Use Good Maps With Land Ownership
You need to understand how to read a map and how to determine who owns a piece of land before you go prospecting on it. If land is private then you will need to obtain permission. If its public land, you need to make sure that it hasnt been claimed by someone already.
The easiest way to determine land ownership is to get a map from the BLM or Forest Service for your area. These maps will include the land ownership, letting you tell the difference between private and public lands.
Thes maps will lack some detail that you need, but they are good for general navigation. Finding access roads into old mines will be worth the purchase alone.
The detailed 1:24,000 scale maps are the best ones, and will show the best detail, sometimes even including mines and prospects. However, it is the 1:100,000 scale maps that will usually show land ownership information.
Five Of The Best Bases For A Gold
Ballarat
One of the richest cities in the world at the height of the gold rushes, Ballarats legacy of wealth lives on in its grand Victorian streetscapes as well as the family favourite recreated gold town at Sovereign Hill. Ballarat also has a burgeoning foodie and bar scene, and is an arts hub hosting the Ballarat International Foto Biennale every two years.
Maldon
Eighty kilometres north of Ballarat, Maldon was declared Australias first notable town by the National Trust in 1966 thanks to its gold-rush architectural legacy and preserved 19th-century feel. This beautiful town has a thriving artistic community and boasts a full events calendar including an annual folk festival on the weekend before the Melbourne Cup.
Avoca
In the Central Highlands, 71 kilometres north of Ballarat, Avoca is these days better known for its wine industry. Considered the gateway to the Pyrenees wine region, its well and truly on the tasting trail.
Clunes
This little town is a favourite of filmmakers thanks to its perfectly preserved streetscapes. Home of a nationally significant annual book fair, it also has an excellent monthly farmers market.
Creswick
Creswick is an action holiday epicentre thanks to plenty of walking and cycling trails, and the striking pale water of Blue Waters Lake is a draw for photographers.
Alabama Gold Camp Ala
Perhaps gold alone isnt enough for you. If youre looking to add the possibility of finding garnet, citrine or fossils into the mix, you should head to the Alabama Gold Camp.
For a mere $5 per person, you can get admission with panning and sluicing included. Children 11 and under are free with an adult. Camping is also available, for only $5/day for primitive camping or $30/day for RV hookups.
Americans have been searching for gold for centuries. Now you and your family can be part of the history. Who knows? Maybe youll get rich doing it, too.
Good luck Penny Hoarders!
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Look For Identify Ground Sluicing /hand Diggings
Hand stacked rock piles are another excellent indicator of historic mining activity. While mechanical mining methods could often be used in the major drainages, the smaller creeks and gulches that had limited water generally needed to be worked by hand. A miner had to manually dig down to bedrock to get down to the gold. Any rocks that were encountered in their digging needed to be moved out of the way and set to the side.
There are miles and miles of creeks and gulches that were worked by early-day placer miners. And the evidence of hand stacked rocks is one of the most notable indicators that they were there. These rock piles are generally still undisturbed.
Some prospectors have a hard time telling the difference between dredge tailing and hand placers diggings. The uniformity of the rock piles is the easiest way to tell. Hand stacking is less consistent and even. Dredge tailings are usually more uniform. Dredge tailings are more common on rivers, while hand placering was usually done on smaller creeks and gulches where a dredge could not be used.
Where Can I Dig For Gold In California
10 Free Gold Panning Areas in California
- Auburn State Recreation Area.
- Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park.
- Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park.
- Merced River.
. Furthermore, where can I mine for gold in California?
The Kern River is one of the most popular gold prospecting rivers in California. Gold was first discovered on the river in 1851 following the start for the California gold rush. If you are new to the river, the best place to start is the Keyesville Recreational Mining area.
Likewise, where can you legally pan for gold? The REAL Top 10 Places to Pan for Gold
- American River, California.
- The Klondike Region, Yukon, Canada.
- Pike’s Peak, Colorado.
- Dahlonega, Georgia.
Accordingly, is gold panning legal in California?
Gold panning is legal in most rivers and streams running through state and national parks in California, but your luck will be best if you head to regions where gold has been discovered in the past.
Where was most of the gold found in California?
Many people in California figured gold was there, but it was James W. Marshall on January 24, 1848, who saw something shiny in Sutter Creek near Coloma, California. He had discovered gold unexpectedly while overseeing construction of a sawmill on the American River.
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Get Specific Gravity Of Your Specimens To Determine Value
Nice specimen! How much gold do you think it has in it?
If you find a nice specimen of gold in quartz, you need to find out how much actual gold is in the piece. If it is good sized and attractive, then there is a good chance that it is worth more to a collector than if you were to crush it and melt it, but it is still a good idea to figure out exactly how much gold is in it.
To do this, you need to do a specific gravity test. This involves getting a dry weight and wet weight of the specimen suspended in water. With this information, you can determine the gold content within your specimen. The calculations to do this are fairly straight forward, and if done correctly you can get a fairly accurate assessment of the gold content.
There are some pretty handy calculators online that will help you do this. They arent 100% accurate, but they are pretty close.
Contact Landowners For Access
Much like contacting claim holders, contacting private landowners is another good to get access to mining areas. Some of the richest spots are on private lands, so it may be well worth your time to try and identify who the landowners are and talk to them to see if they will let you do some prospecting.
There are some amazingly rich gold prospecting locations on private land. It might be worth asking the landowner for access.
Much like when dealing with claim holders, making an agreement on a split of the gold finds might help you to gain access. Sometimes landowners are interested in the history of their property, so if you are metal detecting for nuggets you might offer to give them any relics that you happen to find also.
It never hurts to ask, and it might give you access to some good ground that most others pass over.
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How To Pan For Gold
- Research where to go
The Lake District: Mungrisdale, Dunmail Raise and Blencathra Mountain are reputed to be good spots and traces have also been found in Troutbeck and Sedbergh.
The Northern Pennines: A wealth of minerals, including gold, has been found here. Nenthead and the River Swale have both had reports of gold finds.
The Forest of Dean: In 1906 there were reports of gold being found near a nature reserve. Apparently there is still gold in the ground to be found.
You must have the landowner’s permission and avoid sites with an environmental designation.
- Learn how to use a gold pan accurately
Gold has a high specific gravity. That means it’s denser and therefore heavier than lots of other sediment. In running water, gold will sink and stay put, while other objects float or roll along downstream.
To get the heavy gold particles to settle to the bottom of the pan, vigorously shake the sediment-water mixture.
Keep reducing the amount of sediment in the pan by gently washing off the top layer of material.
It might be useful to sign up for a gold-panning course and join the British Gold Panning Association.
Mr Jones’s six-year-old daughter Elinor has also picked up the gold bug – and to encourage her, he has joined an increasing number of people buying “pay dirt”.
This is waste soil from mineral-rich places like Alaska that is likely to contain ore, although it is also available from places closer to home, such as Scotland or the northern Pennines.
Prospecting For Gold In The United States
Only a few prospectors among the many thousands who searchedthe western part of the United States ever found a valuabledeposit. Most of the gold mining districts in the West werelocated by pioneers, many of whom were experienced gold minersfrom the southern Appalachian region, but even in colonial timesonly a small proportion of the gold seekers were successful. Overthe past several centuries the country has been thoroughlysearched by prospectors. During the depression of the 1930’s,prospectors searched the better known gold-producing areasthroughout the Nation, especially in the West, and thelittle-known areas as well. The results of their activities havenever been fully documented, but incomplete records indicate thatan extremely small percentage of the total number of activeprospectors supported themselves by gold mining. Of the fewsignificant discoveries reported, nearly all were made byprospectors of long experience who were familiar with the regionsin which they were working.
Today’s prospector must determine where prospecting ispermitted and be aware of the regulations under which he isallowed to search for gold and other metals. Permission to enterupon privately owned land must be obtained from the land owner.Determination of land ownership and location and contact with theowner can be a time-consuming chore but one which has to be donebefore prospecting can begin.
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Can Old Mines Collapse
Equipment and buildings:Abandoned surface structures and old mine equipment may collapse on bystanders. Highwalls:These are the excavated vertical cliffs in surface pits and quarries. They can be unstable and prone to collapse. Highwalls may not be visible from the top, presenting a danger to off-road drivers.
The Tool For Desert Prospectors
Instead of water, the drywasher uses air pressure and vibration to separate gold and black sands from the lighter gravels. Power can come from a generator or battery, or there are simple hand crank models just like the early prospectors used. Both will work just fine.
Material that you put into a drywasher needs to be totally dry. If it is damp at all, then it will perform poorly. Soils will clump together looking up the fine gold. This is why drywashers are rarely used in wetter climates like Oregon, Idaho, or Montana. Even in the heat of summer soils are usually too wet to be processed with a drywasher, so you are better off using more traditional methods.
If the soil is at all damp, then it is best to dig out your material and spread it out in a thin layer exposed to the sun. Then come back in day or two when everything is dried out to process it through the drywasher.
If you get a drywasher set up correctly you can recover some really nice gold. Check out this 5-ounce cleanup by a couple hardcore prospectors in Arizona:
And another video that shows their drywasher in action with another an ounce of gold recovered:
Some people just shovel directly into the head of the drywasher. Others prefer to classify into buckets. Most commercial drywashers are set up with a grizzly that will remove large rocks as you shovel into it.
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Where To Pan For Gold Panning Opportunities
Old wisdom professes that the best place to look for gold is where its already been found. Following that advice, the best places to look for gold are the following states, listed from north to south and west to east:
Other than the states listed above, there are a few places in the continental United States where gold has been panned, but these are relatively few and far between.
Many Placer Deposits Have Been Worked
Many believe that it is possible to make wages or better by panning gold in the streams of the West, particularly in regions where placer mining formerly flourished. However, most placer deposits have been thoroughly reworked at least twice–first by Chinese laborers, who arrived soon after the initial boom periods and recovered gold from the lower grade deposits and tailings left by the first miners, and later by itinerant miners during the 1930’s.
Geologists and engineers who systematically investigate remote parts of the country find small placer diggings and old prospect pits whose number and wide distribution imply few, if any, recognizable surface indications of metal-bearing deposits were overlooked by the earlier miners and prospectors.
Convergent plate boundaries are the plate tectonic setting of many gold deposits. There, magma produced by the melting of descending lithosphere rises as magma chambers and crystallizes close to the surface. Gold in these hot environments is often dissolved in superheated water and carried away from the magma chamber along faults and fractures. The water temperature is very high near the magma chamber but drops with distance. As the water travels farther from the magma chamber, gold starts to crystallize out within the fracture to produce a vein gold deposit. USGS image.
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Re: How Deep Do I Dig When Panning
Guest Tue Apr 26, 2011 4:41 pm
- Guest
Guest Tue Apr 26, 2011 6:29 pm
someday wrote:This topic has more questions than answers? If your panning an old favorite spot, then recent floods could have the gold at every level depending on the severity of the flood waters!If on the other hand your panning waters simply because your imagination said give it a go, If gold was recovered you need to find out if gold has been previously found in that water course? If No then get your butt higher in the hills and do it quickly? I always chose to move in leaps, go 2km up stream, if nothing come back a km, if something go up 500 yards.Rather than the old school of slowly panning up stream until the colors run out, which can take weeks? The walls have ears, especially when it comes to GOLD.
- Guest
Guest Tue Apr 26, 2011 7:04 pm
Wanlockhead Dumfries And Galloway Scotland
The Lowther and Buccleuch Estates issue gold panning licences for the area. Alternatively, the Wanlockhead Lead Mining Museum offers panning courses for amateurs a Canadian tourist found a 20-carat nugget worth $12,800 during a course in 2014. The courses are still going ahead in 2020, taking place on 18 July and 15 August.
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Learn To Identify Natural Gold Indicators
I think that finding historic gold mining areas is the most important first step toward finding gold prospecting areas, but serious gold miners learn how to identify natural gold indicators. These are things that are commonly associated with gold.
While most of the rich gold mining areas have been found, there are certainly still some places out there with good gold that were completely overlooked by others. If you are fortunate enough to find one of these places, you are likely to be rewarded with some exceptional amounts of gold.
Once again, the main takeaway here should be that you need to learn youre the geology of your mining district. When you understand the geology of the places where gold has already been found, you are more likely to spot the places where it might occur.
Often, the old geological reports that you use to research areas to prospect will tell you about the prevailing rock types found at a particular mine. Pay attention to those details.
Just as importantly, you need to know the rock types that are unlikely to be associated with gold. Dont waste time looking in areas with a low chance of having gold.
Gold Bug Park & Mine Ca
The Gold Bug Mine is a real mine left from the days of the historic Gold Rush.
This park offers visitors a chance to tour the Gold Bug Mine and Priest Mine, either on a self-guided tour or guided tour.
Theres also a gold mine museum here that would be perfect to learn more about the history of gold in the United States.
Theres a gem and gold panning trough located within the mines that gives visitors a chance to find some gold for themselves.
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How To Get Started Gold Panning
Purchase a pan or, better yet, a basic tool set which includes a second finishing pan and screen to separate sand from gold, as well as some bottles to test different areas. You can get these materials from Gold-N-Detectors in Golden for $30. You will also want a garden spade to dig, and two five gallon buckets, which you can get from a hardware store.
For tutorials on the fundamentals of how to gold pan, check out this resource on Finding Gold in Colorado, which includes a half-hour instructional video from Colorado gold pan master, Freddy Dodge.
Once you have found gold, you can once again visit Gold-N-Detectors to sell it backunder normal circumstances. COVID-19 has put some restrictions on the business but owner Bill Chapman says he can connect you with local buyers.
