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Here is something I found a long time ago, before Mercur was active in the 1990's. As you enter this canyon before you come to the area Barrick was mining for the micro-gold deposits, I found some black rock which was from a seam in a quarry in this canyon. Apon crushing and panning I got a nice showing of gold dust in my gold pan. The rock isn't very hard either. It looks like a black soot color. There are also black to grey rock on the north side of this canyon about 50 feet from where the guard station once was which kept people out from Mercur. There is gold dust in this rock too but not as rich as the sooty-black rock from the quarry. I have no idea what this rock is. It's not quartz or limestone. Not hard enough for an igneous rock like basalt. Not brittle like chalcedony. Kind of like a carbonized type of metamorphic rock. I hope others can find this and have the enjoyment of obtaining some gold for themselves. There was never any gold nuggets found at Mercur. Only micro-gold locked up in the rocks. So this rock is different.
At West Dip, which is just north of Mercur canyon, there was a town which sprang up in the 1890's around the mill which was once there. The rock was leached with cyanide and zinc shavings were used to precipitate the gold out of the cyanide solution. As the zinc disolves into the cyanide, the gold drops out as a black sludge, where it was placed into containers and sent to a refinery, for processing. The slag pile from this mill was huge and is mostly buried under the sage and weeds. The fire brick fragments which have a coating of brownish to greenish brown, when crushed and panned, show gold dust. Not much, maybe about 5 cents per brick. But it shows that the assayer wasn't very good at watching how hot the mix of ore and flux got. As the flux melts with the crushed rock, the flux cleans the gold so that it will readily pick up when other metals are added such as lead or copper. It was a problem to keep the assay from getting to hot.
There used to be a few small mine dumps near the mouth of Mercur Canyon in which one could find tiny red crystals of cinnabar ore. North side of the mouth of this canyon. The reddish crystals were associated with while calcite crystals on a matrix of a brownish-yellow rock. I haven't visited this area since Barrick is or was cleaning up their mining activities. Reclaiming the land by reseeding the area so that the collectible minerals they exposed won't ever be collected ,(enviromentallity) if that's a word?