Photo Gallery

Walgreen’s Photo Center, free uploads of your digital photos with unlimited storage. You may purchase hard copy photos and more with this service.

FOOTHILLS PROSPeCTOrS

This very large nugget gold specimen contains significant quartz and is from Alaska.   It's rounded shape shows the signs of wear and tumbling in a river environment.

Here is yet another beautiful gold piece from the big mine at Round Mountain. The gold is formed in a mossy crystalline pattern on the surface of the rock. The bulk of the ore which comes from his mine, produces gold only in tiny microscopic particles. Only a very small percentage of the gold occurs in visible pieces like this.

Gold does not commonly combine with other elements, but there are exceptions. These are the telluride minerals such as Calaverite. This very rich gold ore specimen came from the El Paso gold mine in the Cripple Creek district in Colorado

The mining district of Austin, in central Nevada was well known for its silver ores, but this specimen of oxidized ore also contains a considerable amount of gold in addition to the silver. It shows few sulfide minerals because it is well oxidized.

This chunk of vein quartz from Mariposa is typical of gold-quartz material from the mother lode district of California. In most gold ore, the gold is present in tiny specs, either within minerals like pyrite, or spread out free among the quartz. Normally even good, rich gold ore has no gold metal which is visible to the naked eye.

Small bits of gold are scattered through this piece of mesothermal vein quartz from the mother lode region of California. The gold is mostly concentrated around the edges of dark colored spots of iron oxide that were likely originally clots of pyrite. This is very rich gold ore.