There's gold in them thar rocks.

About a month ago, we met an elderly prospector who goes by the name Rattlesnake Jim. He says he is the orneriest man in New Mexico. Andrea had met him at our rockhounds meeting a few days earlier. he gave her a rock nugget the he said had real gold in it. after hearing so many false claims by people coming into our store to have gold. Most times it was just pyrite. I was not able to make the meeting, so I didn't meet him. He did however, make it a point to stop by the store to meet me. Amazingly I knew who he was the minute I saw him. I thanked him for the gift to my wife, and we had a nice chat about prospecting. After a couple days, he returned with a couple more nuggets that he wanted to show me. He asked if I had a loupe to look at them them with. I told him I could do one better and brought out the stereo-scope. He said there wasn't enough gold to justify trying to get it out of these nuggets, but if you had enough of them it would be. So we spent about an hour exploring the nuggets.

Here you can see gold deposits in the matrix. 🙄

But things got interesting when we started exploring the quarts in the matrix.

A tiny blade of gold barely visible to the naked eye.

So we explored further and found other gold.

We even saw a couple that looked like tiny worms.

After our little adventure, I handed the two nuggets back to Jim ... to which he replied "no those are yours" I am greatly appreciative. 😁He also invited me to go out prospecting with him. I promptly said "Sure, just let me know when."

I already had, in my personal collection a pair of vintage earrings that came with a tag claiming to be genuine gold ore. being that they were predominately pyrite, I had my doubts. But since this event, I decided to check them out under the scope. Sure enough I did see gold in one of them.

Although there is about 99.5% pyrite you can clearly see the gold. after spending about twenty minutes looking at the other earring nugget I didn't find any gold on the surface. 😒
But that doesn't mean it's not in there. 😃