Hi everyone! It has been a long time since I have posted anything to the forum. I guess I am what people would consider a lurker. I know that naturally occurring silver is hard to find in a lot of places and many people do not even know what it looks like so I thought that I would share a few pictures of a fantastic piece that I found a few months ago. This piece was discovered 3 feet deep with a metal detector on a steep road leading up to an old mine site. It is a vein of silver and acanthite and weighs 25 pounds. Acanthite is a silver sulphide that is 87% silver and it is the dark gray colour in the vein. I hope you enjoy the pictures.
Very nice. For the uneducated (me) what would you guesstimate the actual silver weight in troy ounces to be?
Raven had a very good guess. Between 300 and 350 t/oz is estimated to be in this piece. Hard to know without doing an actual assay but I certainly would not want to have to damage a museum quality specimen like this just to find out the actual amount when a visual estimate is accurate enough. Cryptic.
Wow that's one cool piece of rock! I guess you found it in a mine in Canada ? I'm guessing Yukon? Lol
Sweet baby Jesus that chunk is amazing! Just curious how much over spot would something like that go, it seems very rare to find a "Nugget" that size!
It comes from Cobalt, Ontario, Canada. In 1911, silver production exceeded 30,000,000 ounces (937.5 tons). In total, the Cobalt area mines produced 460 million ounces of silver. Many of those pieces were bumped out of wagons on the journey to the refinery or made into roads leading from the mine.
Thanks, ironwood. A rock hounds dream for sure. It is not very often that something like this can be found around here these days. A few years ago I did manage to find a 153 lb specimen that I had to drag a half mile out of the bush to my truck. That was certainly a workout. I always said to myself that I will never be able to find something as nice as that piece. A once in a life time find. I ended up having it assayed and it came back at 4,000 t/oz ton for silver. Last year I found this 60 pound piece, 25 lbs after knocking off the wall rock which is nicer than anything I or anyone I know has ever found around here. I guess you never know when lady luck will be looking down on you. Cryptic.
Cryptic, do you still have the larger 153 lb piece. I'm sure everyone would LOVE to see pics of that.
I sliced it up in my 18" rock saw. Here are a few pictures of what it looked like before cutting it up. This is what it looked like after after about two hours of digging to get it out. It was too heavy to lift out of the three foot deep hole ho I had to go back to my truck and get a ratchet strap to pull it out. This is what it looked like in the back of my truck. It is pink because it also has cobalt/erythrite in it. This is what it looked like when I had to break it up to fit in my 18" rock saw and drill a hole in it for an assay.. This is what the silver looked like inside. Certainly a great find but not very aesthetic. That is why I decided to have it sliced up. Cryptic.
Very rare indeed. In almost 10 years of detecting this is the first piece that I or anyone I know has ever found something close to resembling this. I can not even find anything that comes close to it doing a google search.. Possibly a museum quality specimen.. Cryptic.
Wow. I guess you have like a mini rock collection at home. Are you a geologist by any chance? Haha Would love to try my hand at detecting one of these days. I'm actually in Ontario and it seems like something I have to try out.
That's very impressive Cryptic. A helluva rock to be hauling out yourself. Well worth it though. LOL. The best I've ever done was dragging out petrified wood. Thank you for posting the pics.
It is becoming harder every year to find nice quality silver specimens here. So many people come here to try their luck at finding some silver. With some luck and hitting the right spots you never know what you may find. here is a picture of a piece that came from a mine site that only produced 2,000 t/oz of silver in 1920.
