Gold Is Where You Find It

Gold Is Where You Find It was Originally Posted on July 2, 2013 by lavarock

Although I have seen a few episodes before, I now have had the opportunity to watch the Discovery TV series “Gold Rush – Season 1″. I’ll leave it to you to read (or watch) the episodes to find why these men (and sometimes family) have moved to Alaska to mine for gold.

Watching the series, it becomes obvious to viewers that these men mean well, but are way over their heads. All season they assemble their production line and attempt to extract gold. Many of their problems along the way involve the fact that most of these people have no experience at all.

I can speak with a bit of expertise, having done a bit of prospecting myself and backing it up with coffee production. In their type of prospecting. they needed to understand that water and movement are the main criteria in getting the gold. You need to understand how gold moves in relation to other materials and how to let water and gravity manage the movement of materials. Many of the pieces of equipment they have, there is no way to adjust the pitch on the path the material must make. When their shaker table doesn’t extract the gold, slowly adjusting the pitch of the table would probably have shown the best angle to extract gold.

In one part of the series, the men dump big rocks onto a screen (grizzly) but the rocks fall off with gold attached. It was obvious to me that the rocks needed to be rinsed before being discarded. In my highbanker there was a square tub where you first put rocks. Water rinses over the rocks and down the sluice where the gold will separate from the dirt.

Although my prospecting was on a lot smaller scale, the principles are all the same. There are similarities in prospecting for gold and processing coffee cherry. With coffee cherry, we rinse the fruit, separate the skin from the seed and use gravity and water to do lots of the work.

In my case, I was in Georgia and had pretty good weather. In Alaska the crew is always up against weather and distance to civilization.

While they keep looking for nuggets, the easiest thing to find is flake gold, that sand-sized powder that quickly adds up. While they assembled hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment to go into mass production, we were able to pull a similar amount of gold in three days as they did in months. We used one earth mover and 5 highbankers and a few people to pan who knew how.

If you like reality shows and want to learn a bit about prospecting, this is a show to watch. If you want to learn as I did, by being part of a prospecting group, investigate the Gold Prospectors at http://goldprospectors.org and their outings and gold show events.

When people ask me about gold, I always tell them “look for gold where it is, not where it isn’t” and they think I am kidding. However, gold is heavy and is carried by water in streams and rivers. So would you look for gold on a mountain top or in a valley? In a river or stream, gold would be carried downstream and where the water flows fast, gold probably won’t settle. Looking at the bottom of a waterfall would be a better place than at the top. So by knowing a bit about gold and having a bit of common sense, you can eliminate looking in places where gold probably isn’t. Knowing where to look can be half the battle.