Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

Here are some photos of raw gold in it's natural form for the seekers and dreamers out there dragging their old metal detector up and down the desert hills and washes or slushing their pans around in the Alaskan streams and rivers.

This one is from Potosi Creek, Alaska, a tributary to Ganes Creek. It was found back in the mid-70s by the former owner of the Ganes Creek claims, Warren Magnuson. It weighs in at 11.09 troy ounces.

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

This one was posted on another thread last year. It's from the South Fork of the American River near Coloma, California, the location of the first gold strike by John Marshall in 1848. Most "nuggets" from this particular area average less than a gram in weight. This one tips the scales at 13.67 troy ounces......or 425.18 grams.

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

This is another nice Alaskan piece from southcentral Alaska. It weighs 5.55 troy ounces, and belongs to a coin dealer in the Sacramento California area. A nice piece with that classic Alaskan look.

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

Another classic Alaskan gold nugget with great character.

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

http://www.akmining.com/mine/nug01.jpg

Here's one I dug out.

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

More smaller Alaskan nuggets with good character.

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

LOL Naccarato...... Not unless your real name is Barry Clay. That's the Alaskan Centennial Nugget, 294.10 ounces.

Here's a better photo to put it's size in perspective. Barry's daughter holding the nugget, the biggest one ever found in Alaska..... or at least the biggest "reported" ....... :s9:

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

http://www.california-gold-rush-mine...270066-web.jpg

Sorry, I ment I dug it out of google images.
This is one that you can carry around.

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

Here are a few nice Aussie pieces for balance............

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

http://www.jaysgoldnuggets.com/gold/1pt1gmaklot2.jpg

How do you post so many photos? I give.

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

And what the heck........... a few more California and Alaskan just to enhance the drool factor !

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

Easy. Just use the "manage attachments" bar in the posting page, and then "browse and click" each photo before you upload. You can post up to 7 photos per post........

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

http://galeon.hispavista.com/ciudadp...y%20bikini.JPG

Here is some Gold in the buff

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

What a rush it must have been back in the day to be digging and come across any of these monsters. Nowadays we still get gold from the earth, but at a rate of about an ounce per 30 tons of dirt and rock. Still amazing to me that man goes to such astounding lengths (and depths!) to get gold ("humanely if possible, but by all hazards"), when they could at first just pick it up off the ground, or out of a stream, in large chunks like these.


I've been there many times to camp and drive around "Apple Hill" to the various apple farms (never tasted better apples or juice or cider than found there). It's nice to visit Sutter's Mill. You get a weird feeling and sense of the history of the place.

Having made my way partly through the Gold! DVD, it turns out John Marshall spent the rest of his life drunk and penniless, and the German Sutter and his mill were overrun by squatters, and all his workers abandoned him to go and seek gold. Ironic that two men at the center of the gold rush in California ended up loathing it so.



Here's a bit more!

http://jamesbond.ugo.com/girls/se/eaton.jpg

http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01...nger_2_600.jpg

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

Hey, some of them is my photos!

Some of them is my gold! (yah, the smallest of the lot):banghead:

Check out this web page if you want to see some more photos of natural gold:
http://nevada-outback-gems.com/prosp...tural_gold.htm

Here are a few more Ralph forgot:

First a crystal gold bear who weighs a bit more than an ounce:
http://nevada-outback-gems.com/Refer.../gldn_bear.jpg


Second, the largest nugget found in the "lower 48" with a metal detector. It weighs a mere 156 ounces and was dug near Randsburg, California in the 1970s.
http://nevada-outback-gems.com/Refer...6oz_nugget.jpg

Chris

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

That big Randsburg nugget is A W E S O M E !!!!

Thanks for the pic. I'll add it to my nugget files.

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

I totally forgot about this one of Dave holding "THE BOOT".

Nice little flake................ (no, the gold.....not Dave) :D

Oh yeah, and another bear too. This one is from Alaska.

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

Is Dave in the picture above a friend of yours, or is he a famous prospector, or both :D?

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

Dave is a good friend of several years. He owns and operates the goldbay.com auction and nugget collector's website. We started out our acquaintenance drilling some guys on eBay that we caught selling fake gold nuggets several years back. We still give a few hell once in awhile.....:D

www.goldbay.com

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

Good stuff. Thanks for posting.
Is it more desirable ($$$) to keep gold in nugget form as opposed to melting it down?

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

I would think it would be best to hold in coin form, for liquidity's sake. Nuggets might be tough to move at the moment's notice, although I have no experience... just a guess. I think folks go after the nuggets more for the allure of them; I mean, look at those things! :bear_w00t:

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

For the most part, YES...... absolutely. Less than about 2% of all the gold ever mined or still in existance is estimated to be in "nugget" form. The vast majority, 98% plus, is microscopic in size when it comes out of the ground. That is the stuff that is mined and made into bars and coins. A one ounce gold nugget is RARER than a five carat diamond. In earlier times, most large nuggets were melted down and refined, only exascerbating the rarity of those few large ones that still remain in collector's hands.

Nice domestic (North American) nuggets with good character will regularly bring double spot prices AND MORE, according to size, on the collector market. Anything over an ounce troy is rare, and as you move on up the size scale, the rarity increases on an exponential scale. In other words, a 2 ounce nugget may be several times more rare than a one ounce nugget, not simply "twice" as rare, and so on up the line. Considering that, a 12 troy ounce nugget could conceivably be something on the order of several thousand times more rare than a one ounce nugget at some locations. And that one ouncer may be several thousand times or more rarer than a small one gram piece. I've seen very nice collector pieces, just nicely worn "placer" pieces with good character sell for upward of 4 and 5 times the spot price and ALOT higher than that for rare and unusual crystal gold formations.

I recently had a display of nice larger nuggets at a regional coin show, and one of the dealers there asked me why not just "melt them down" and have them refined into pure gold bars.

I had to ask him if he would take a 1933 Double Eagle and "melt it down" so that he could make a gold bar weighing under an ounce.

He snapped back "OF COURSE NOT, they have rarity and collector value far more than just the metal they contain !!"

I said "I rest my case".

That particular coin dealer had never realized or considered that there was a big and active market for nice gold nuggets and specimens, or had any previous idea that such things were so rare compared to the microscopic gold normally mined to make coins and bars. Many people apparently think that ALL gold is dug out of the ground in nugget form, but that is FAR from the truth. Beyond the rarity factor, each and every nugget is different, no two ever being just like another one. In that sense, each is "unique", something that cannot realistically be said of cookie-cutter mint production coins and bars.

Before the end of that coin show, that dealer had actually purchased a couple of nuggets and admitted his "personal ignorance" of the matter, saying he was going to study up. As Krugerrand mentions above though, for "liquidity" purposes on a wider market scale, refined and coined gold is easier to sell on short order. Nuggets fall more into the category of COLLECTIBLES, so have somewhat lower liquidity than does refined bullion, again much like collector coins, fine art, antiques, and other such material. But just try to find a nice large domestic gold nugget over a couple of ounces in size. Beyond the rarity factor, most all of these trade within a network of collectors and dealers and are seldom seen publicized on the market.........often SOLD face-to-face in private offerings that are never advertised.

Compared to large domestic (U.S.) nuggets, there is an abundance of Australian gold on the market. While "gold is gold" in that respect, location found and provenance of a piece can also make a big difference in it's value. There is also some degree of counterfeiting or making of "fakes" that collectors have to be on a constant look-out for. Most collectors and dealers who have dealt with natural nuggets for any length of time are well versed in identifying fake nuggets by their character in relation to where they are reportedly from, color, wear patterns, density, and so on, even "if" they do happen to actually be made of gold.

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

I'm always keeping my eyes and ears open for new words, and there's another new one for me. Along with trying to learn more words, I tend to be interested in the provenance of phrases and such (Midas touch, blue plate special, etc.), too. :D


Sounds similar to the "fake" Sovereigns and US $10 and $20 pieces out there... made of gold, so they're the correct size and weight, but they're faked for their collectible/numismatic value. Passed off as genuine Sovereigns when they're just replicas, albeit gold ones. They take experienced eyes to spot, just like the nuggets, or so I've learned. :wink:

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

One thing that is cool about metals like gold is that they could only have been created in a star gone supernova. So every piece of gold out there was once ejected from some ancient star. And now, millions and millions of years later, we can dig nuggets like these up out of the earth, from where they've been resting since the creation of the earth!

Nature is so awesome sometimes...

http://ephemeris.sjaa.net/0706/f.html

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

Nice. All those nuggets aren't bad either.

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

Splendid! Do silver nuggets exist and how do I get one?

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

Natural silver is much rarer than gold, but specimens do exist and are offered for sale. I'll try to post a photo.

Chris

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

This thread should be titled "PM porno"....

http://nuudeli.com/gallery/albums/Vi...goldmember.jpg

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

What is the purity of a gold nugget? I would guess that there is a range.

The standard theory is that the earth was made by the accretion of asteroid and comet hits 5 or 6 billion years ago as the solar system was forming. I'm envisioning the beginning as a molten ball with constant multi-gigaton celestial hits.

Under those circumstances, how does the gold end up so concentrated?

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

Gold is one of the heavy elements(above Fe), which means that it can only be produced from a star that goes supernova. So just think that every piece of gold you have was blown out from a star's explosion somewhere in the milky way, probably within the last 3 billion or so years. Pretty cool huh? :bull-buddy-icon: I would imagine that nuggets would be the rare globs that escape that explosion intact. The rest would be scattered about, golden splats fused onto other metals flying outward from the explosion.

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

Gold that eventually became "nuggets" is thought to have returned to near the surface (relatively) under volcanic pressure much later than the meteoric bombardment during the early formation of the earth. Gold and other minerals were basically diluted in liquids that were forced up through fissures and formed quartz and other gold-related minerals. There is some conjecture that some Australian deposits actually formed as a result of organic processes, perhaps through a kind of natural electrolytic reaction involving natural cyanides and salts, with quartz acting as a natural electrical conductor of sorts, thus the occurence of so many "salt lake" and quartz deposits. Other evidence suggests that there may be some actual microbial re-deposition involved. For the most part, gold that occurs within the fissures of quartz formations weathers out over eons of erosion leaving the gold nuggets behind, most of which contain some traces of quartz. Naturally occuring gold may range from very low grade "electrum", a natural alloy of gold and silver, upward to around 98% pure for some of the richer deposits in Australia. "Pure" gold never occurs in nature. Most U.S. domestic gold ranges from around 78-92 percent fine, depending on location of occurence.

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

here is some that i have owned in the past.

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

So, in theory the likelihood of finding a nugget is about the same anyplace on the planet?

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

The distribution should be even across earth's surface, but because of erosion, water, volcanic activity, etc, some areas have been better exposed for the discovery :) That's my amateur analysis :D

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

Well, if both silver and gold can be found in nugget form, what about platinum?

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

OK, here are photos of natural silver from Norway, and a natural platinum nugget from Northern California.

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

How big is a 0.5 oz Pt nugget?

Re: Gold In The Buff - The Thing Dreams Are Made Of
 

Slightly more than a half inch long.

Chris