What High Grade Gold Ore Looks Like (Taken From My Hard Rock Mine)

When people talk about gold ore, they usually imagine something dramatic—massive quartz veins with visible gold laced through the cracks, or even fist-sized nuggets gleaming in the sun. Whilst deposits like this do exist, and are incredibly rare, the reality, especially in hard rock gold mining, is a lot more subtle—and often a lot richer than it first appears.

The deposit I’ve recently opened up is a perfect example of that.

There are no visible nuggets. No obvious veins flashing with gold. To the untrained eye, the rock doesn’t scream “treasure.” But the moment I started crushing and testing it, it told a very different story.

This is high-grade ore—but not the kind you’d recognize at a glance. The gold here is fine. Extremely fine. We're talking flour gold—tiny particles, barely visible without a close look and good lighting. But there’s a lot of it. In every handful of rock, there are hundreds—sometimes thousands—of microscopic gold flakes, densely packed throughout the matrix. It's not just rich—it's prolific. This ore is from my new hard rock mine. I’ve hit a high grade section where gold has accumulated in disseminated abundance.

Now, fine gold like this is tricky. You won't always see it with the naked eye. But crush it, pan it, and suddenly the gold shows itself—glinting and dancing in the pan like someone dumped a pinch of golden glitter into the sand.

And it’s consistent. That's the key. This isn't a one-off pocket or a fluke piece—this is a zone. Every sample from this section of the deposit has returned gold, and not just trace amounts. I’ve tested pieces the size of a coin and recovered over 200 visible gold particles after just a basic crush and pan. That’s not just promising—that’s high-grade. But, there’s a catch. It doesn’t conform to gravity. Individual grains are so light and flat they’ll float around in a pan. Gold is one of the heaviest metals in the world, but when it reaches a certain micron size, it stops behaving like a heavy metal and starts behaving more like a piece of dust. Surface tension, water flow, and even air bubbles can keep it suspended or wash it away entirely. That’s why fine gold is so notoriously difficult to recover—and why so much of it was lost in early mining operations. Without proper technique, it simply floats out with the tailings, unnoticed.

But when you know what you’re looking for—and how to process it—you can recover it. Even the smallest particles. Because while each speck might be tiny, when they occur by the hundreds or thousands in every sample, they add up to serious value.

The host rock is exceptionally mineralized throughout. You can see quartz veining, occasional streaks of sulphides, weathered iron staining, even hints of arsenopyrite in the surrounding structures. But the gold doesn’t sit neatly in the quartz. It’s disseminated—spread through the rock, woven in fine threads, tucked between grains, often bound up with sulphides or locked in oxidized fractures. You have to liberate it. And that’s the difference between looking and knowing.

Fine gold like this forms in specific conditions—hydrothermal systems that deposit gold on a tiny, occasionally microscopic scale, sometimes inside sulphide minerals, sometimes along fractures or in altered zones. Over time, weathering can free some of it, but much remains trapped in the rock, largely invisible until processed.

To the old timers, this might have been passed over as barren. Too subtle. Not worth the effort. But with modern techniques—crushing, roasting, and leaching —you can recover gold from rock like this with surprising efficiency. And when the rock grades this high, it’s more than worth it.

And it’s not just one rock. This deposit runs along a linear system. Multiple exposures, multiple outcrops, and every sample I’ve tested from this zone returns fine gold. Some of it bound to sulphides. Some free-milling. All of it recoverable with the right method. But this section of the reef that I’ve hit is by far the richest accumulation of gold that I’ve seen yet.

And here’s a critical point: this kind of ore demands more than just crushing and panning. If you want to recover the full value, you need to think about process. That means figuring out a way to oxidize refractory sulphides in a cost effective and safe manner. I’m going green and using bioleaching to do this. You also need to figure out a way to leach the gold to pull it into solution. If you approach this kind of ore with nothing more than gravity methods, you will lose 90% or more of it. You need to have a sound chemical strategy down. And lemme tell ya, chemical dissolution isn’t as easy as people make it seem. Contamination is the biggest factor, no one is going to buy gold alloyed with different metals, it needs to be pure.

I have a high percentage of copper in this ore, so I’ve had to troubleshoot ways around it. If you’re using Aqua regia, which is a mix of hydrochloric acid and nitric acid, it will dissolve everything, not just the gold and you’ll be paying a fortune to soak one ton of ore. It isn’t practical. Hydrochloric acid and bleach will do the same, dissolve everything, and, along with this, it will release horribly strong and dangerous fumes that not even a respirator can properly filter out. And I say this from experience. Plus, again, you’ll be spending a fortune on the amount of hydrochloric acid you’d need to even make this viable.

The image above shows copper staining on the ore.

Even if you had access to mercury, it’ll only bind 30% of the gold if you’re lucky, the rest will remain unbound due to its fine size, which is why the big mines use cyanide over mercury nowadays to dissolve gold. And with all, dissolving is, surprisingly, the easy part, it’s precipitating the gold in a clean, meltable, pure form that is the hardest bit. But when you have it down pat, with the right chemicals, tailored for the ore, at the right reagent dose, each step becomes part of a bigger system.

One day I’ll make a video and/or write a book on how I do this, but for now, it remains a closely guarded secret that took years of troubleshooting to develop. It was a painstaking, absolute bitch of a process, but it was worth it.

This is one of the main reasons why I’m not too worried about claim jumpers. Good luck getting the gold out in a usable form that you can sell, I say.

Historically, deposits like this were often missed or ignored. Prospectors looking for visible gold would pass over rock like this because it doesn’t glitter on the surface. But with modern knowledge and tools, we can go back to these zones and unlock the wealth that was always there—just hidden in plain sight.

This discovery marks a turning point in my work. It's the richest, most consistent fine gold system I’ve found to date. And while there’s no showy gold sticking out of the rocks en masse, there’s real value here—measurable, recoverable, and incredibly dense. I’m actually struggling to crush this rock up, it’s just too… beautiful. I think I’m going to clean it and put it on my shelf. I just can’t bring myself to destroy it, even if there’s so much gold within it.

So if you’re out prospecting and you find rock that doesn’t look like much… crush a piece. Pan it. Look closely. Because sometimes, the richest gold is the gold you almost can’t see.

This is what real high-grade gold ore looks like: not flashy, not showy, but quietly packed with value. Gold you almost can’t see—until you know it’s there. And when you find it… you’ll never see a “plain rock” the same way again.

Here's the video I made on this on the OzGeology YouTube channel: