With gold prices soaring to never-seen-before highs, exploring for the yellow stuff has become one of the most sought-after activities today. Unlike stocks and bonds, its value will never go to zero...
Gold is one of the most highly prized of Earth's natural resources.
Gold Panning
The gold pan is one the oldest and simplest tools used to find gold. A shovelful of dirt and gravel would be dumped into the pan. The pan would then be lowered into the water and gently moved in circles.
Prospecting for gold has become one of the most sought-after activities of the decade...
It gets us outdoors to enjoy with our families and friends all the beauty and excitement our lands have to offer.
The exercise is invigorating and the exposure to nature is relaxing.
It's an escape from the stresses of our everyday lives, and for our kids, it's just plain fun.
By knowing the many ways available for finding gold, you can better choose the gold mining adventure that's just right for you.
It usually involves some method of seeing through the surface of the water to the bottom, with the aid of a sniping tube or diving mask. It's picking up pieces of gold with your hands or by using tools like hemostats or tweezers, when you find the glistening nuggets waiting there, in plain sight.
Gold is caught either by "riffles" (ridges on the bottom of the sluice box) or by a false bottom with holes in it. Mud and the larger chunks of rock wash out the lower end leaving the much heavier gold behind.
A typical Hibanker or power sluice will process nearly twice the amount of material that a medium size sluice can produce when operated under optimum conditions. Simply feed material into the hopper and let the washing action do its job.
Crevicing
Crevicing is fun and rewarding for the whole family. You will probably recover lots of fine gold and once in awhile a nice nugget or two. If dredging isn't your cup of tea, and you don't want to spend extra dollars on other equipment, crevicing may be just the thing for you. Crevicing gets it's name from the cracks and crevices found in exposed bedrock.
These are known gold catching areas. it's amazing how deep gold can settle inside these cracks. The job of crevicing involves breaking the crack open wide enough to allow you to get out all the material it contains. This isn't hard. Within a short time you can become a pro at it. The tools of the trade vary... a chisel, rock pick, gold claw, heavy bar, a hammer, a spoon/hand trowel and a bucket to put your material in. Several models of vacuum suckers are available on the market.
The grizzly is mounted at a fairly steep angle and above the dry washer's sluice box. Anything larger than the holes in the grizzly falls or is scraped away and falls behind the dry washer. Anything smaller than the holes in the grizzly falls onto the tray and into the top of the sluice box.
Weekend gold prospectors can work old places where gold was first discovered with sometimes very rewarding results! The metal detector is quickly becoming the new millenniums treasure hunting tool of choice.
Dredges of today are lighter, more portable and more efficient than ever. They are commonly used to pull material up from a stream bottom, run it through a separation system to recover valuable minerals, and then redeposit the stream material back onto the bottom of the stream.
A little bit about production dredging and safety...
At least 80 percent of the work involved with dredging is moving the oversized material out of the dredge hole. From a production viewpoint, a large portion of this has to do with freeing the oversized rocks from the streambed in an orderly fashion. Hard-packed streambeds are laid in horizontal layers during major flood storms. Rocks further up in the streambed were laid in after, and on top of, rocks that were deposited deeper in the streambed. Generally, the streambed is put together like a puzzle, with different rocks locking other rocks into place. Usually, because of gravity, rocks higher up in the streambed are locking lower rocks into their position in the streambed.
The key to production dredging is to dredge the hole down a layer at a time. If you take down a broad area of the streambed all at once, you uncover a whole stratum of rocks which are interconnected like a puzzle; and you can see which rocks must be removed first to free the others more easily. This really is the key to production dredging.
When you find yourself making little progress, the key is almost always to widen your hole.
Production dredging means moving gravel through the nozzle at optimum speed. This is accomplished by making your hole wide enough to allow the oversized rocks to be easily removed. As soon as you find the rocks are too tight to come apart easily, it is usually time to widen the hole. Since production is controlled by how efficiently rocks can be removed from the dredge hole, it is important to understand they must also be strategically discarded so that they will not need to be moved a second or third time. Generally, this means getting each rock well out of the hole -- as far back as possible.
An important safety factor...
As you move your hole forward, dredging layers off the front of the hole, be certain to taper it to prevent rocks from rolling in on you. This is an important safety factor. Since the nozzle-man's attention is generally focused on looking for gold, the rock-man's job is to keep an eye on safety. Any rocks or boulders that could potentially roll in on and hurt anyone, should be removed before they have a chance to do so. Some rocks will be too large and heavy to throw out of the hole. It's wise to leave a tapered path in the back of your hole so that boulders can be rolled up and out easily.
Production dredging technique IS the key to finding lots of gold.
Beginners should probably spend the first few weeks dredging in an easy spot. Don't worry about how much gold you're getting. Instead, have fun becoming familiar with the tools and your environment. The key is to try to make a game out of getting as much material through the nozzle as possible in a safe and orderly fashion. Once you actually see the gold being recovered, everything comes together and something clicks... you realize; you can do it, too!
Modern technology has made it easier than ever to find gold. Many old channels, faults, and crevices, have had the better part of a century or more to trap and reconcentrate their richness since they were last prospected and mined, not to mention all the new sources that our ever-changing earth has secretly unveiled during this time.
How much gold could you find by using today's modern methods? None, if you're not actively searching for these reserves.
Large stones in the pan would be thrown out, and the dirt broken up using the miner's fingers. As the pan moved in circles, muddy water and sand would float out of the pan, with the much heavier gold remaining at the bottom of the pan.
The Sluice
The sluice-box, a long open trough, is very popular. The sluice is narrow and low at one end. Material that you've placed into a bucket from an area you believe gold might be found is placed at the top of the sluice and washed down the length of the sluice by a constant stream of water.
High-Banking
"High Bankers", or "Power Sluice" are considered one the most versatile gold recovery machines available for the prospector.
Drywashing
Dry Washing is the use of a "Dry Washer" to separate gold from sand and gravels without the use of water. A dry washer begins with a "Grizzly" onto which gravels are shoveled. The grizzly is usually a piece of expanded metal mounted on an aluminum or wood tray.
Metal Detecting
Can you really find gold with a metal detector? The answer is; YES! In our day of modern technology it is more possible than ever to find gold. Miners 100 years ago didn't have the tools available for finding gold as we have today.
Sniping
For those of you who have never tried sniping, it's a fun, inexpensive way to collect jewelry size nuggets from rivers or creeks on your claim. Sniping is a word used to describe picking up gold nuggets right off of the bottom of streams, from crevices in bedrock, or from behind boulders.
Dredging
Dredges are essentially underwater vacuum cleaners. Although history reveals that dredging has been in existence throughout the world for many years, it is just recently that it has reached such a high degree of popularity due to advanced technology in equipment.
Placer Mining Methods
Finding gold used to be mostly luck, but modern technology has changed all that.
Here are some of the ways you can easily use for finding placer gold;
