Once you find gold you can take the gold to an assayer. If it’s a larger amount of gold they can really tell you the value of it. Or if you just looking for the cheap easy way, you can go to a pawn shop, or anywhere that buys gold. But you’re not going to get the stock price for it because they have to resell it at some point. You do want to find a specific buyer who is looking for gold, and gold sells for more if you haven’t quite tampered with it. If you find a nugget and it’s now a specimen if it looks really nice if it’s got nice curvature and angles to it, looks really fancy people are going to pay decent money for it just so they can have it in a collection. They will pay more for that more than if it was refined in a gold bar just because it’s a natural sample, you see the natural beauty of it and people want to pay for that nature. A lot of our members never really sold their gold, they kept it because they found themselves. This shows some of the excitement that comes to people who do it recreationally. Some people will really get into this and Camp along on a river with a fifth wheel or a motorhome looking for gold all weekend long, and if they make a mess they can actually pay for their weekend. Kind of like Las Vegas!
Typically from my experience bedrock in a small seasonal creek fluvial system would be anywhere from 3 to 5 feet down depending on where you dig. And probably take about two hours or three hours. Constantly systematically digging down with one or two people getting down in the hole trying to find the bedrock. And then collecting the fine materials out of the crevices in the bedrock. A lot of the gold is making its way down to the bottom, so we run all the material down to the bedrock just trying to get all of the flakes in the process of migrating down. Whoever gets to the bedrock is the person who gets the major amount of gold. But there is gold all the way through all the layers – not as much because it hasn’t been deposited for the same amount of time as a gold at the bottom. So we sluice the whole thing. We get everything we can because it adds up. A lot of the gold that you find are very small flecks of gold. It adds up. There is a crevice tool for digging the material out of the crevices. It looks like a screwdriver that has been bent into a 90° angle. Using that you can scrape things out. Any type of material you expect to be bearing gold or pager, you pull that out and that’s where you really find the gold. The gold likes to hide in those crevices. It gets stuck there or it moves on to the next crevice wherever it can get caught. That’s really where they find the gold in the crevices at the bottom of the bedrock. Or even on the sides of the river bed you’ll see a lot of rocks that are exfoliating and you’ll see cracks in those. There is gold in there as well. That’s usually a finer gold but you can do fairly well with those cracks too. Sometimes the cracks will be on the cut bank because when the floods come sometimes the gold will deposited in the upper cracks. Especially in Julian there is a lot of that, you’ll see that cut bank or you’ll see an S curve and you go into those areas and you pull soil out right above the water level and that’s where you’ll find it. Most likely you’ll find gold. Gold likes to hide.
Gold is about 19 times heavier than water so it tries to go as straight as it can till its sticks to the inside of the bank. Sometimes you see these deposits on the inside of the bank, that’s where a lot of the plaster gold is as well. That’s where a lot of the material is building up. About $30 worth of gold would probably be about 10 thin flakes. You definitely need to find more than that to pay for your weekend with the cost of gas.
I have an SUV and I can haul a trailer. I shove everything I can in there. Typically I bring a sluice box, I bring two or three gold pans, I bring classifiers to different types just to filter out the material and get the finer material. I also bring a 5 gallon bucket, a crevice tool, a shovel, a pickax which helps with the larger boulders. Gold get caught under boulders, and a small spade to feed the sluice box. As soon we find that spot. I take my 4 x 4 so I can traverse a little bit farther back on the property that I’m on. As I get there I unload all of the equipment. We will go until we find a good spot that looks promising – that may have some paid dirt – then will unload the equipment. We will start digging, one person well dig while the other person is unloading and setting up. We are looking for any kind of fluvial material that may have gold in it. I will set up the sluice box in the stream. You want a steady stream of water pouring over this loose box, just enough to where it will wash off the light material, you want the darks and hematite and magnetite heavier materials to stay in this loose box. So we will do a couple of test pans to check out if the flow is right on the sluice box to make sure that the ripples are looking great, to make sure that you’re not losing material or getting back up. It takes a long time to get this loose box perfected to make sure that you’re not losing any gold at all. Because you want to make sure you’re not losing any gold at all. That’s the goal. So one person will get that set up and we will start digging a hole once we find a nice place and go as far down as we can till we hit bedrock. Typically you get a lot of soft sand in the beginning and then you start reaching your gravels, and then it becomes very Cobbley at the bottom. And that’s where all the gold gets washed down. Then you will hit either condensed clay or actual bedrock. Then look for the crevices and curvatures, and the little cracks or ripples in the rock, something where the goal could be hiding. Typically we will do that for about five or six hours. It’s definitely manual labor. Ideally we just camp out so we don’t have to drive back and forth, and ideally you want to run as much material while you’re out there as you can. So you stay out there and said to spend the night, or you can gather all of the material that you can at the bottom of the bedrock and bring that back home and run it. So while you’re in this area you want to grab as much material as you possibly can and use as much of your time as you possibly can if you’re looking to get better rewards, more profit and more gold bearing material. Then you run that through the sluice box at the river or that you might set up at your house. Hours and hours of running it. You can go through about a 5 gallon bucket of material before you have to do a cleanup. To do cleanup you take this loose box out of the water and unhook everything. And you get all of that heavy dirt and you put that into a pan and now comes your final moment. All that time and effort, and the question “are we in a good spot, was it worth our time”. You pan all that material, aerate the material and make sure you have got water in between every particle of material in there. You want the whole thing aerated so that the gold will just fall right to the bottom. Then you use the ripples on the pan to keep the heavy material in the pan while the lighter stuff just washes right over the top. It does the same thing in the sluice box but now in the pan it’s a much more condensed area. You keep doing it and finally you see that shiny flicker in the pan and that’s when you know you’re in a good spot! Then you want to stay!
NEXT WEEK:
I’ll tell you how I found my two gold nuggets!