Where To Find Gold
Before you can discover where to find gold, you first must know what kind of gold deposit you are seeking— Placer deposits or Lode gold. A placer deposit is a concentration or accumulation of different varieties of gold (flakes, wire gold, nuggets, pickers, flour gold) found in sediments of a stream bed,
beach, drainage basin, or other residual deposit. Placer gold, because of its weight and resistance to corrosion, is the easiest to find and extract. Lode gold occurs within the solid rock in which it was
deposited and is best left to large-scale hard rock mining ventures.
In addition to "wet" localities, placer gold occurs along many of the intermittent and ephemeral streams of arid regions, too. In many of these places a large reserve of low-grade placer gold may exist, but the lack of a permanent water supply for conventional placer mining operations requires the use of dry or semi-dry concentrating method, such as drywashers, to recover the gold.
No matter what type of gold prospecting you want to do, the best chances of success come from systematically studying existing and known productive areas. You might wonder why you should prospect where others already have been? Well, the development of new, highly sensitive, and relatively inexpensive methods of detecting gold means you can find placer gold deposits that were missed by earlier prospectors who used only a gold pan or an inefficient sluice. Today, you can rely on power sluices, dredges, highbankers, automatic spiral gold panning machines, and lots of fine gold recovery methods that didn't exist in the days of the '49ers or before. You can even find nuggets with a variety of metal detectors and gold detectors nowadays!
In addition to "wet" localities, placer gold occurs along many of the intermittent and ephemeral streams of arid regions, too. In many of these places a large reserve of low-grade placer gold may exist, but the lack of a permanent water supply for conventional placer mining operations requires the use of dry or semi-dry concentrating method, such as drywashers, to recover the gold.
No matter what type of gold prospecting you want to do, the best chances of success come from systematically studying existing and known productive areas. You might wonder why you should prospect where others already have been? Well, the development of new, highly sensitive, and relatively inexpensive methods of detecting gold means you can find placer gold deposits that were missed by earlier prospectors who used only a gold pan or an inefficient sluice. Today, you can rely on power sluices, dredges, highbankers, automatic spiral gold panning machines, and lots of fine gold recovery methods that didn't exist in the days of the '49ers or before. You can even find nuggets with a variety of metal detectors and gold detectors nowadays!
Where to Find Gold in the United States
After you study where to find gold in each state, mainly Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, you must determine specifically where prospecting is permitted and be aware of the governmental regulations at each location. In the eastern USA, limited amounts of gold have been washed from some streams draining the eastern slope of the southern Appalachian region in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. Small quantities of gold have been mined by placer methods in some New England States, but most of the land in the East is privately owned.
After you study where to find gold in each state, mainly Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, you must determine specifically where prospecting is permitted and be aware of the governmental regulations at each location. In the eastern USA, limited amounts of gold have been washed from some streams draining the eastern slope of the southern Appalachian region in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. Small quantities of gold have been mined by placer methods in some New England States, but most of the land in the East is privately owned.
Of course permission to enter privately owned land must be obtained from
the land owner, but each type of publicly owned land carries its own
rules and
regulations.
For example, National Parks are closed to gold prospecting, but certain
lands under the
jurisdiction of the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land
Management are open to anyone who gets a permit, which is generally
inexpensive. Public land records in the proper BLM
State Office will show you which lands are open and closed to mineral
entry under the mining laws. These offices keep up-to-date land
status plats that are available to the public for inspection. Buy a good
map from one of these organization so you can study where to find gold.
After you get the proper permits and start prospecting, if you discover
a valuable placer gold deposit, you
may stake a claim. Learn how to correctly take ownership of your gold mining rights (placer and lode) by clicking here.
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FREE "Gold Mining Claim Secrets" special report
If you've never tried to stake a gold mining claim before but would like information on how to get started with gold mining claims and how to find out which government lands are open for claiming, click here to get
Tyson Elliott's FREE report! |
Where to Find Gold in a Streambed
Let's say you've learned about a gold-bearing stream and want to start sampling for gold there. Now you need to know where to find gold in a streambed. The first step is to look for hard-packed material. “Hard-pack” is created at the bottom of waterways during major floods and storms. The reason that hard-pack is important to a prospector is because gold nearly always concentrates at the bottom of hard-packed layers.
Let's say you've learned about a gold-bearing stream and want to start sampling for gold there. Now you need to know where to find gold in a streambed. The first step is to look for hard-packed material. “Hard-pack” is created at the bottom of waterways during major floods and storms. The reason that hard-pack is important to a prospector is because gold nearly always concentrates at the bottom of hard-packed layers.
Gold is about six times heavier, by volume, than the average weight of
the sand, silt, and rocks that make up an average streambed. Because of
this disparity in weight, when streambed material is being washed
downriver during a major flood, most of the gold will work its
way down to the bottom of the streambed material. During major storms, most of
the gold moving in a waterway will be washed across the surface of
hard-packed streambed that is not being moved by the storm. At some
point during the storm, gold falls out of the turbulent flow
by dropping into cracks and holes. Then, rocks, gravel,
sand and silt will drop out of the flow and form a layer along the
bottom over top of the gold. This streambed material that lies on top of the gold will nearly always be
hard-packed.
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You can get
started gold prospecting for well under $100 if you buy a gold panning kit containing plastic gold pans and classifiers, a
plastic suction bottle, tweezers, a magnifying glass, and an instruction book. After that, each time you get a flash in your pan, almost certainly
gold fever will invade your psyche and you'll need to spend a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars on more sophisticated gold prospecting equipment that will give you a special advantage in finding more paydirt and
processing more concentrates more quickly. And why not?! With the price of gold these days, you don't need to find much to completely pay for your equipment and turn a profit!
|  Learn Where and How To Find Gold! |
