Silver Panning?
 

Myself and a few friends plan on going to camp at a place on private property that was once a silver mine.

I have panned for Gold, is it similar for silver? How do you recognize it? Where do you Look

Help
jgibbons6320@yahoo.com

Re: Silver Panning?
 

The silver mine was probably a hardrock operation extracting ore (rock with included values) that held a number of ounces of microscopic particles of silver per ton of rock. Also, most silver even today is recovered as a bi-product of mining operations primarily recovering other metals such as lead, zinc, copper, and gold.

A person can pan silver, but you hardly ever hear of it. While visable gold and particularly nuggets are rare, silver nuggets occur even more rarely.

Silver is not as heavy as gold so it will take longer motion, work, and time washing a pan of material to get any silver to move to the bottom.

The best you can to is to give a shot and see what turns up. Good luck.

Re: Silver Panning?
 

Silver is usually combined with other minerals. What is usually found is dark heavy rock.


I have found a few grams of bright shiney silver on the outside of copper nuggets I have metal detected here in Michigan; and have heard of much larger pieces of native silver here, but they are very rare.[Note: the deposit at the White Pine Mine in Ontanogon County was said to have contained 18 Billion Pounds of Copper and 800 Million Ounces of Silver, very little of it was free silver]

Re: Silver Panning?
 

Silver is most often found in galena. If you find galena it likely will be several feet wide and all you have to do is break it into chunks you can lift. Figure about 1% silver and the rest is lead or rock. In some areas you find silver chloride which looks like a grey or black rock but it's soft. If you hit it with another rock it dents. That is about 75% silver. For anything else you'll need to study.

Oh, and if you go to the Trigo Mountains of SW Arizona the silver is royal blue. I haven't found any info at all about what that might be.