A short history lesson. A million years ago, rocks melted, the earth cracked, and gold nuggets formed. End of class. A million years later, the nuggets are hard to find, but weekend prospectors search the desert wadis washeshoping to get lucky. Gold was first reported about one hundred and twenty five years ago, near where Steimle stood, in what proved to be the largest and richest placer deposit in the southeastern corner of the state. From toseveral hundred miners and their companion burros worked an area from the nine drsert four hundred foot Old Xz Peak to lower elevation claims. Their efforts produced about fifteen thousand dollars in gold each year. The hardest working miners each took out about one ounce koney gold per day.
Where Has Gold Been Found in the Past?
The small town of Wickenburg, located in the northern part of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, gets its name from Henry Wickenburg, a miner who discovered the Vulture Mine. Held in February each year, the festival gives you a chance to try your hand at gold panning, too. Other events include a shootout, a parade and a rodeo held on Saturday and Sunday with cowboys from around the country participating. The fair also provides a carnival, food booths and arts and crafts displays. Live music and dancing rounds out the activities. Becoming a member of the Arizona Association of Gold Prospectors goldgetters. The club provides access to a commercial placer mining operation in the Wickenburg and Hieroglyphic mountains near the town of Wickenburg. You keep any gold you find. The club also provides lessons to help you improve the odds of finding a big gold nugget, discounts on gold-prospecting equipment and the opportunity to join other members on gold digs.
Where Can One Legally Prospect?
The Vulture Mine, located 12 miles southwest of Wickenburg, may have made a small fortune, but the gold mine never really paid off for its founder or investors. At one point, Vulture City, where the miners and their families lived, reached a population of 5, people. The mine finally shut down in , leaving the city to become a well-preserved ghost town with old mining equipment and an assay office, stamp mill and other buildings still filled with artifacts from the mining days. The mine is privately owned, but self-guided tours are available for a small fee and by calling to make arrangements. Adventures of a Lifetime ATV atvwickenburg.
ARIZONA GOLD MAPS
It’s been done. I’ve seen guys doing it but my idea of making a living is not sleeping under a tarp with a old stinky dog eating jack rabbit the dog caught. You will make more money working at Mc D’s. Now you can give it a shot up north in Alaska but the dog is there already and you will be the waging tail. If it was easy everyone would be doing it. But hell if you have a warm dog go for it. You can always mine the miners.
GOLD MAPS INCLUDE
There is still gold in the creeks, and washes in Arizona. The best chance to find Gold in these creeks and washes, placer deposits, and prospects, is to know where the occurrence of gold has been found. Before you dig or pan for Gold you will need a map to show you where to look. These Gold Maps provide you with past gold mines, placers and prospect sites. The venture will be interesting and challenging. When you do make a Gold find it will be very exciting. In the past, it was not uncommon for one to find 1 to 6 ounce nuggets in the streams and placers. Those days may be gone, but with some luck and a lot of determination you may find some gold or even a gold nugget. There are present day stories of modern day prospectors, either panning or using metal detectors, finding nuggets today. In , a 70 ounce gold in quartz nugget was found by metal detecting at a shallow depth. Kingman Gold Map. The picture to the right is mountains in the vicinity of Sedona, Arizona. The blm data base only shows active or inactive claimed areas where someone is prospecting are had been prospecting. The claimed areas could contain minerals ranging from silver to gold to copper to uranium to sand or just rock without any value.
1. Look in Places Where Gold has been found before
The only thing that these tools will do is help you recover the gold once you are a few feet or a few inches away from it. They are still inexpensive, but they will increase your gold recovery. Gold is difficult to find, but learning about the types of rock that it is generally associated with as well as the types that it is not associated with will help you find the best areas to focus your efforts. Cleaning them out can be a slow process, but patience will often pay of in the end. Just keep in mind, the higher your equipment is set up above the water that you are pumping from, the more your pump will have to work, the more fuel you will burn, and your equipment will wear out sooner. Sometimes the type of plants growing in the different soil types can help you find them. During high water events, gold moves downstream until it reaches some type of obstacle that prevents it from moving on. Finding gold consistently is take much more than just knowing how to pan for gold or run a sluice box. A simple gold pan will work just fine to check small samples. If land is private then you will need to obtain permission.
Arizona Association of Gold Prospectors
There are few other hobbies where you can have prospefting outdoors and potentially make money at the same time. With the right knowledge and skills there is no doubt that plenty is left for you to. The truth is, there are still TONS of gold out there waiting to be found by prospectors, but you have to know how to find it. Research is the best way to find the places where gold occurs. Find the old mines, rivers, and creeks where the early miners were searching and you are much more likely to have success.
Finding these places can take some experience. Some indicators are more obvious and others are somewhat subtle. An open mine adit is obvious, but a small creek that was hand-placered over years ago might not be so noticeable. Finding historic mining sites is often dismissed by the beginners, but I assure you that experienced gold miners understand the importance of locating these places.
You need to learn the geology of your particular mining area. There are some natural gold indicators that can be found in most major gold producing areas, but each area can be different.
You should learn to spot the types of rock that are associated with gold in your area. Gold is difficult to find, but learning about the types of rock that it is generally associated with as well as the types that it is not associated with will help you find the prospwcting areas to focus your efforts.
Contact zones also called a dykes or intrusion are places where two major rock types come. This is a natural geological process that happened millions of years ago. These events would result in rapid heating and cooling, and this often created the conditions needed for gold to form. Learning to identify the zones can be difficult, but it is something that will become more apparent as you learn to look makin it. There are certain rock types that are better from a gold mining perspective.
I have found these 3 types moneu rock to be present in most of the places where I have found gold. When these geological masses would contact each other, pressure and high temperatures would deser fissures that would result in gold formation.
Gold would be pushed to the surface, making it accessible to prospectors without needing to tunnel deep into the ground. Identifying the general direction of the geology in your mining area is important. In most of the western U. Look for contact areas where some other rock type enters at a different trend to the general geological mass. Many of the richest gold bearing areas will have a intrusions that are at a 90 degree trend to the prevailing geology.
It can potentially be any combination of rocks, although they usually make up at least one of them at gold-rich contact zones. This roadcut exposed a great example of a contact zone dyke, intrusion.
Sometimes gold forms in these locations if the conditions are right. The color changes of soil are also good indicators of a contact point. Sometimes the major source of bedrock has eroded away long ago leaving behind only soil.
You may spot a band of reddish soil, indicating an iron rich intrusion that dedert existed. The host rock has eroded away, but the red soil and potentially gold still remains. The ground changes can be obvious or subtle depending on their size or the difference in color.
Ground cover from grass and trees can also majing. Sometimes the type of plants growing in the different soil types can help you find. Contact zones can eesert as short as a few feet in length, or they can run for miles and miles.
In the California Mother Lode for example, you can look at a map and see major gold mines that seem to line up perfectly in a straight line over miles and miles. They have located contact zones with gold. I think that finding historic gold mining areas is the most important first pros;ecting 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 prospectig some places out there with good gold that were completely overlooked by. If you are fortunate enough to find one of these places, proospecting are likely to be rewarded with some exceptional amounts of gold. When mobey 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 peopel will tell you about the prevailing rock types found at a particular. Pay attention to those details. Just as importantly, you need to know the rock types that are unlikely to prospectint associated with gold.
Most of the time when you find gold you will also be finding some black sands. These sands are a variety of iron rich material, most commonly hematite and magnetite. However, in gols where gold does exist you will frequently find gold with these black sands.
Very dark or reddish colored soils are usually high in iron content. In gold country, these are often the first places you want to start prospecting. Iron rich soils can be reddish or even purple, orange, yellow, and other bright colors. It takes a quality metal detector to handle these iron rich soils.
Evidence of mining activity is most easily seen by deswrt the disturbances that the early miners left. Do you see those rock piles? Miners had to move the big rocks to get down to the bedrock to get to the gold.
Learn to spot these tell-tale signs of mining activity. This old mine adit dates back to the s. I took this picture in a little-known gold mining district in Idaho.
They simply did not find it all. When the gold started to get dseert, the miners would move on. Plus, modern technology like metal detectors can recover gold that was missed by the old timers. Modern sluice boxes will capture gold that was lost by the crude methods employed by these early miners. We will discuss some of the specific indicators and how to identify them in further in this article.
Gold is the heaviest substance that you will find in a creek or river, and because of this it is somewhat predictable in the way that it deposits itself in a waterway. These paystreaks will settle down through the sand and gravel and sit directly on peope. They will be richest down in the cracks and crevices of the bedrock. High water during the spring will add more gold to these paystreaks. They are constantly refreshed by gold that erodes from the hills and feed into the river.
Inside bends of a river where water slows is the best known place to find gold deposits in paystreaks, but they also form in concentrations behind boulders, logjams, under prospectingg, or anywhere that the velocity of water slows. In recent years, suction dredges were the makimg way to efficiently mine the gold paystreaks in a river due to their ability to process lots of gravel from the riverbed.
Dredges are still the best tool for the job, but permitting and regulations have aaz difficult in recent years. Many mondy are now limited to using sluices and highbankers in many states. I mentioned earlier that schist was one of the rock types that gold is commonly associated. This is particularly true when I am metal detecting for gold nuggets.
Larger nugget sized gold seems to be in vertical schist in many of the areas drsert I prospect. This decomposed schist bedrock is in an area that has produced literally millions of dessert worth of gold since the s. I have found a lot of gold nuggets. Unfortunately the early miners that worked here left tons of iron trash, making it very difficult to metal detect. Schist is a metamorphic rock that forms in high temperatures. It will be in thin, vertical sheets similar to the pages of a book.
It is a very brittle rock because it heated and cooled quickly. It easily cleaves apart. Mojey most productive gold areas will often have intrusions of vertical schist as outcrops or intrusions to igneous rocks. These are contact zones that are definitely worth peple prospecting if maing notice.
The internet can help you find places golc. Twenty years ago, a person needed to go to the library to find old references and maps to find historic mining areas. This is no longer the case. Today, there is exceptional material available to us right in the comfort of home by accessing the internet. Google Earth is a makking handy tool for finding old mines and other areas that you might want to explore further on the ground.
Use desrt satellite image layer to look for evidence of past mining activity. You can use it to look for old mining shacks, tailing piles that might produce gold specimens, creeks that have been placer mined, dredge tailing piles, hydraulic mine pits, and much. I can spend hours on Google Earth. You can zoom in and glld old mines and other stuff that you can check out monet the ground later. Amking are many other modern tools that are of great value to the modern prospector.
One of the best out there right now is mylandmatters. You can use this to locate current and past mining claims. It is updated regularly. In fact, it is much more user friendly than the information that you get directly from the Bureau of Land Management.
5 Hours, 15 Buckets And How Much Gold?
This is an age-old question and one I find difficult to answer. The answer is of course, «yes,» however, there is one important question majing must first ask. If you want to own a nice home, drive a new car and have some of the finer things in life, than making a living gold prospecting becomes more difficult. It is for these and other reasons that I advise most people to choose recreational prospecting and to keep their day job.
How and Where to Find Gold in The Desert
I really enjoy gold prospecting as a hobby and, like many others, often wonder if I will ever find the mother lode. I do know one thing for sure — I will not find it watching TV or sitting around the house. Gold prospecting is not easy and requires research, time, and quite a bit of effort. You will either love it or hate it, but you will never know until you try. Let me tell you about a man I met about 15 years ago, who came to San Diego to get a grub stake so he could go back and work his mine in the Western part of the United States. His name, for the lack of a better one, shall be Mr. Smith makinb you will understand why as the story proceeds. Smith got his first real taste of life in Vietnam. When he returned home, he held several jobs but none really kept his. Somehow, he got into gold prospecting; he liked it because it gave him time to think and to be alone in the mountains. Smith started his prospecting career by researching information about the old mining district in his area. The one location that interested him most was one in a epople remote region. There were no roads left, as civilization had passed that part of the world by. It took Mr.
Comments
Post a Comment