Posted on 06/20/2011 11:57:01 PM PDT by thecodont
Gold nuggets are sprouting like weeds on streams in the Sierra foothills. High water from melting snow is scouring feeder creeks this month that haven't been flushed clean for years.
The flushing power can dislodge gold caught for eons in deep pockets and under rocks and propel it downstream. Eventually the weight of the gold causes it to fall to the stream bottom, often jamming between rocks in V-wedge crevices. There it waits for you.
At more than $1,500 an ounce, this isn't a kids' game. Gold panning can yield gold flakes amid a layer of black sand. But sniping - which any youngster can manage - can get you nuggets.
Like fishing, it takes the right technique at the right spot with the right equipment, then the persistence to stay with it until you catch the big one.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/06/15/SPIA1JU486.DTL#ixzz1PtGLuFUd
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Sniping? You shoot at the creeks?
Sniping: you use a sort of telescope to look at cracks in the creek bottom. That’s where the nuggets are.
Having panned for gold in the “black sand” collected around boulders and large rocks near a creek, I can testify that it’s painstaking and tiring work to go through all that grit to look for a few tiny flecks of yellow. It would be gratifying to find a much bigger piece.
How nice it is to find real gold and to look at the luster of it and feel the malleability of it between one’s fingernails.
They think this is news? This has been going on since time began. I live in the foothills and people have always panned for gold here(even when it was against to the law to own it). There won’t be any more gold washing down this year than in any other heavy snow pack year. The stupidity of the news media never ceases to amaze me.
During the California Gold Rush, laundrymen were getting rich by panning gold dust and flakes from the dirt they washed off the miners’ clothes.
Takes me back....I spent many a fun camping trip panning gold with my friends.
We always found gold. Not a lot, but enough to pay for the trip and more.
It’s true, every spring and summer we’d go back to places we had panned clean the previous year, and it would be full again.
Quite a fun way to go camping.
Takes me back....I spent many a fun camping trip panning gold with my friends.
We always found gold. Not a lot, but enough to pay for the trip and more.
It’s true, every spring and summer we’d go back to places we had panned clean the previous year, and it would be full again.
Quite a fun way to go camping.
I could imagine a kind of two pronged thingy that would robotically poke all over the creek bed looking for a piece of metal to complete a circuit at a very low resistance, then nab it with a scoop and strainer. It might be something other than gold, but pyrite would not fool it.
The key phrase here is,
“.....put flecks in a small glass vial.”
That would be a very small glass vial.
Apparently you have never actually seen gold flakes(most of them cannot be called "nuggets")in a pan lying in the black sand. Your two pronged thingy would have to be extremely tiny if you actually expected to make contact across any flakes of gold encountered.
Now let me see if I have this straight. You live near a creek, you pan for gold and there won't be any more gold washing down this year than in any other heavy snow pack year.
But there will be gold washing down, more than in non heavy snow pack years, I presume....and you don't think anyone should be wasting there time coming out there based on some silly big city news story
See, taint nothin but dirt.
Dont be wastin yer time.
Me? Oh, I just come out
here to proves it to ya.
I did a job above an old dam on a 30’ wide river coming out of the mountains - in an area known for some gold (not huge, but some). In order to do the work they opened the spillway to let the water go. I was kind-of surprised with regards to environmental permits etc.
Anyways, we watched as who-knows how many years of black sand sediment buildup washed over the spillway - sparkling in the sunlight. Fun to imagine that all that sparkles was gold!
This obviously would be a nugget looker, not a flake looker. A grid of these prongs of alternating polarity could help increase the efficiency of the search.
But water laced with minerals is a good conductor of electricity...
They're only $100 per copy. get yours before they're gone!
Even with a lot of minerals, I can't imagine that it would be anywhere near as good a conductor as the gold would be.
[FR post the other day, link escapes me, about guy making $850 per week finding gold on the city byways]
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