Panning for gold

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dali lambone

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I just got done panning for gold near Hatchers Pass just northwest of Palmer Alaska and actually had some pretty good luck. We found 20 or 30 gold flakes in roughly half an hour. So not much as far as weight is concerned, but I have to admit that it was pretty exciting, especially since I didn't think we'd find a thing.
 
I went years ago in Colorado when I was younger. It is definitely possible to find a little this way, but you are right, it does not add up to much. Great times and a great piece to take home with you.
 
20 or 30 flakes? Did that make a gram by weight? Pretty impressive for just a half hour! Sounds like a fun and educational vacation.
 
@bug - I'm sure it's no more than a gram, most are really small. We found a sandy portion near an elbow in the river ( which is still rushing with snow runoff ) where the current wasn't that bad. The water was freezing, but on the very first pan, my wifes dad found a flake, so no one cared about temperature after that.
 
With gold @ ~$50/gram, that averages (albiet from a single data point) out to ~$100/hour. Even if there were four of you searching to find it, that's roughly $25/hour/person. Not bad at all.
 
My partner in fusion crime, Bill Fain, does this avidly, sometimes even brings me junk from the rivers he visits so as to maybe make up some automated floatation system to pan the stuff. I gotta get him to join here...
 
Gold panning / mining / metal detecting is great... I've been at it for a lot of years, prospecting areas around where I live.

Sometime I'll travel up to Alaska or back out to Colorado and hit some hot spots. It's addictive.

ADK
 
anybody ever tried one of these things ?

http://www.goldmagic.com/

i keep asking in the hope someone will say yup they are good, as ive got several thousand tons of mine waste ..........

They work pretty good for concentrates, but you really need to get down to concentrate level first. If you have have a lot of mine waste you want to run through (I'm assuming soil), you should set up a recirculating water, or wasting water sluice. You can pretty simply build one yourself, get some miners moss and lay it under the riffles.

Then, take that stuff from your cleanout and run it through a gold magic, or something like that. Or, just pan it out.

Man, first thing I would do is take a day or two and pan some of those mine tailings and see what you have.

ADK
 
I've been researching this stuff for Bill. I'm trying to learn what miners of various things do already.

In theory, if you could come up with a liquid that had a density higher than the usual rock (about 3.5) but less than gold - the gold would sink, the rocks float, and there you are. Gold bonded to rocks might be lost, but it would be a way to process vast amounts of material.

As far as I can tell, yes, you can create such a liquid, even an ionic one, with say, zinc bromide dissolved in water - something really heavy. Heck some of the freon-class liquids are almost there as is. Fluoinert is already 2.84 (but that stuff is really expensive itself).

But I also find out that miners (not just PMs) also use some tricks with foams and selective wetting via various kinds of resins and soaps with agitation and compressed air, but they tend to keep the details kind of close - or just feel no one is interested enough to want to see a writeup on it. So information on that set of processes is kind of sparse out there.

There is some gold in the creeks and rivers here in SW VA, Bill's brought me some he's panned locally. Just milligrams worth, but it's purty.
 
Cheers fellas.

My tailings contain commercially recoverable quantities of lead and zinc ores.

All ground down to fine material under 3mm (1/8th inch)

But theres not enough here to justify setting up a commercial process on site and haulage to distant treatment with disposal of subsequent waste, kills the alternative.

So a 'hobby', below the radar level recovery has been discussed ........

And eeerrr, we all know what is often co-disposed with lead (-:
 
I also love escaping north for a bit of panning! It's addictive and a great excuse to get into the wild. It's seriously hard work though and I'm not sure I'll be giving up my day job just yet :-D


This is from a previous trip...

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:gold:
 
Several GIMers are into this. Maybe they'll see this and chime in. Would be a neat thread.
 
Not a how to..........just a neat read.

I Quit My Job to Hunt for Gold. This Is What I've Learned.​

On a sunny day this past January, Pauly Larouche was floating face down in a creek in a remote New Zealand forest. He was thousands of miles from home, and he and two guides had trekked for hours to get to this particular spot. They were drawn there by the same force that had lured prospectors in centuries past: Gold waiting to be discovered. Armed with a dive mask, a wetsuit, and hand tools, Larouche poked at rocks on the creek bed, searching for a hypnotic yellow shine.

In just ten minutes, he found his first nugget. And after two hours, he had picked up over 38 grams of gold, a haul worth thousands of dollars.

“I actually thought it was a prank,” says Larouche, but his guides were just as surprised as he was. He had uncovered something truly incredible. “It felt amazing,” he says.

Larouche, a native of Vancouver, Canada, has turned gold seeking into his full-time job. He travels the globe hunting for the precious metal, and he has over 540,000 subscribers on YouTube, where he posts videos of his exploits. Although most people think of gold hunting as a relic of the pioneer days (if they think about it at all), Larouche is proof there’s still treasure out to be found. In fact, thanks to the recent wet winter in California, amateur gold seekers across the Western U.S. are gearing up for a banner year. Heavy rains and snowmelt have sent soil cascading down rivers and creeks, exposing new gold for those willing to search for it. There are no guarantees in this business, but you might just get lucky, too. Larouche likes your odds.

More:

 
Pretty cool video. Shows a time lapsed summary in the first couple of minutes and then a more detailed view of the process in the rest of the video.

 
Two guys in Australia hunting for gold in a river in Tasmania:

 
Neat video (subscribed.) Was the dowsing rod for gold or spiritual?

To do what the guy in the vid does you have to be fit and agile, for sure.
 

SATISFYING WORKERS..! HOW TO USE A SLUICE BOX FOR GOLD​

Dec 29, 2023


18:42
 
For any Bearing Sea Gold Fans:

We get on the gold in the first dive of the season!​

Jan 20, 2024

10:45

We are finally ready to get on the gold in the first dive of the season!But it's not smooth sailing.
The divers have to battle icebergs, historically cold water temperatures, and regulator freeze-ups to get paid.
This is part 5 of a 40-part series about our summer mining season - so make sure you subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications so you don't miss an episode!
Here are the episodes:

1 - I lost my job on Bering Sea Gold https://youtu.be/VywFUeNvcnU
2 - Bering Sea Gold Dredge - COMPLETE REBUILD! https://youtu.be/DvVf9_NGmL8
3 - Bering Sea Gold Dredge Critical Design Error! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANXzz...
4 - Gold mining dredge launch in Alaska's Bering Sea (will it float?) https://youtu.be/idfr2rn6kDk
5 - We get on the gold in the first dive of the season! https://youtu.be/-6kOeS5vZ_Q

Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheEmilyRiedel/videos
 

Meet Roger, A Full Time Nome Beach Miner​

May 27, 2022
Today Bryan Wilder And Gary meet up with Roger, a full time beach miner, and he shows us how he mines and lives homesteading on the beach of Nome, Alaska.


24:27

All episode playlist here! • American Gold Prospectors Show Episodes
 
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