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.
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.
A trail goes two ways and looks different in each direction - There is no such thing as a timid woodland creature - Whatever does not kill you leaves you a survivor - Jesus is NOT a bad word - MSB