Liberty District – Siskiyou County, California
Claim is located on and easy 2WD dirt road.
Contact us for exact coordinates.

The Lanky Placer is located on the West Fork of Whites Gulch in the Liberty district. A district with a good number of producing lode and placer claims. One which is well known for the recovery of gold nuggets. With the flooding and influx of water from the 2017 flooding, there will invariably be a lot of shifting and new deposits made. The claim is easy to access and is in a great location for placer mining. There is substantial river to work with and good turns and twists, ideal for slowing down the gold as it washes down the river. There a few small tributaries that are dumping into the main channel, even at low season. The Lanky sits below the Lanky Bob lode gold mine, and is so named for this property. The Lanky historically was part of the Ruby Group which is one of the largest gold mines in the Klamath area. The claim is set along Whites Gulch, with multiple old gold mines above it. The water runs through these old deposits and dumps it all in the river. There are local gold clubs located in Happy Camp and can help set you up with all your mining needs. There are some small clearings and old camps that could be used for camping and workings under casual use guidelines. A small sluice or shaker could be utilized in the back of a pick up truck or on a trailer and maintain casual use guidelines. The river contains many large boulders and falls that are ideal hiding spots for nuggets and placer gold deposits. This is a highly coveted area that has produced nuggets of all sizes and varieties.

Nearly all of the lode mines in the Liberty gold mining district are located in an approximately 2,000-foot-wide shear zone. This shear zone is in the thrust faulted contact between underlying late Paleozoic to middle Mesozoic greenstone and marine metasediments of the undifferentiated Hayfork terrane, and overlying Paleozoic to Triassic bedded chert and other marine metasediments of the Stuart Fork Formation. The thrust zone occurs as an outcrop about 12 miles long which trends southwest-northeast along the north slope of the Salmon Mountains. It dips mainly south to east, from 10 degrees to 45 degrees in the southwest half of the district, and it dips 40 degrees to 85 degrees west in the northeast half of the district. The anomalous dip to the west is probably due to faulting and folding of the thrust zone along the edge of the Russian Peak batholith.

The thrust zone contains numerous discontinuous slabs of bedded chert and siliceous schist sheared mainly from the Stuart Fork Formation, and metamorphosed organic shales and mudstones (carbonaceous schist), pelitic schist, slate and greenstone derived mainly from the Hayfork terrane. These rocks are folded and faulted, although their general attitude is parallel to the thrust. They have been intruded by numerous sills and dikes of predominantly diorite and dacite porphyry*, and a fine grained, dark rock. The porphyry sills and dikes commonly form one wall of quartz veins or occur as fragments in the vein bearing fissure. The distinct red to orange/brown weathered surface expression of the porphyry sills and dikes was called "brown argillite" by prospectors, and was considered a prime indicator of gold bearing mineralization, especially in association with quartz veining.

Gold bearing quartz veins in the Liberty district most often occur along contacts between harder, more resistant bedded chert or siliceous schist, and softer less resistant carbonaceous schist. When the Stuart Fork Formation was thrust over the Western Palezoic and Triassic Belt rocks, and slabs of each rock unit were sheared from the thrust fault walls, much of the slippage occurred along the siliceous rock/carbonaceous rock contacts. The softer carbonaceous rock are much more sheared along the contacts than the harder silicic rocks.[1]

Many have done quite a bit of mining in this county, and still do, with enormous success. Heart of the famed "Northern Mines", Siskiyou County contains more than 370 once active gold mines, which yielded 1,800,000 troy ounces of gold between 1880-1959, with a large unrecorded amount produced between 1850 and 1880. Each summer many amateur prospectors work the gold bearing streams throughout the county in perhaps the most rugged region in California.

Compared to other California counties little has been officially reported on Siskiyou County and gold production and much of the information available is questionable. Placer mining is the main way that gold is taken, due to the complex geology in the county. Gold is not the only metal of importance in Siskiyou County. The county is said to contain large Platinum Group metal deposits.[1]

Federal Registered Mining Claim ID: CAMC0314351