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Has anyone here done any gold panning? - Michigan Swamp Buck - 07-31-2024
I may have brought this up before, maybe not, but has anyone here panned for gold? If so, could you describe how you went about choosing where to pan and if you found any gold, be it fine dust, flakes or nuggets? Also, what techniques did you use, like a sluice or rocker, or how did you use the pan to concentrate the heavy material?
RE: Has anyone here done any gold panning? - Michigan Swamp Buck - 08-02-2024
Well, after so long without a reply, it seems that the answer to my question is a resounding no.
I will say this, my property that I have mineral rights for, has a small creek running through it, a couple of feet wide and around half a foot to a foot deep during flooding. I've been practicing panning on a small stretch of the creek that runs through my swamp. I figured that the melting glaciers 11,000 years ago, particularly the Lake Michigan and Saginaw lobes that met here and washed through the Muskegon River valley, had brought some gold with it. I'm on an outwash surrounded by glacial till and moraines in a high-level flood plain of the river. Gold has been reported a couple of miles away on the river, but I have found a lot of gold-colored mica deposits and pyrite around the area, so I never thought that report was accurate.
The stuff I screen out has a lot of iron. The creek bed is about 3-4 inches of muddy silt with about a foot of sand and then rough gravel below that. I've only put in enough time to make my mining camp, set up a sluice, and pan up a few tablespoons of black sand, but I'll be damned if I haven't been able to tease some small flakes out. There is a lot of fine dust in it as well, but I think that would need some other processes to bring it out. I will be digging more into the gravel bed upstream, so the loose stuff will come down to my camp while I pan out the shovel fulls.
RE: Has anyone here done any gold panning? - VioletDove - 08-02-2024
That sounds fun. I hope you find something.
I’ve never tried panning. I’ve thought, a couple of times, to try and see if anything is in the creek that runs through here, but I haven’t tried it.
If I remember correctly most gold that can be found in Oklahoma is in the form of dust. I’ve heard rumors of a supposed old silver mine near here but I don’t know if they are true. There are remnants of what looks like an old mining area, on the property next to mine, but I think they must have been mining minerals of some kind.
RE: Has anyone here done any gold panning? - Schmoe - 08-02-2024
(07-31-2024, 12:44 AM)Michigan Swamp Buck Wrote: I may have brought this up before, maybe not, but has anyone here panned for gold? If so, could you describe how you went about choosing where to pan and if you found any gold, be it fine dust, flakes or nuggets? Also, what techniques did you use, like a sluice or rocker, or how did you use the pan to concentrate the heavy material?
Gold panning is one of those things I keep meaning to try. I did a small bit of reading on it, and apparently creeks and rivers are good places to prospect. You want to pan near bends in the creek, where gold might accumulate. I think my state of Pennsylvania isn't very good for gold though, probably why I never bothered.
RE: Has anyone here done any gold panning? - Ninurta - 08-02-2024
I've not done any gold panning, although I would have if I had any interest in gold. Reportedly, I live in a gold area. Starting in the 1500's and 1600's, European prospectors reported gold in all of the rivers heading in the Appalachian Mountains,
In the 1920's, an Indian family passed through the town I grew up in, and camped there a few days. The old Grandfather of the family stated after looking around a bit that if he lived here, he would shoe his horses with gold, there was so much of it present in his estimation.
The Indians around the time of the Jamestowne settlement had a copper mine several miles east of here. The Shawnee Indians had a silver mine somewhere in northeastern Kentucky, several miles west of here, Somewhere around a short-lived Shawnee town named Eskippakithiki, but diligent searches have never turned it up - only the Shawnees know where it was, and they aren't telling.
Some Long Hunters reported, in the latter half of the 1700's, that there was a mountain in eastern Kentucky that never had snow at the top of it, even in the deepest winter. It's known there are uranium deposits here, and the speculation is that the snow melted due to the heat of the radioactive decay of uranium from a particularly rich deposit. Background levels of radiation in this section of the Appalachians is 11 times the average levels in most of the rest of the country.
I know that in this immediate area where I now live, there are deposits of coal, salt, and iron. These hillsides where I sit are shot through with abandoned coal mines, some of which still show coal seams if you're bold enough to go in after it. Roadside cuts frequently show coal seams, anywhere from 1 foot to 12 feet thick. This area of the Appalachians was originally settled by the Sword brothers, who came here because they were Long Hunters, and the hunting was good due to the proliferation of salt licks all over this area. A nearby community is named "Swords Creek" after the Sword brothers. And, in the creek at the foot of my mountain, you can see rust form on the banks when the water is low from all of the iron being leached out of the ground and washed downstream.
In the Corner Settlement where I grew up, 20 miles or so from here, I did find a couple of small veins of gold in the limestone-quartzite bedrocks of the area, but I always left them where I found them, and didn't tell anyone that I had found anything. They were pretty tiny anyhow, not worth the bother of trying to pry them out to me, but if I told anyone, we'd have been swarmed with riches-hunters trying to tear everything up for the gold that might or might not be found in larger veins.
So, there is no shortage of minerals here, and I have reason to believe that gold and silver are among them. I just don't have any interest in "precious" metals. If I were to pan and find any, word would get out if I tried to cash it in, and next thing you know we'd be swamped with outsiders trying to pan their own... and then there goes the neighborhood. I'd rather have the land and what's on it - and peace of mind - than have outsiders trying to rape it for what is IN it. We saw that story a hundred or 150 years ago when the outsiders came in, raped the land for it's coal, and left us with nothing but misery. They eventually moved on for greener pastures after depleting this one, like a swarm of locusts... and took all the wealth with them when they left, leaving us for dead.. I've no desire to see that repeated.
.
RE: Has anyone here done any gold panning? - Michigan Swamp Buck - 08-20-2024
I'm beginning to believe that I have gold fever, but when I can get a half dozen or more flakes from a few tablespoons of black sand I panned by hand, I think it may be time to consider doing more like making a bigger and better sluice. If this produces more flakes, then when I could afford it, I should get a gold spiral wheel. This device can cleanly separate the smallest dust from the black sand that I would otherwise painstakingly pan by hand. The spiral wheel will cost around $1,000, but when gold is worth $2,500 an ounce it may be worth the investment as it is environmentally friendly compared to other methods used to recover gold dust.
With gold having a specific gravity of 19.3 and black sand at 1/4 to 1/3 of that, I am quite certain I have real gold flakes, I've isolated four and have more in the pan. They are not magnetic and they pass the pin test (as best as I can tell, they are so small). I have the mineral rights to the property, it may be worth trying to form a small mining company. That is only if this ultimately "all pans out" and the flakes pass some assay tests once I get enough to do that.
ETA: I have estimated that the few tablespoons of black sand that I got from the sluice and panning were reduced from a full five-gallon bucket of white sand screened to about 20-mesh. After using a post-hole digger to go down around three feet below the creek bed, I got very little broken gravel and rocks, less than an inch in the 5-gal bucket. Mostly fine white sand and I don't see how I could go deeper without heavy equipment.
RE: Has anyone here done any gold panning? - DuckforcoveR - 08-20-2024
No panning, but I did get a metal detector for my birthday last year. I have months of bottle caps and the remnants of 1970's parties on the beach. But then. BUT THEN!!! someone on a local page needed help with a lost wedding ring in a pond.
(Having issues yet again with pictures from phone, sorry)
RE: Has anyone here done any gold panning? - Michigan Swamp Buck - 08-20-2024
(08-20-2024, 04:09 AM)DuckforcoveR Wrote: No panning, but I did get a metal detector for my birthday last year. I have months of bottle caps and the remnants of 1970's parties on the beach. But then. BUT THEN!!! someone on a local page needed help with a lost wedding ring in a pond.
(Having issues yet again with pictures from phone, sorry)
There is a simple but truthful saying, "Gold is where you find it."
Of course, the Nazis found it in human teeth.
RE: Has anyone here done any gold panning? - DuckforcoveR - 08-20-2024
It was honestly the best moment of my adult life (outside of family stuff; kids, etc) chest deep water, to see that guy's eyes light up when I found the ring was like Frodo 30 seconds before going over the edge
RE: Has anyone here done any gold panning? - 727Sky - 08-22-2024
A smart guy
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/I0moJj6C3rw?feature=share
RE: Has anyone here done any gold panning? - Michigan Swamp Buck - 08-22-2024
(08-22-2024, 09:37 AM)727Sky Wrote: A smart guy
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/I0moJj6C3rw?feature=share
Nice. I had thought about that for abandoned mines in the U.P. If I saw that much color in my pan, especially with just one pan, I wouldn't be taking videos. $80 a gram, $2,500 an ounce, shut the hell up and get to work, smart guy.
RE: Has anyone here done any gold panning? - Michigan Swamp Buck - 11-17-2024
I just thought I'd report on my latest efforts on the creek here. A few weeks ago, I made a new sluice and have been able to use it since the rain finally came to fill up my creek. I did some panning as I filled the sluice and allowed the current to work for me.
I took down my mining camp for the season and brought the sluice up to clean it and flush the bedding material. This bedding material (known as "moss" to prospectors) is a fine tight carpeting, not as coarse as the last sluice. It is five feet long and a little over a foot wide, so I had more surface to collect gold dust on when in use.
I ran a moderate amount of soil through and noticed there was a greater concentration of black sand and with very little effort I extracted a half dozen gold flakes. There are even more particles so small I can't pick them out, and flour gold as well. A super teeny tiny amount of Dawn dish detergent in the pan water works wonders to keep the flour gold submerged in the pan water. The real prospectors use jet dry for automatic dishwashers and not dish detergent.
Next season will be better after I make improvements on the new sluice and set up two new campsites on the creek.
RE: Has anyone here done any gold panning? - Michigan Swamp Buck - 11-18-2024
The amount of black sand that normally averaged a tablespoon per scoop of panning more than quadrupled in the sluice. I panned up a half dozen very small flakes with a couple that, although small, where the largest I panned up yet this season.
All on my little creek here on the property, one I have mineral rights to.
Bottom line, the new sluice increased production by 4 or 5 times the volume and gold flakes. I can't get the dust or flour gold extracted with the methods I have at this moment, but I want to get a spiral wheel to do that at some point.
Here is a picture of the sluice just before I brought it in. Click to enlarge.
RE: Has anyone here done any gold panning? - Michigan Swamp Buck - 11-21-2024
I've posted this subject over at The Patriot Hangout board. The one guy, Cy, is into stocks and other investments. He started a thread about buying gold even though it is high-priced, so I chimed in about panning it. He got a laugh because he thought that was way too much work compared to exchanging fiat currency for physical gold.
I explained there is physical labor involved, but for me, it is a recreational activity. I find it pleasant to sit there and pan away while I listen to the gurgling stream and other sounds of nature. There is the occasional wildlife encounter as I'm not making much noise or moving around.
Plus I get great pleasure when I look at the color in my pan, it makes me laugh every time to think I have lived here for 30 years and never realized what I had all along. I also think about how my neighbors would think I was nuts for prospecting in a swamp. Ha, ha, ha, crazy like a fox! Look at gold prices and tell me who is crazy, exp. after I have produced results that look very promising.
I look at those little flakes in that vial and crack a great big smile
As long as I can show proof it is there in any amount, I can justify creating a workshop prospecting camp for tourists and weekenders. If I can give them that same feeling I get along with some knowledge about gold prospecting, geography, and local history, I could really have something here.
RE: Has anyone here done any gold panning? - Michigan Swamp Buck - 03-20-2025
I've been out to the stream for a couple of weeks now with the sluice I made. I've been taking careful notes this time around. I did more firewood cutting in that area than gold panning and am dividing my time between the two activities.
I ran a little over half a 5-gal bucket through the sluice and noted the composition of the soil including how much sand, gravel, and stone. After cleaning the sluice I got just under a tablespoon of black sand and four tiny flakes, giving me a total of 7 flakes in my specimen vial now. Last year hadn't produced the six flakes I thought, after carefully looking at them, it was only three I could be sure of. Some pyrite was in that batch, I found some nice quartz pieces with veins of pyrite in them.
I estimate that using the sluice I made with the latest improvements in design and methods I currently use, I can get better than 8 flakes per bucket. I've even calculated the volume of material needed per one hundred flakes and hope to reach a goal of 12 or more flakes per 5-gal bucket making it 8 buckets per hundred flakes. This would equal around 350 gold flakes per cubic yard of soil processed.
There are ways to speed up the process and I will be noting the time for processing each bucket load. Also, there is the issue of the finer gold particles known as flour gold. I will need special equipment to extract that from the black sand. I will be making a mini-sluice with a small pump and see if that might do the trick, otherwise I may have to buy that equipment at some point. So I'll be saving the black sand I have panned through already to reprocess it for the fine dust at another time.
ETA: It took me half an hour to dig up and screen out a 5-gal. bucket down to a 1/8" mesh then another half an hour to run the bucket through the sluice one scoop at a time, an hour-long process in total. Each scoop was screened through a kitchen sieve with a 1/16" mesh so only fine material went through the sluice. The bucket of material pretty much filled the sluice but after an hour of the stream flowing over it, it was half gone with streaks of black sand visible now. I estimate after three hours there won't be much sand left. I placed field stones in the sluice to cause more turbulence and help catch gold flakes. I'll check it tomorrow and see what is left in the sluice and then pan up the remaining sand.
The angle of the sluice is around a 3/4" drop every foot as it drops 3 1/2 inches from top to bottom (5ft). Based on the bubbles floating down it, the flow was around 1 foot per second. It may be too fast and I'll need to add legs on the end or add a foot or so to make it a little more level.
RE: Has anyone here done any gold panning? - Michigan Swamp Buck - 03-21-2025
Seeing how a full bucket of sand filled the sluice, I don't think I'll run more than a bucket at a time. However, when I observed how the material moved with the flow of water in the sluice and created little holes and sandbars, it was really quite a lesson for me.
When the black sand appeared, because of its higher weight, it gathered together in streaks as it moved along the top of the sand until settling out somewhere. It seemed that when the water level became shallower as it filled with sand, it worked the material better than when it dropped deeper toward the end of the sluice. I think if I have about an inch of water over the sluice at an even grade, instead of 2 or 3 inches, that would be the best angle for the flow rate.
After that bucket runs through, I'll bring the sluice back up to the house to clean with the hose. Based on the last clean up, the fine carpet I use for a mat might need a power washer to clean completely. I'll try that, I have a small power washer that would do the trick. I'll time the clean up part of the process, but I suspect that will add another hour with panning the material from the sluice added in, maybe a bit more.
If I streamline the entire process down to two hours per bucket and can reach my goal of 12 flakes per bucket , that has me produce 6 flakes per hour.
RE: Has anyone here done any gold panning? - Michigan Swamp Buck - 03-22-2025
Well, it took an hour to clean out the leftover sand in the sluice and there was a pile at the bottom that spilled out. I panned that pile and the leftover sand and found a flake right off the bat. Even though I've played with the same couple of flakes in my pan, over and over again, to make sure it was gold, I have been trying to get them out of the pan immediately so I don't lose them.
When I got the sluice back to the house and set up for cleaning with the power washer, I stopped keeping track of time. I washed it into a Rubbermaid bin, and no matter how much I washed that carpet I used as a mat, it still had sand in it. So I took too long right there, then I panned it from the water in the bin and produced another 4 or 5 flakes. There could be more but eyestrain had me quit for the day. I used an eyedropper to pick up the flakes and place them in a small pan and then into the glass vial. I think I may have lost a couple that way.
I think I also lost a lot when I put the whole bucket of material through the sluice. Plus I should have adjusted the angle to have a slower and more even flow over the bed of the sluice. Leaving it go overnight might have been a bad idea as well, as that obviously flushed it out pretty well.
I'll make some more improvements to the sluice and my next run will be only a half bucket of material at a time. I will adjust the sluice for optimal flow so the light material flows slowly and evenly across the bed while allowing the heavier material to stay behind. I will let it run through for no more than an hour. If this half-bucket method can produce six or more flakes a run, that will put me on track for my goal and might actually save time in the end.
RE: Has anyone here done any gold panning? - Michigan Swamp Buck - 03-22-2025
Here is a picture of the sluice with a few improvements. I put expanded aluminum over the bedding mat, the kind you use over gutters to keep debris out. I added the short front legs to level up the flow. You can see how the water just gets over the riffle at the bottom now. If you look at the old picture you can see how sharply it sits at the bottom and has a build-up of sand. No need to weigh it down like I did last year with the legs on the end now.
RE: Has anyone here done any gold panning? - Michigan Swamp Buck - 03-27-2025
I have an interesting thought. Considering I'm on a glacial out wash plain and the creek is so small and seasonal, the gold that is there is probably fairly well distributed on the property.
Now, if there are around 350 gold flakes per cubic yard of soil from the stream and if the gold is evenly distributed, then every stride I take on my property is walking over the top of 350 gold flakes. That is only three feet down, it is hundreds of feet to the bedrock.
That thought blows my mind the most and fuels my goal of 12 or more flakes per 5-gal bucket to prove this idea is true. That this horrible wet mess of a swamp actually has a carpet of gold to walk upon.
With the fact that the water well was sand down to 100', that would mean that 3 cubic yards extended down 100' could equal as much as 11,666 gold flakes. The bedrock is around 800' down as best as I can find out, giving us a total of as much as 93,324 gold flakes with each stride! After 11 or 12 paces you've walked over the top of over one million gold flakes!
OK, went a little crazy there. I found out that the bedrock is around 150 feet down, maybe a little more in my exact area. That means the potential of around 17,500 per stride, or around 58 paces for one million flakes.
RE: Has anyone here done any gold panning? - Michigan Swamp Buck - 03-28-2025
I ran another half bucket and only got a single gold flake, but it was a little bigger than the rest in my vial. One is better than none and getting skunked. There was the usual amount of black sand though, so it seems like there should have been a couple more flakes.
I didn't take the sluice entirely apart when I power-washed, so that may have been why, or the area of the stream I dug into wasn't a good spot. Also, I let it go overnight again, that might have been part of it. If there is gold stuck in the sluice, I'll eventually take it entirely apart when I clean it again and find out.