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The Prospectors Page. . .
Articles on Prospecting, Rock Hounding and more.
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I was recently featured on Roughin'it Outdoors with Adam Eakle. We panned and sluiced for gold in Utah's Little Sevier Creek, and found some nice color, including 1 picker (small nugget).
A friend of mine, Dick Thomas (owner of Nature Nuggets), recently wrote a short article on the relative price of gold. I though it was well written and insiteful, and have gotten his permission to reprint it here.
WHAT SHOULD THE PRICE OF GOLD BE?
By Richard Thomas©
I have had numerous people pose this question to me since I have been in the gold business. There are a number of factors that impact the price of gold.
I have settled on three things that I feel pretty well impact and provide some insight to me on what the price of gold should be.
Historically, one Troy ounce of gold has on average purchased about 14 barrels of oil. Oil is currently above $80 per barrel. So if you 14 tunes $80 = $1 120 per ounce. This is about gold's current price as I am writing this article. If oil goes to $90 per barrel, just $90 times 14 = $1260 per ounce. The only trouble with this formula is that the current price of gold rises or falls with the daily price of a barrel of oil, so you should look at the 30 day and 90 day futures price of that barrel of oil to be able to get an idea of what gold's price will be in those time-frames.
Since about 1959 the money supply in the USA has increased around 7% on average annually. In 1959 the price of gold was $35 per ounce. If you use this figure (1.07) as a base and times the price of gold ($35) by the increase in the money supply per year (1 .07) to the 51st power (5 1 years) = 31.519x$35 = $1103 per ounce. Again, this method does not reflect the current very large increase in our money supply (over the last year or so) that the Feds have used as an economic stimulus. It also cannot be used as an accurate method to predict future prices because both the Fed and Congress can and do make changes that affect the money supply.
The mean salary in the USA is around $55,000 per year. In the past an ounce of gold was equal to about one week’s salary. So, if you divide $55,000 by 52 weeks, gold should be about $1058 per ounce. Again, due to our current economic crises, this method is not completely accurate. I believe that the average yearly salary in the USA has dropped due to our current economic troubles.
The price of gold is set in dollars, so if the dollar goes down in relation to the other major currencies of the world, the price of gold will rise. Because of the current problems that the Euro has been having, a lot of the people in the world feel safer putting their funds into USA Treasury bonds and this has kept the value of the dollar up a little. I do not have a better crystal ball than you do. The global financial markets are still in terrible shape. I believe that we have a lot more problems ahead of us. Now, if you believe that the USA economy will suddenly start moving up, and we can reverse our balance of trade deficit, you should then be selling your gold. It just seems to me that our politicians are just working harder to get us into a deeper hole. I believe that gold will, at the minimum, go up at least 10% a year for a number of years.
Richard Thomas
March 2010
HOW TO PAN FOR GOLD
Here is a short video clip that I made on how to pan for gold. This video was made at Crescent Creek, in the Henry Mountains this last Valentines day. It had to be broken into two segments to fit into the Youtube formate.
This is my first time in front of a camera. . . please be patient, as I am still learning what I am doing--both in front of the camera, as well as in editing.
The Crescent Creek Placers©
By Alan Chenworth
View of Crescent Creek and the Henry Mountains, looking west.
The Henry Mountains are found in southern Utah, midway between Lake Powell and Hanksville. These mountains are an oasis of water and shade in an otherwise forsaken desert. The tops of the mountains are heavily timbered and there are green meadow filled basins surrounded by pines and aspens. Deer and other wildlife are abundant, and the nation’s only free roaming herd of buffalo can be seen around the base of the mountains.
There are several accounts of the discovery of gold in the Henry’s placing the discovery of gold between 1885 and 1890. It is probable that the discovery of gold in the Henry’s is related to the development of the Glen Canyon Placers. While the gold was abundant, it was also fine and hard to recover. Prospectors, disappointed with the prospects in Glen Canyon, spread out across the country. In trying to locate other sources of gold, some prospectors worked their way up the Dirty Devil River to the base of the Henry Mountains; where, on the east flank of Mount Ellen, they found gold in Crescent Creek. They were able to follow the trail of gold up to lode gold and copper deposits in what is now Bromide Basin.1 Early miners also found signs of the Spanish—an arrasta was found, and John Fremont found the skeleton of a burro—still carrying saddlebags full of high-grade ore in 1853.2
This lode was fairly high grade—but was also shallow—and the mines soon failed. Tens of thousands of years of erosion, however, left wide spread placers in a large alluvial fan around the eastern base of Mt. Ellen. Crescent Creek has carried the gold bearing sediment from Bromide Basin to the benches, where it formed a placer deposit that is large enough to be measured in square miles. Since the time of the original deposition, Crescent Creek has cut down through the gravel, reconcentrating the gold and creating a narrow, steep walled canyon that heads east away from the mountain and drains into North Wash. North Wash then drains into the Dirty Devil River. Butler Creek to the north and Copper Creek to the south, also cut through the margins of this placer, and as a result carry some limited values in gold.
The gold here is high karat gold—heavy and rich in color. It is also chunky and large—coming in grains, wires and large flakes. In the original deposit, the gold is distributed quite uniformly across the placer, with a concentration of gold found “in black-sand streaks at the base of the fanglomerate gravel,”3 as it was described in Johnson’s Placer Gold Deposits of Utah. Where Crescent Creek has cut through the alluvial fan, the gold has been reworked. Because the amount of water flow is low—even in spring run-off—the gold tends to be spotty. It is generally moved only in flash floods. These flash floods are common—coming several times a year, principally during the monsoon season at the end of July and August.
In the bottom of the wash, the gold tends to be right on bedrock, leaving the overburden barren. And while some gold can be found just about anywhere that you find bedrock, the floods have formed rich pockets along the way. The Crescent Creek placers are considered to be one of Utah’s few commercial grade placers, but they are marginal and difficult to work at a profit. A mining company has a lease on almost all the placer ground. Their claims are well posted and run from North Wash all the way to Bromide Basin. Another company (Unico Mining) currently holds lease on the lode mines in the basin.
Panning Crescent Creek with my son, Dalton.
Because of the number of people that visit the area, a public panning area has been provided on Crescent Creek. It is well marked and is actually one of the better gold producing areas on the creek. When I first worked the area, I was working the stream sediments, as I didn’t see much bedrock exposed on the creek bottom. I was getting some gold, but it was fine and far between. Another prospector who was in the area came over and showed me the trick to the gold. I hadn’t realized it, but the bedrock in the public panning area is a soft clay—alternating gray or black bands—and by digging along the contact of this clay and the gravel I found large flakes of gold and small pickers. I was not getting rich, but it was certainly enough to keep me interested.
Map of the Crescent Creek Area.
A few weeks later, while working an unclaimed area at the bottom of Crescent Creek, I found a fairly good pocket of gold and filed a claim on some of the last remaining land in the canyon. Instead of the black and gray banded clay that we found up at the Public Panning area, we had a soft, brightly colored orange/red clay, alternating with a hard but brittle dark red mudstone. The rich gold we found was on top of this soft orange colored clay. The work was slow and water was difficult to come by, but by using primarily a shovel and pan, we pulled about ¼ oz of gold out of this small stretch creek over the next several weekends.
Crescent Creek is a perennial stream—but as you pull away from the mountain the creek bed goes dry, the water flowing under the abundant gravel in the area. The area we were working has shallow bedrock, and as such, has some water year round. The water here doesn’t flow except during spring runoff. In this area, it is more of a seep—just enough to keep the ground muddy. When we want to pan, we need to dig a hole and let the water seep in. Then as we pan, we need to keep mucking out the hole. It also took some time to clean the gold out of the sticky clay.
Along Crescent Creek, the gold can be found associated with barite sand. The barite sand is a white to very pale yellow coarse-grained sand and is fairly heavy. If you are not finding much barite sand, you probably aren’t getting much gold either as they tend to settle in the same places.
Gold and barite sand.
There isn’t much black sand in these placers and on our claim there is almost none. The black sand is more commonly found in the bench placers above the wash (in fanglomerates), and related to the original alluvial fan.
Crescent Creek sits at the bottom of a steep walled wash—and as was already mentioned, it is prone to flash floods. In this area, they are fairly common. While we were there in the late spring we saw a brief storm that brought strong winds and heavy rain. It lasted for only about twenty minutes. About a half an hour after the rain stopped, we noticed a puddle creeping down the riverbed—and about two minutes behind it was a fast moving river. This trickle of a stream not even ¼ inch deep turned into a fast moving creek six to eight inches deep and about eight feet wide—and it flowed fast for over an hour, with a residual flow that lasted most of the night.
These flash floods can be dangerous, but they can also move a lot of material—including gold. By putting a sluiced box into this flood, we were able to pick up some nice pieces, without shoveling any dirt.
The first year we were there, we worked a stretch of river between six and eight feet wide, about seventy feet long, with bedrock ranging from three inches to one foot deep and pulled out about ¼ oz of gold.
When we returned the next spring, we could not find any sign of our previous activity. Everything we had done was washed away, including the two foot high dams we built to collect water; the large piles of tailings (we had to muck out our panning holes); and the five foot deep test hole that we dug about ten feet to the side of the shallow bedrock that we had worked. It didn’t take long to realize that a very large flash flood had come through the previous fall. The flood that came through completely filled the wash. By examining the water lines on the sides of the canyon, we estimated that this flood was about six feet deep and at places, greater than fifty feet wide. And, in addition to scouring the wash, this flood also left gold.
We went back and worked the same stretch of river that we had worked out the previous spring and found about ½ oz of gold over about three weekends.
Most of this gold has come in the form of coarse grains, about the size of granulated sugar. We have also found some very large flakes and an occasional rice-grain size nugget. Several guests (3) to our claims have even found pea size nuggets, be we (the owners) have not yet been that lucky.
What the future will hold is uncertain. We believe that there is a lot more gold there. The gold is in pockets and almost all of it is on bedrock. The trouble is, except where the bedrock is shallow or exposed, we can’t get to it without heavy equipment. The area is too wet to dig—all the holes fill with water—but too dry to dredge. I tried working it with a small 3” dredge, but had to dig a hole just to hold the dredge, and I then had to re-circulate the water. I was dredging in mud and couldn’t see anything. Rock jams were common, and it was difficult to tell where I wanted to work. The clay also made it very slow, as it was stuck in place and didn’t want to come up the dredge hose. After a day of dredging (with poor results) I realized that I probably could have gotten more gold (maybe twice as much) by working by hand with a pan and shovel. A highbanker does work well if you are there early enough in the spring to catch the runoff.
The public panning area is upstream from our claims and has much better water flow. If you go in late summer or fall, you might find water in the morning and evening—but a relatively dry riverbed in the heat of the afternoon when evaporation is going strong. And yes, it does get hot. In the summers expect 100°+. The Public Panning Area fortunately does have shade from several large trees and is a nice place to camp. There is even an old cabin at the public area. It is in fairly good shape if you need to get out of the weather. In this area, you can pan, sluice, highbank or dredge. Sluicing, highbanking and dredging all require a state permit, but they are free—just contact the Utah State Division of Water Resources. If you like, dry washers can be used on all of the gravel found above the creek. And I know of a prospector that found a pe sized nugget with a metal detector.
This is a great area to explore. There are good opportunities for photography, hiking, four wheeling, and riding motorcycles or ATV’s. Small uranium and vanadium prospects also litter the lower margins of Crescent Creek—they are interesting, but you should probably stay out of them as they are in soft rock and are especially prone to cave-ins—and also full of radon gas.
As a general rule, take what you are going to need if you are going to explore the area. Hanksville is a small town with a few basic supplies like gas, ice and groceries. If you need anything else, you are probably out of luck—and it is 25 or 30 miles just to Hanksville from the panning area; it will take hours to get anywhere else. This area is remote but well worth the trip.
Over 1/3rd ounce placer gold from Crescent Creek. Several small nuggets were also found.
This article was originally printed in the October 2009 ICMJ and references the Crescent Creek chapter of A Guide to Gold Panning in Utah, also by Alan J. Chenworth. The maps and many of the photos are also taken from this book.
MINING CAMP FOLLIES
This is a hilarious TRUE story written by my uncle, and takes place in the copper town of Magna, Utah back in the 1940’s. It has been lightly edited to include some details remembered by my mother, and lightly edited for grammar. Most of the story has been left as it was originally written so as to preserve its flavor.
SONABITCHEN CHEVROLET ©
By Audy L. Harrison
Edited by Alan Chenworth
We had a 1936 Chevrolet two-door sedan that Dad was trying to nurse through the war years. I swear that that car had its own personality, including some traits such as a stubborn cantankerousness. At other times it had a sneaky playfulness.
One day after a cleaning session around the yard in the early springtime, my father recruited a couple of my friends, my sister, and myself to help carry off the trash. We loaded boxes of trash into the old Chevy’s trunk and back seats. We all clambered into the car and pointed her prow towards the dumps.
The dumps were located north of Magna on a flat, sagebrush covered plain next to the tailings pond. The garbage trucks dumped their weekly pickup here, and everyone hauled in their unwanted trash. As we began our journey down the dump road, which was usually a dusty dirt trail—we quickly noticed that things were, however, not the same. There were some pretty good ponds and mud puddles in the middle of the road. Not to worry thought, my old man deftly swung the wheel and skirted the treacherous quagmires. He drove on to the sagebrush covered flatland and avoided a sure bogging down.
After unloading our trash on the dump, dad began the homeward journey. After he had avoided a very mucky road hazard, one of my friends made the mistake of praising my father’s evasive action.
“Hell, son, this car is half mule and half jeep.”
“Really?”
“Yep. If I put her in low gear, she would climb that tailings pond dike.”
“Wow!”
“Watch this—“
Dad veered on to the sagebrush-covered clay flatland and sure enough the old Chevy plowed through like a jeep, mowing down the sagebrush. All went well until about a quarter mile from the road, the Chevy slued sideways and spun to a stop in a big slippery mud puddle.
Dad mumbled something about this not being a problem and put the car in reverse. The Chevy made a gallant effort but went only about a foot and a half before it bogged down again. Dad was wise enough to know that you don’t just spin your wheels or you will just sink deeper.
“Everybody out,” he ordered. “Grab sagebrush and shove it under the wheels.”
Dad was at his best—delegating his way out of a problem. He was getting us to help him provide traction for those slipping tires. “OK, now you boys get in back and push,” he ordered.
Dad opened the drivers’ door, reached inside and pulled the hand-throttle open a bit.
Hell! It worked good. A bit too good, however. The Chevy lurched forward on to the sagebrush—dumping we three pushers onto our faces, luckily on fairly dry soil. Luckily, I say because Dad did not fair so well. He found himself face down in the center of the mud puddle. He sat up and uttered a few words that we had never heard before, and I’m sure we weren’t supposed to remember either. The sight of him covered with mud sent the three of us into peals of laughter. Dad was just beginning to say something about our disrespect when he realized that the Chevy was bouncing across the sagebrush plain on its own volition, and heading for a power station about a half-a-mile away. Dad was up like a shot and was soon in full pursuit of the old Chevy. It looked like the car was mocking him the way it flapped its sprung door open and nearly closed.
Dad was amazing. We kids were dually impressed as he sprinted after the wayward automobile. Then with a graceful leap worthy of a male ballet dancer, he mounted the running board of the vehicle. He reached inside and grasped the steering wheel. Then in a far less graceful manner, he dismounted. The combination of slippery clay-mud on his feet and running board and the bouncing vehicle left him rolling head over heels through the sagebrush. He had accomplished one thing however, as he fell he pulled the steering wheel so that now the car was going around in a big circle. To add to his chagrin, all three of us were rolling on the ground in mirth. Loud guffaws were the reward Dad got for his efforts to corral the maverick Chevy.
Dad got up, brushed himself off as best he could, what with clods of mud covering his frontal area. He surveyed our wild mirthful abandon and muttered something about or parentage. But it wasn’t complimentary at all. Then he yelled at the smirking Chevrolet—most of which is unprintable except for “Sonabitchin Chevrolet.”
Dad ran after the circling car like an Indian chasing a circling wagon. Again Dad leapt onto the slippery running board just in time to be bashed by the swinging door and sent tumbling through the sagebrush again. Hells Bells! This was more fund than a Three Stooges comedy, and tears were running down our cheeks. My stomach hurt from laughter. Dad questioned our parentage again. We really couldn’t see why he saw no humor in his predicament. Off he went again in pursuit of the playful Chevrolet. I swear, each time it circled towards us, there was a grin on that battered grill. Dad, after a couple more sidesplitting tumbles finally was able to insinuate himself between the doorpost and the wildly flaying door. He fell into the seat and pushed in the throttle lever. Then mustering all the dignity that he could, the old man drove over to where the three of us were still rolling around in unbridled laughter. He pulled himself upright in the seat and said, “Would you kids get in the damn car?!”
One look at his mud caked face however, sent us into peals of unrestrained laughter again. After a short stern lecture about how he could have been crushed under the marauding wheels of this two-ton monster of a car, Dad finally had us fairly sober and into the car.
The ride home was rather quiet and chilly. It was punctuated however, by a snicker that slipped out now and then by one or the other of us kids. These relapses were met by an icy stare from the old man.
We finally pulled into our yard. Mom was hanging out clothes. When she saw the muddy apparition that was my father climb out of the car she shrieked—“What in the world happened to you?”
The first words to come out of the old man's mouth were “Sonabitchin Chevrolet!”
I swear that that car was grinning at him.