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Thanks to everyone who has supported the release of my new book, A Guide to GOLD PANNING in Utah, Second Edition–the response and feedback has been great.

Alan Chenworth

Special Announcement

The Public Panning Area in on Crescent Creek has been closed. Apparently, the previous owners sold the claims and the new owners have closed the area to the public. This is unfortunate as it has been a great area to visit, but the new owner may do as he pleases with his claims. Please stay off the area that has traditionally been a public area. Please respect private claims.

Note: The Northern Utah Prospectors Club still has access 1 mile of creek bottom on the lower portion of Crescent Creek.

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Claims for Sale

We have  3 Idaho claims for sale.  Check them out Here:

http://goldpanningutah.com/claims-for-sale/

Or list your claim with us, just send us a write up and desired photos, as well as a signed statement saying that you own the claim and it is as listed.

 

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A second new page, Related Stories/Links (Click HERE) has been added.  This page is composed of interesting or important stories currently on the web.  It is updated often, check it out.

 

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The Prospectors Page . . .

Articles on Prospecting, Mining, Rock Hounding and more.

We will pay $75 for true, unpublished articles and stories relating to Mining or Prospecting (or related ventures). The stories may be serious or humorous. Photos related to the story are encouraged.

12/20/20

Volume is the Key to Success

by Alan Chenworth ©June 29, 2016

This article was originally sent to the the ICMJ magazine in Nov 2016.  The  photos have been added later–some from the original article and some are more recent.

 

A few years ago, I found a nice pocket of gold on a small side-creek in Idaho.  Over the space of about 3 days, I pulled 1 1/4 ounces of gold from this pocket.  The gold was predominantly fine, with most of the pieces similar in size to granules from a salt shaker, with a few nice pickers to liven things up a bit.

About a week later, I received word that someone in our local prospecting community had heard about my find and headed to the same location.  I don’t know how he heard about it . . . I didn’t tell him, but the word was out.  Interestingly, I found out that he had been up there when he came back questioning my find, saying that he “couldn’t find enough gold there to fill a tooth.”  I am glad that was the case, since we hadn’t filed a claim on it yet—and we have since pulled another 10-15 ounces off of the same claim.  This experience got me to thinking, however.   What is it that you need to do to be successful as a prospector?  How do you identify a deposit with profitable quantities of gold?  Unless you are merely having fun and getting lots of exercise, these are important questions.

The first and most important thing is to find a large quantity of gold bearing material—and it has to have enough recoverable gold to add up into a measurable quantity.  Then, once you have found a suitable deposit, you must procure a method of processing the material in a fashion that is fast enough that the gold will cover your expenses.

One lesson that I learned from a geology class years ago is that the richness of a deposit is typically inversely proportional to the size—or in layman’s terms, rich gravel is likely found in small deposits; and low-grade deposits are more likely to contain a goodly volume.  The only way to make money from an area with very little workable material is if the gravel that is there is extremely rich—and this isn’t common as the rich areas were worked a century ago.  Instead, focus on low to moderate grade areas with an abundance of gravel, and the gold will add up, sometimes into impressive amounts.

On one of my claims, I have a stretch of creek flowing across exposed bedrock—and I can always find gold by opening up the cracks.  On one occasion, as I wrapped up a productive weekend, I looked at my poke and decided that I needed another small nugget.  I only had about an hour left before I needed to leave, so I headed here.  After about 20 minutes (and on the third crack I opened) I found my nugget—It was small, only slightly larger than a rice grain, but it was a nugget.   Interestingly, while I almost never work this stretch of creek because there isn’t really any overburden to work, it is the one stretch that all of the claim-jumpers hit.  I know I can and will find the occasional nugget, but I will never get gold in any real quantity because it isn’t there.

When I am prospecting this claim, I tend to look for places with two to four feet of gold bearing gravel on top of bedrock.  This material does not need to be rich, and tends to have predominantly flour gold—with the occasional small nugget.  I will sample around and If I can locate a place with three or four small granules or 20-30 specs of flour gold (or more) per sample pan, then it is usually enough to capture my interest.  In these cases, I will set up a small sluice and shovel this material through.  A few of pieces gold per shovel, along with a smattering of flour gold will add up fast when you are running 50 to 100 shovels of material through the sluice on each run.  My last trip to this claim was yielding about 4 grams per day of mining—and  I came home with about 1/3 ounce.  I won’t get rich, but it paid for my gas, food and other expenses—and I had a lot of fun as well.

In addition to having a deposit large enough to be worth mining, you also need to process the material fast enough to get the gold in a reasonable time frame.  One of the often overlooked keys to mining:   It’s the volume of processed material that is the key to success.  The more material you can work in a given time, the lower the gold grade in the material that can be worked economically (and the more gold you can recover).   And while recovery rates are important, they must necessarily be secondary to the volume of material processed.  Running more material at lower recovery rates is generally preferable to increasing the efficiency of the system.   Some simple math can show this well:

Let’s say you have gravel that has a placer value of $25/ yard, and you can run 1 yard of material per hour at 90% recovery: $25yd x 90% = $22.50/hour.

If you run the same gravel faster, doubling the production rate you will likely lose some recovery—let’s say recovery drops from 90% down to 70%:  2 yards x $25yd x 70% = $35/ hour.

By doubling the volume, you have just increased your profit margin by 64%—even after losing approximately 20% additional recovery.  More volume almost always means more gold.  The trick, however, is to find out where the correct balance point is between efficiency and volume.  What is the size of the deposit?  What are your capital constraints?  How much time do you have to work the deposit? (Is it important to stretch the life-of-mine to increase support capital investment or are you under lease and need to work as much as you can while you have access)?  These are all important factors that will influence how you balance the conflict of volume with efficiency.

One of the most common places that I see prospectors face this dilemma is on the bank of a river with a gold pan in his or her hand.  I will watch them spend 5-10 minutes to work down a pan of gravel—they are always careful not to lose any gold.  And then they see me.  I will pan down a similar pan of gravel in 20-30 seconds, with water splashing everywhere.  They are aghast at my speed and recklessness.  How much gold did I just lose?  And they struggle to comprehend that I am recovering more gold than they are.  Yes, I do lose gold.  Depending on the material in the pan (high karat or low, chunky or fines, angular or smooth), my retention rates generally range from 75-90%.  If you recover 95-100% of the gold, but only work 1 pan in 5 minutes, I will recover about 7-8 times as much gold in the same amount of time, even with a 25% loss.  And let’s be clear—when I am working with concentrates, I will both slow down and pan into a second catch pan.  Once the grades go up, production must necessarily slow down to some extent.

Graduating from the basic gold pan to some other form of simple equipment is the best way to increase production rates.  Just going from a pan to a sluice will increase production by five hundred to one thousand percent, depending on how it is used.  A high-banker will work about the same amount of material as a well-run sluice, though it can move the water to you—instead of you bringing the gravel to the water—thereby dramatically increasing volume of production.  A dry washer will produce similar results by allowing you to work without water.

A dredge is the next step up, often with a significant jump in price as well.  Because a dredge uses a gasoline motor to generate the suction that will load and transport the material to the sluice, it allows for greatly increased volume—as well as allowing a miner to reach gravel on the river bottom that would otherwise be un-accessible.   The more material a dredger can push across his riffles, the more gold he can recover.  An additional benefit to dredging is that it also allows the miner to clean gold out of all of the cracks and crevices in the bedrock.  This is something that a shovel typically can’t do.

The size of the dredge intake nozzle is the most important factor in how much material a dredge can process—and it is not a direct one to one relationship to dredge nozzle sizes.  A 5″ dredge will not move twice the material that a 2.5″ dredge can move—it actually moves much more.   Because the surface area of the hose is figured in square inches, the area (and therefore the volume) goes up much faster than the diameter, and the corresponding production rates go up proportionally.  I have listed the nozzle surface area by diameter below:

Diameter     /     Surface Area

2.5″        =                4.90 inches²

                                                                                      3.0″        =               7.06 inches²

4.0″         =              12.57 inches²

5.0″         =              19.64 inches²

  As shown above, the 5″ dredge can move approximately four times the material of a 2.5″ dredge, though the nozzle is only twice the diameter.   Furthermore, due to the ability of rocks to clog the dredge, this difference in the volume of processed material between a 2.5″ and 5″ dredge can actually be much greater than the four hundred percent increase in the surface area.  The smaller the dredge hose, the higher the proportion of rocks that are either too large to pass through the dredge hose (and therefore must be moved by hand) or that can clog the hose—which will cause a delay in production or damage the equipment.  Both of these outcomes will significantly reduce the time spent actively dredging and finding gold.  I have a 3″ dredge, and there have been numerous times while working in the river that I had to shut down my dredge and dismantle the intake hose, pull it to shore and very slowly work the rocks out over the course of an hour.  This is not productive and most of my clogged hoses would have been avoided if I had simply had a larger dredge.  You will always have rocks jam-up the hose; but as a general rule, the larger the hose, the less likely you are to have a rock jam.

Beyond dredges, you get into some professional mining set-ups, beginning with trommels and moving into high volume concentrating equipment such as jigs and shaker tables, etc.  The same rules apply.  Find equipment that can process enough material to maximize your production, then work to increase the recovery.  It will be a lot of work determining exactly how high your recovery and production ratios need to be to optimize your system.  If you are working a large, commercial grade deposit, it may be worth your time to bring in a professional consultant who can optimize your system.  At $1190 per ounce (as of November 27, 2016), any significant discrepancy could be worth millions over the life of mine.

Every deposit is different, coming in variable sizes, grades and structures.  Climate and access will change mining methods—and rock types, including the size of the gravel and boulders, is critical to determining which equipment will work the best.

There are many skills that are needed to be a successful prospector, and this article covers just a few of them.  Finding a suitable deposit to mine and finding a way to work it economically—something that will justify the time and expense of setting it up— are two of the most basic skills.  Fun and exercise are good reasons to go prospecting, but you just as well make some money while you are there.

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11/29/19

Join me on the Yuba again.  This time I worked on the South Yuba, near Edwards Crossing.  I got some nice gold from sniping cracks in the river.   This video is related to an article published in the ICMJ magazine in the Fall of 2018.  See the video below, or click the link HERE: https://youtu.be/NEzi2W-2Hd8

 

7/17/19

I just got back from Northern California where I had a chance to try some new areas. Here is the video we made on the North Fork of the Yuba. You can see the video HERE: https://youtu.be/jCeEV8c9p9E

6/14/2018

I spent a day prospecting with William Osmon and Andy George (How to Make Everything) in the Mojave desert of southern California. We found some gold and had a lot of fun.  Check out their videos below:

Here is the video that Andy and his team made of the trip, where he mines for gold and turns it into a gold wire.  It is very well made and lots of fun.  Take look.  You can see the video HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=5Yh9qC1ZSZs

Here is the rather humorous video that William made of the same trip.  After a long day mining with in the desert with Andy and I, he takes his hard won nugget to see if he can trade it for chicken nuggets. I hope you enjoy it. you can see the video HERE: https://youtu.be/I5-jpboHhy8

 

 

2/17/2018

Here are a couple of videos showing the old Roman gold mining area of Las Medulas (and the Galeria de Orellan).  This is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and was one of the largest mining areas in the world, until the advent of modern open-pit mining.

1/18/2018

 Spend a day with me in the Mojave desert as  I find a new spot with good gold.

1/2/2018

 Last fall, I spent the day on the river and filmed a video on how to setting up a sluice.

8/27/17

I have finally finished my video about my gold panning trip to Portugal.  I didn’t find what  I was looking for, but it was a lot of fun.

08/13/2017

Utah Prospector and Rocky Mountain Ryan just made a trip to my Rocky Bar claims (that are for sale).  You can watch their video HERE:

08/02/2017

A Day on Douglas Creek

© August 2013 by Alan Chenworth

(Also printed in the Gold Prospector Magazine, May 2014)

 

I have wanted to try panning on Douglas Creek, Wyoming, for close to 10 years, but as I live about 8 hours away in Utah, I hadn’t had the chance. This summer, I decided it was finally time to head to south eastern Wyoming, and set about making plans–with the blessing of my wife and kids, who thought it sounded like fun.  One of the first things I did as I set my plans for the area was to consult with the GPAA claims guide to see if there were any claims in the area, and as luck would have it, there I found that the GPAA had three claims located in the Medicine Bow mountains–two on Douglas Creek (the Big Nose Kate and Yela Fever claims), and one about a half mile away on Lost Creek (the Crazy 8 claims).  Lost creek has its confluence with Douglas Creek just below the GPAA claims.  A quick search on the internet gave me more information on the area.

According to the Wyoming State Geological Survey, gold was first discovered on Douglas Creek by Iram Moore in 1868. Gold was later found on most of the tributaries from Lake Creek to Rob Roy Reservoir.   There was heavy placer mining through the 1870’s, and the placers were re-worked in the 1930’s and 40’s. With the high price of gold since about 2006, there has been another resurgence of  mining in Douglas Creek.  The total historical gold production from the area creeks is estimated to be more than 4,000 ounces.

The gold found in the creek is of a high carat, reportedly between 0.890 and 0.960 fine (22-23 carat); and the largest nugget that has been found in the district was reportedly 3.4 ounces.  It is also interesting to note that platinum and palladium have been found in small amounts in Douglas and surrounding creeks.  Back in the 1970s, there were also several diamonds found in the Medicine Bow mountains, and there is still sporadic exploration by mining companies looking for kimberlites (rocks that host diamonds) in the region.

We also found that the old mining town of Encampment Wyoming, located about 20 miles to the west of the Medicine Bow mountains, was having its Grand Encampment Cowboy Poetry and Western Music Festival in mid-July, and set plans for that weekend, with the hopes of camping on the Douglas Creek claims, and driving into town (Encampment) at night and catch a show at the Grand Encampment festival.

We arrived in Encampment on Friday morning, and found it to be a very small (but charming) town. It has a population of about 450 people, and offers  few services (though it did have a gas station, cafe and convenience store).  It also has a nice museum reflecting the history of the copper mines in the area.  As part of the museum, they have reconstructed  a small town from old cabins and buildings that they have transplanted from the areas numerous old mining camps.

The Grand Encampment Museum was our first stop, where I inquired about directions to Douglas Creek. The Claims Guide had good directions from Laramie, but Laramie was east of the Medicine Bow Mountains, and we were coming from the west (and it was a long way around).  Encampment was the closest town and is located in the valley just to the west–and it appeared to be right on the way to the claims.  I knew I was in trouble when no one knew anything about where Douglas Creek was located–in fact, the first three people that I spoke with had never heard of it.  With the help of the GPAA book and some maps, we soon had the creek pinpointed.  As it turns out, the North Platte river sat between the us and the claims, and there was no bridge or access from Encampment.  Though the claims are only 20 miles to the east, we either had to go north and east to Laramie or south and east into Colorado to get to the claims from Encampment.   From where we were, it was closer to head south into Colorado, and then back up Highway 230 to Fox Park Road, which would then take us down to Douglass Creek (Fox Park Road is mentioned in the directions given in the Claims Guide).  One of the locals drew us a map of the route we would need.

By the time we figured out how to get to the claims, it was 11:00 am, so we decided to stick around Encampment and tour the museum, which we did for the next several hours, then went and saw some of the shows at the Encampment Cowboy Poetry Festival. We also set up camp, with the plans of heading to Douglas Creek early the following morning.  It was an easy and beautiful drive, but it took us about 70 miles of driving to get to the claims that were only 20 miles away.

 

All things told, the directions in the Claims Guide were good and the claims were relatively easy to find. Route 543 is a good dirt road (car-passable) that follows the creek through the claim and on up the canyon.  The Douglas Creek claims (Big Nose Kate and Yela Fever) cover nearly a mile of creek bottom that ranges from swamp land at  the lower boundary to shallow bedrock with faster moving water at the north.  The creek averages about 20-30 feet wide, and is about 12 inches deep on average (during mid-summer).  The hills surrounding the creek are green and covered in heavy forest–there is plenty of shade.

These claims are very popular with GPAA members in Wyoming, as well as surrounding states. The claims were quite crowded, and more than half the people that  I spoke with were from Colorado.  Wanting to protect the claim, members were quick to let me know of the local regulations governing the claims by the GPAA and Forest Service.  As the claims guide mentions, the claim does not open to mining until July 1st, due to releases  from an upstream dam that help protect the fish habitat. Apparently, you can use a high-banker within 100 ft of the river as long as you have a pond to catch the tailings in and let the mud settle out.  They also don’t want you bringing material from the benches above the river down into the stream.  Dredging is also allowed in the creek as long as you have a permit from the Wyoming State Department of Water Resources (and its free).

As I walked down the creek, I noticed that most of the people there were dredging (all but 1, in fact). As I spoke with the dredgers, I was told that 10-15 years ago, the claim was little worked and that panning for gold on some of the sand bars could yields as much as 20-30 flakes per pan;  however,  with the increase in the price of gold, the area had received a lot more interest.  In the past 10 years, the claim has apparently been worked hard and you don’t find much gold in the top layers anymore.  I was told that there is still good gold here, but that sluices aren’t very productive and that you need a dredge to get down to the richer materials.  Pickers and small nuggets are not uncommon if you can get to bedrock, and miners can still turn a profit on a days’ work if they run a dredge.  Unfortunately, this was planned as an exploration trip, so I did not bring my dredge.  Instead, I brought a small, highly portable sluice that I like to use for testing.

 

I picked a spot on the inside bend of the river to set up my sluice. Test pans on the surface didn’t show any gold, but I wanted to see what there was deeper down.  It was slow going as I shoveled the gravel in to the sluice.  Because this is a large, fairly slow creek with a gently gradient, I could not get enough water flow through the sluice to push the pebbles through, so I had to help them along by hand every so often.  The flow was sufficient, however,  to wash the sand and gravel through–so sluicing was still more productive than panning the material by hand.

Another problem that I encountered was the rocks–Douglas creek is full of cobbles and boulders, making digging difficult. The cobbles, ranging in size from 4 to about 10 inches, are difficult to shovel–and I spent a lot of time pulling them out by hand.  By the time I had dug down about a foot and a half, I came to the top of a boulder that I could not get past.  I continued to dig to the side, following it down about another foot, but could not get it out or dig below it.  After digging down about two and a half feet, I could not effectively get the rocky material out of the water-filled hole and into the sluice.  I had to end the hole.

While digging the hole for the sluice, I continued my sample pans. I found that by about 1 foot of depth, I was getting a small flake or piece of flour gold in almost every pan; and by two feet, I was getting 1-2 pieces per pan.  The gold was definitely getting better as I went down.  From what I could see from old dredge holes, the bedrock was under anywhere from 3-6 feet of overburden (at least on the north half of the claim), and I would love to go back with a dredge to see what is on the bottom.  When I cleaned up the concentrates in the sluice, I found 40 or 50 pieces of gold ranging from small flakes to flour gold mixed into the brown and black sand that makes up the heavy materials of the creek.  Unfortunate, I did not find any platinum, palladium or diamonds in my clean up.

After testing Douglass Creek, I also headed downstream to try Lost Creek on the Crazy 8 claims. These claims are also swampy on the bottom end, just above the confluence with Douglass Creek, but have very shallow bedrock in a rocky stretch where the canyon narrows near the top of the claims.  I chose a rocky stretch next to the road to sample, and it appear that this section of creek had been little worked.  The banks were somewhat overgrown with willow and wild rose, and the stream was very rocky.  I set up my sluice and started digging between several  large boulders.  There was not much sand and gravel in the creek bottom, but there as some behind boulders and filling low places in the bedrock.   Much of the sediment in the creek is larger than 3 inches.  The stream sediments were also cemented together, making digging difficult.  When I cleaned up the sluice  I found only two flakes of gold (and one of those pieces was flour gold), and a couple of nice garnets.  In fact, the concentrates were full of very small, dark garnets, but one of the garnets that I found was larger than the rest–possibly large enough to cut–and was a clear deep red.

The Medicine Bow mountains are beautiful, and are a fun place to visit. The water in the creek tends to be low and slow by midsummer.  It is pleasantly cool, and ideal for kids to swim and play in on a family outing.  The directions to Douglas Creek, (and the GPAA claims in the area) are good, and will take you directly to the claims with little or no problems.  Just remember, the directions are from Laramie because there are no access roads from the west side of the range. Of the two claim groups, I found the gold to be much better on Douglas Creek, and when I come back, I will bring a dredge as it is the most likely way to get down to the gold bearing material.

 

References:

http://www.wsgs.uwyo.edu/research/minerals/Gold-DouglasCreek.aspx

http://douglascreekgold.blogspot.com/

05/24/2016

I got to spend a day panning for gold on the Yuba River, just outside of Nevada City, California. This was in the Yuba River State Recreation area.  Check out the video HERE:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Nlk7fyQTLE

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12/22/2015

I got a new dry washer this summer . . . A Gold Buddy Maverick their mid-size unit.  My test run was on a high-bar in Rocky Bar, Idaho.  You can see the video of it HERE:  https://youtu.be/2W9C5jBng3g