Gold, gold; elusive gold! Where to find it! How to find it! This beginners guide to finding gold will help you understand the basics of where gold can be found and how to find it once you have found a place to look. The basics of how to find gold are all over the net and in books, and the basics ARE the places to start. But, every miner will tell you, "Gold is where you find it", and it can be in some amazing places. First, there are basically two types of gold mining; placer and hard rock mining. We deal mostly with placer mining and leave the hard rock to the professionals. However, we are interested in the formations and study gold and how it is formed incessently. How and where gold is placed in the hard rock formations tells us more about where we will find it in the placer deposits. Placer mining is the easier way to find gold, and so, we'll deal with how and where to gold from the placer point of view. Future pages will give some insights into formations and are touched on in the Gold Formations page. Placer gold is found in gold bearing regions wherever rivers or glaciers are or have been in ancient times, have carried deposits far away from the sources, or weathered from the rock where it was placed millenia ago. Mountainous areas are usually the sources, as they have volcanic or super heated steam systems to deliver gold and other minerals to the surface of the earth. Stream action carries erroded material from the mountain tops to the seas until they are flattened and the upheaval begins again in the never ending cycle of building up and breaking down. While these cycles bring about the inevitable results, it is the formation of the glaciers during ice ages that wears away the most and brings the most gold down out of the mountains with the grinding of earth under ice. The magnitude of the ice events is astounding! The volume of water that the ice produced boggles the mind, and the force of the water that broke out of ice, rock or morainal dams during the melting process of the ice, literally moved and gouged mountains in its rush to the sea, sorting and depositing lighter and heavier materials in predictable places on its downward plunge. To find those predictable places sometimes takes the mind of a visionary to imagine the volume of water and how it would have spread over a given area. Placer miners are very gratful to mother nature for having done so much of the heavy work and making it easier to find gold. |
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The newer stream cuts through the mountains are easier to read, and every prospector should take his or her gold pan out every once in a while to test a theory. You might be pleasantly surprised to find gold where you least expected it to be. At the least you will find where it is not, and that is valuable to learn, as well. Check areas where stream water would or does slow down. The inside bend of a river, the backside of a rock, a natural drop in the river, or eddies are all good places to find gold. We also like to look where fish swim. Fish do not work harder than they have to, and will stay to the calmer spots in the river. Some areas will be better where larger rocks drop out, and others will scour well enough that bigger rocks will not be evident. Smaller streams will, naturally, show smaller rock. The farther you are from the source the more rounded the rocks will be. The exception to this is in areas where glacial activity has been. The grinding of the glacier will round the rocks even close to the source. You will need to research the area where you are going to look to know how the gold was placed in the placer area. Knowledge from someone familiar with the area is the fastest way to determine this. We all first look where it has been found before, but to find the "mother lode", you may have to look beyond what is readily known about an area. Even lode miners start with what is shown on the surface, and there are vast amounts of gold hidden, maybe a couple of feet under the surface, that is missed. Every year more is brought to the surface and carried away. Every year someone spots a rock that has been walked over many times, (us included) but not turned over, that has moved in its spot just enough to reveal the gold that encrusts its underside. Even the best metal detectorists miss those big nuggets. Where do you look to find gold? Rivers that drain gold bearing areas, to be sure. Their bottoms and banks can contain the rich substance, but look also for bedrock, which traps the gold along its bottom and in crevices, and old river channels above the present ones for ancient deposits left when the river changed course. Changing course can happen many times, so you need to look also in other areas where the river has coursed in the past. Sometimes, as with the Arkansas River, a mountain range has risen up to block the original path, or a moran has pushed a river to another side of a valley. All of these will help you to find gold, but do make sure you know where you are. |
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| Tailings piles from old mines can also be a place to find gold that was overlooked in days of old. Mining techniques were not anything like what we do today, and were inefficient. All types of mining done 100 years ago went after what was easy and what was visible and plentiful. A word of caution about old mines, here. FIRST, most of them are still active claims and private property. Make sure you have permisssion to be there. Second, they are EXTREMELY dangerous, so be extra careful around them. A 1,000 foot fall would definetly hurt, and the bad air and water that plagues a lot of them isn't worth your life. Many of them are owned and have no treaspassing signs on them and you need permission, as well as with placer claims, already in place, so do your homework. Belonging to a club can be a real boost in your ability to gather information about an area and which places are best for a week long excursion for your vacation, as well as dangers, and permits required.
Desert areas are of great interest to the prospector. Vast areas can hold gold that has simply weathered away from the exsisting rock, or may have been carried from far away to be left deposited on the hot, dry gound. Finding gold with a metal detecting in these areas can produce large nuggets as well as small, and is, at the least, cleaner than the dry washer. The draw back to stictly metal detecting is that most only reach a few inches accurately, and a foot for very large targets. That leaves an awful lot of ground beneath unprospected. To be sure, even the desert errodes and more nuggets are brought out of areas previously detected, but no one, no matter how good, can get ALL the gold out of an area with a detector. If you know of a place that is open for metal detecting where gold has been found before, finding gold there again is a good bet. Dry washers can sometimes find gold in a productive area faster than the detector, and certainly is more effective with smaller gold the detector misses. However, be prepared to wear a dust mask. The work is strenuous, as well, so use those dumbbells in the off season! I never choked on so much dust in my life as the day I spent (or half day) throwing dirt onto and classifying rocks off of one of the big dry washers at Stanton. I spit grit out of my teeth for a whole day later, and blew dirt out of my nose for three! Sure was fun, though. Now, why is that? Finding gold is an interestng way to spend your time. You will learn much about the earth and many earth sciences as your quest increases. When someone asks you what you do, you can include prosepcting in your answer. Now there is an activity that perks up a lot of ears!
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