Gold & Silver Forum - As gold price rises, prospecting takes off

As gold price rises, prospecting takes off - Sandhya Somashekhar, Washington Post
Sunday, August 27, 2006

On weekends -- and sometimes, Robin Adair confides, smack dab in middle of the workweek -- the cool, gurgling streams and dappled sunshine of the Virginia Piedmont forests call to him.

Forget the bass in the streams and the deer in the woods -- it's gold that catches hold of Adair's imagination.

Adair is an honest-to-goodness gold prospector, "like the pirates of old," he jokes. Paradise, he says, is standing knee-deep in a chilly stream among the frogs and water snakes, peering into the bottom of a pie pan, searching for that distinctive sparkle.

More often than not, he finds it -- maybe a few pennies' worth on a slow day and maybe a lot more on a good one.

"When I started doing this, I thought I'd be out here chasing old ghosts," said Adair, who lives in this tiny southern Fauquier County town that, for decades, was the center of the state's booming gold mining industry. "But it's out there, and it turns out there is a thriving community of gold prospectors working the streams all over Virginia."

With the price of gold hovering above $600 an ounce for the first time in a quarter of a century -- and predicted to go higher -- gold fever is spreading, from the dusty old Forty-Niner towns of California to the backwoods of Virginia.

Editors of popular gold prospecting magazines say circulation has spiked in recent months, similar to what they experienced in 1981, when gold prices peaked at about $800. Suppliers say this summer has been their busiest since the 1980s. And assayers -- who judge the purity of gold and other metals -- say business has doubled in the past few months.

"There are some guys right now (in the West) that have actually got a good spot that they're working and reworking, making 400 or 500 bucks a week," said Mike Jacobs, owner of Jacobs Assay Office in Tucson, a fourth-generation assayer whose company has been in business for 126 years.

Local prospectors aren't anywhere near that successful, although they say that with the right tools and a little luck, it's possible to accumulate a quarter of an ounce on a very good day, enough to cover the surface of a quarter.

"You don't really know the feeling until you turn the first hand yourself and see that bright yellow shining at you," said Ben Vaughan, president of the Central Virginia Gold Prospectors, 300 strong and growing. "Can you believe this is the first time anyone has ever set eyes on this piece of metal, and it's worth something to boot?"

Some prospectors use oblong metal sluice boxes dug into river beds to filter out the gold or suction dredgers to vacuum it out of the mud. But the most popular way of sorting gold from sediment is old-fashioned panning -- sloshing around a pan full of dirt and clay to force the heavy bits of gold to the bottom, then carefully pouring out the rest.

It's grueling work. A prospector might spend hours hunched over a creek, feet planted in the dirt, eyes straining to catch that unmistakable glimmer, mosquito bites the only guarantee.

"For some of these guys, I do believe the gold fever is terminal," said Bob Sinclair, curator of the Monroe Park gold mining museum in Goldvein, where visitors can examine old stone crushers and rusty pickaxes from the mines that operated here in the 1800s.

Rumors circulate about a Goldvein prospector who lives illegally in a tent on a Fauquier river bank, armed with a dredge and a pistol.

But for most, prospecting is simply a way to commune with history and nature, with the possibility of a small payoff.

Billy Curtis, 53, was a Civil War enthusiast, spending hours every weekend hunting for relics with his metal detector. He collected enough artifacts that, when he reluctantly sold a batch, he was able to lay the foundation of his house in Sumerduck with the money. But when relics became harder to come by, he started to learn about gold. Before he knew it, he was hooked.

"My very first pan, I found gold," he said. "The sun was hitting it just right, and that's all it took."

As he became more skilled, more adept at eyeing the kind of boulder where gold might hide, he began to fish out larger pieces, wrought into gnarled little fragments by the heat of the earth's crust and the patient force of the current. He stores all his finds in a glass case and plans to keep them forever as mementos -- unless the economy crashes.

If he did try to pawn the three ounces he's collected over the past three years, it's unclear how much he'd get. Gold fished from waterways ranges in purity from 60 to 95 percent, Jacobs said. But often, he added, nuggets are worth more than the gold in them because some people favor their natural shape.

Adair, 46, a computer salesman who goes by the name Tinpan among his prospector buddies, believes found gold is best given away. For years, he has been prospecting just to give his loot to kids who visit the interpretive center. He hopes gold prices won't break the 1981 record.

"Any higher, and it will take all the fun out of it," he said.
Adair discovered the hobby as a child growing up in Goldvein, where longtime postmaster and museum namesake Pat Monroe used to take kids to scour the riverbeds for treasure. It seemed a bore at the time -- he preferred Civil War re-enacting -- but it caught his interest as an adult when he learned that gold mining played a vital role in local and national history.

"The Civil War may have divided our country, but gold built it," Adair said. "It's truly amazing when you think about it."

Adair also enjoys the chance to escape the whir of civilization. On a recent afternoon, he hopped in his truck, grabbed his pipe and plenty of tobacco and drove a visitor along a quartz-studded trail that served as a main highway in its heyday 200 years ago, Adair said.

He parked, picked up his shovel and a few pans and trudged up the path a few yards before cutting off the trail and down a hill to a stream known only as MOAB -- named, he said, for the Mother of All Beaver Dams.

The ticks and fire ants were voracious, but the trees cast a cool shadow as he dipped his shovel into the stream bed and dropped a pile of wet dirt into his pan. With a deft shake of the pan, he churned the mixture until it resembled chocolate milk, letting the top layer splash back into the river.

This, he explained, is called classifying -- separating the contents so the lighter substances, such as clay and stones, float to the top, while the denser material, most of it iron dust, sinks to the bottom.

His rough shaking became a practiced sway, the murky brown top layer slowly sloughing off to reveal a dark smear of iron at the bottom.

Glittering there in the black were three tiny gold spots.

"Virginia gold," he said, a grin spreading on his face.

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