Gold & Silver Forum - Prospecting trip this Saturday

You need to prospect before you do any recovery (mining) work. Don't try to prospect and mine at the same time or without fail you'll end up doing a half-ass job at both. carry a long handled shovel. It will keep you from having to bend over to dig, and will also slerve as a good walking stick. If needed, it also an excellent tool to handle 2 and 4-legged critters. Also carry a light weight short handled mattox or pick but don't load yourself down with stuff you don't need. (Good is a long handled shovel, a short-handled lightweight pick or mattox, water, and a good gold pan in which you've drilled a hole directly across from the center of the riffle section, and tied a loop of cord so you can clip the pan to the back of your pants while walking....keeps your hands free.

If your spiral panning machine is a "Gold Magic" it will work well separating out straight-run materials. "Gold Miner", "Desert Fox" and simaliar type machines are not designed to wash straight-run materials. Rather, the materials must be screened and the same-size lots worked together. But regardless, you will be able to wash FAR MORE "dirt" with a properly set up sluice box than with any spiral machine.

One critical key to operating a sluice box is that the materials be screened before feeding them into the head of the box. The best thing to do is to classify them through a 4-mesh (1/4") screen and then feed the minus-1/4" stuff slowly into the box. Don't ever run any rocks larger than 1/4" through a sluice box because the are large enough to create a vortex as they move through the box. The vortex that a rock creates will disrupt the ability of the riffles to hold gold and the movement of the rock itself will trap them and carry them out the foot of the box = not good :(

Powerful (high velocity) floodwaters move colors down stream in company with tons and tons of silt, sands, gravel and rocks. Heavier colors will move along the bottom in the channel together with the larger rocks & boulders, and will try to striaghten out the steam....meaning that they will travel the shortest distance possible. At bends any colors that move along the side of the channel adjacent to the outside bend will most often be "blown" on around the bend by the higher velocity water ("hi-pressure area) that is created by centrifical force. The inside of the bends will carry lower velocity water (comparatively a "low-pressure" area) along the lower downstream half of the inside of the bend. It is in the low pressure areas where the heavier colors are most likely to fall out and deposit.

A prospector must mentally visualize torrential flood waters and "read the creek" to locate potential low pressure areas that are created by anything that reduces the velocity of the water.

This can be in the channel along the lower portion (around the corner) of the inside of bends, the downstream side of large rocks & boulders, and sunken logs that lay into the channel from the bank, and places immediately below an area where steep banks narrow the stream. As a stream widens immediately below this "pinched" area floodwaters spread out. This causes them to lose some velocity which in turn can let colors fall out and deposit.

Locate the best low-pressure areas and then "sample" the materials they contain. Don't forget that heavier colors ALWAYS deposit deeper than lighter weight colors. Shovel off the first foot or so of debris, sand, & gravel, and then start sampling the materials that lay beneath. Firstly look for black sands and then colors. Black sands (iron ores and oxides) are very heavy so where there are concentrations of black sands so often will there be concentrations of colors.

Make a mental note of the size and number of colors you find in the pan full of materials you sample in each location and then excavate the area that produced the most colors, and remember that anywhere a course color (nugget) is found there most often are others.

If you can, excavate all the way to bedrock because that's where the largest colors will have located. During their movement they will have moved down through all the lighter gravels until they hit something that was solid enought to prevent them from moving deeper. Try to find cracks or other deteriorated (busted up) areas of bedrock. When you do spend time to thoroughly clean them out. When colors move along the bottom and find a crack in or busted up bedrock they will fall in to it and stay there because they are out of high velocity water. These cracks and decomposed areas of bedrock are the best low-pressure areas a person can find bar none. Serious prospectors work to find areas along a waterway that don't have much "overburden" (materials that have naturally been depositied on top of the bedrock (earth's crust). It's much easier to get down and "work" the bedrock in these locations.

Good hunting... and if you find any nuggets give me a call. I need to know where you're diggin!