Has Anyone Here Done any Gold Prospecting?

[MichSwampbuck]

Has anyone here panned for gold? If so, could you describe how you went about choosing where to pan and if you found any gold, be it fine dust, flakes or nuggets? Also, what techniques did you use, like a sluice or rocker, or how did you use the pan to concentrate the heavy material?

There is physical labor involved, but for me, it is a recreational activity and on my bucket list. I find it pleasant to sit there and pan away while I listen to the gurgling stream and other sounds of nature. There is the occasional wildlife encounter as I'm not making much noise or moving around. Right now, the ticks and mosquitos are emerging, so it won't be so pleasant for very long.

[MichSwampbuck]

I noticed the zero response rate on this subject. Maybe I should have rephrased that question to, "Is anyone interested in hearing about gold prospecting?"

I could post about my adventures in gold prospecting, if there is any real interest in any of that. I feel pretty good about the whole thing, considering what I have recovered from my property, which I have the mineral rights to.

I can back it all up, of course, and explain why it is there and how much I think is there, and how it is possible to make some money with my discoveries. Prospecting can mean a couple of things, and the prospect of owning the mineral rights to 40 acres with a creek that produces any amount of gold, especially at current gold prices, sounds promising. Add to that mix the fact that I live in a booming recreational area, and I see an opportunity to make some cash from a number of activities here.

[quintessentone]

I noticed the zero response rate on this subject. Maybe I should have rephrased that question to, "Is anyone interested in hearing about gold prospecting?"

I could post about my adventures in gold prospecting, if there is any real interest in any of that. I feel pretty good about the whole thing, considering what I have recovered from my property, which I have the mineral rights to.

I can back it all up, of course, and explain why it is there and how much I think is there, and how it is possible to make some money with my discoveries. Prospecting can mean a couple of things, and the prospect of owning the mineral rights to 40 acres with a creek that produces any amount of gold, especially at current gold prices, sounds promising. Add to that mix the fact that I live in a booming recreational area, and I see an opportunity to make some cash from a number of activities here.

I looked into it briefly where they explained basically where to look for gold nuggets, such as in rock crevices in moving streams, or on rock covered beaches, etc. What I took away from that is that 'good luck' finding any gold these days as others before you have most likely found it all. Is that incorrect?

[MichSwampbuck]

Lesson Numero uno, "Gold is where you find it!" (Yah!)

Lesson two, "You won't find gold where there isn't any." (Opps!)

You are talking about placer (pronounced plass- er) gold mining. These are deposits concentrated by erosion, water erosion primarily, but some placer deposits are made by wind erosion and even gravity.

The prospector will follow where the color in his pan leads him, normally that is to the "mother" load where hard rock mining can occur. Here in Michigan, the load is in the Upper Peninsula or Canada, what we have in the lower is glacial till and moraines that will concentrate into placer deposits through water erosion.

Concerning how much of the gold remains after so much as been "played out", they only went for the most profitable operations and they left a lot behind in their mines and mining wastes. Plus, they haven't found all of it yet and there are plenty of places left on Earth to look for it.

[quintessentone]

Also, panning for gold looks like hard back-breaking work. Are their special metal detectors just to find gold?

[MichSwampbuck]

Also, panning for gold looks like hard back-breaking work. Are their special metal detectors just to find gold?

MY GF has a really good metal detector and that one would be great for bigger deposits near the surface. There was this TV gold prospecting show I saw where these prospectors in the Australian outback were using metal detectors to find huge chunks of gold out in the open. I never looked into how there might be such gold field deposits just under the surface, but I have to think it was a placer deposit of some kind, possibly due to ancient flood waters.

The back breaking part, yeah. However, there are ways to streamline the process and reduce the strain of manual labor. Those big operations in Alaska dig up the stream bed and load it into these huge crushing and sluicing machines using heavy equipment to dig and load. Ocean operations have their methods too. As far as panning goes, it is the only way you are allowed to do recreational prospecting, until you can make a claim on federal land or on private property with mineral rights.

ETA: You can use small sluices or rocker boxes to get at the gold too, but you will still be screening and panning to get all the non-gold material out.

[argentus]

I did some panning as a stress-reliever and cheap entertainment when I was going to school more than 40 years ago.    I couldn't afford much, and I've always been comfortable with my own company.    My strategy was to study creeks and look for the downhill side of bends.   Mostly dust, but the occasional small nugget.   I wasn't very aggressive about it;  mostly a way to unwind while being immersed in nature, often places where I thought many feet hadn't ever trod.  I  would look for an accumulation of quartz in the creekbed, thinking that gold and quartz went together.   Saw a lot of agate, chert.   Once found a widening in the stream with some quartz sparkling up at me, and I panned than area for more than a week;  it was about a half-hour walk from the road and I loved the lush woodland forest, so quiet, with just the oscillating bubble of the stream set in a mat of variegated leaves, ferns, bitterbrush and fescue.   That area turned out to be my biggest strike in all the two years I was in Northern Utah.    I had about 1/2 oz.  of dust an small nuggets after a couple of weeks, and that was worth $250, after the assayer took his cut.   That was a hella lot of money then.   I worked that area ten hours a week for the next month, but didn't get much, so let my gold fever die and went back to just panning and walking and hiking to blow off steam.

[argentus]

I noticed the zero response rate on this subject. Maybe I should have rephrased that question to, "Is anyone interested in hearing about gold prospecting?"

I could post about my adventures in gold prospecting, if there is any real interest in any of that. I feel pretty good about the whole thing, considering what I have recovered from my property, which I have the mineral rights to.

I can back it all up, of course, and explain why it is there and how much I think is there, and how it is possible to make some money with my discoveries. Prospecting can mean a couple of things, and the prospect of owning the mineral rights to 40 acres with a creek that produces any amount of gold, especially at current gold prices, sounds promising. Add to that mix the fact that I live in a booming recreational area, and I see an opportunity to make some cash from a number of activities here.

I am interested in your gold adventures, if you care to share.   I started out a geology major and then realized I'd get stuck looking for oil or uranium if I wanted to make any money.    Switched to chemistry.   Still didn't make any money.   I always liked the study of things, especially minerals and the strata of lands and such.   Fossils.   You seem to have a mind that gathers data to accomplish a task, and if so, that's right in my wheelhouse.

[MichSwampbuck]

Panning for gold has been on my bucket list for ages, and I've done some prospecting around Michigan just enough to figure out I was doing something wrong. Now I figure I'm getting around 8 flakes per 5 gallon bucket. Being on a glacial outwash plain, with a small seasonal creek, I figure any gold within a few feet of the surface is likely evenly distributed on the property. My personal goal is to perfect my methods and produce around 12 flakes per 5 gallon bucket.

Now, the gold fever had set in and I began crunching the numbers if I could get around 12 flakes per bucket. That would have me produce around 360 gold flakes per cubic yard of soil processed. Expanding that down to the bedrock around 150 feet down, and a 3 foot by 3 foot excavation down that far could potential hold around 17,500 gold flakes, the same distance as a three foot stride at the surface, making 58 paces equal to walking over one million gold flakes.

I estimate that I get a few tablespoons of black sand from the sluice and panning after it is reduced from a full five-gallon bucket of white sand screened to about 20-mesh. After using a post-hole digger to go down around three feet below the creek bed, I got very little broken gravel and rocks, less than an inch in the 5-gal bucket. Mostly fine white sand and I don't see how I could go deeper without heavy equipment or drilling wells.

None of my current methods address the fine gold dust called flour gold that certainly makes up a good part of that black sand at the end of all the panning and other work. There are methods and equipment that can recover the flour gold too.

[quintessentone]

MY GF has a really good metal detector and that one would be great for bigger deposits near the surface. There was this TV gold prospecting show I saw where these prospectors in the Australian outback were using metal detectors to find huge chunks of gold out in the open. I never looked into how there might be such gold field deposits just under the surface, but I have to think it was a placer deposit of some kind, possibly due to ancient flood waters.

The back breaking part, yeah. However, there are ways to streamline the process and reduce the strain of manual labor. Those big operations in Alaska dig up the stream bed and load it into these huge crushing and sluicing machines using heavy equipment to dig and load. Ocean operations have their methods too. As far as panning goes, it is the only way you are allowed to do recreational prospecting, until you can make a claim on federal land or on private property with mineral rights.

ETA: You can use small sluices or rocker boxes to get at the gold too, but you will still be screening and panning to get all the non-gold material out.

That's very interesting, about the placer deposit. It just shows how important it is to study geology and ancient flood waters to even find a place to start, if one is using a metal detector.

At this point in time, I am not near any wilderness areas with those criteria, close enough to make it worth my while and I am somewhat a craftsperson, so the original thought was to incorporate the gold I found into some of my projects and perhaps sell them online. Who knows what the future holds?