I found quite a few rocks littered with pieces of solid silver and gold chunks of mineral. Some you can almost grab with pliers and some are like dusty veins coming through. They were found by a old mine that was mined for gold, silver and iron. Any ideas on what it may be or if there might be any value?
It depends on where you are, but it is very unlikely that the minerals you see are pure precious metal. Actual occurrences of pure native silver and gold are not common. In fact, pure metal anything is not common in nature. Depending on what type of occurrence you are looking at, you likely will find a lot of sulfides or oxides of metals. Pyrite, pyrrhotite, various iron oxides (rusts), hematite and magnetite are the common forms of iron in ore deposit circumstances. Carbonates and quartz are common gangue (useless) minerals and generally dominate the rock in mass. Associated ore minerals are highly variable and depend on what else was in the ore-forming system. Copper, lead, and/or zinc sulfides are common in pretty well all ore deposits. Many abandoned workings may contain some ore value (relatively high concentrations of a target metal) but simply were abandoned because there wasn,t enough of that stuff to make it worth the effort to pull out. A lot of pre-industrial small workings targeted extremely unusually high grade materials (often chased veins), and they mined until all the easy stuff was grabbed. the tailings (the rubble around the mine entrance) is often enriched but not spectacularly so. Generally make good specimens of minerals or ore types but have little economic value. But on the flip side, metal prices have risen so much that many worked out deposits have been reopened, and even tailings from larger mines have been reprocessed, because technology exists to recover that formerly non-extractable residuals. but back to the original question, it is very likely that the gold and silver you see are actually sulfide minerals and not precious metal grains.
since it is an old silver, gold and iron mine, I would guess that you are finding, gold, silver and iron or it could be all all pyrite because some people thought the pyrite was gold or silver, which it is not, but it is an iron ore be careful, old mines can be dangerous
