ATTENTION GOLD DIGGERS OF A2k

B.C, a full day, borrowed equipment, not a damn thing...

That is not encouraging/ MA and I are thinking about doing a trip with one of our friends from Maui in 2010 and go pan gold in California. We'd do a lease thingy on an active site.

Don't know nothing about gold panning in CA but I do know there is lots of gold panning in Colorado on Clear Creek between the Central City cut-off and GeorgeTown. I knew one guy that made a living on that stretch.

Wonder how close Cripple Creek is from Boulder.

about 1 hour drive (central city, not cripple creek)

Hmmmm, my son lives in Longmont.

close enough, if you need more info, PM me.

Its funny yuou ask, Im on a gold mining project in the SOuth Carolina Slate Belt right now. We are doing crushing and Au/Hg amalgamation. The gold is tiny flecks in the quartz that lies within slate. The mercury and gold amalgamate and then the Au is driven out by heat and the mercury is recollected and the gold is further processed. We get about 5 oz perton of rock. (Thats pretty rich by todays standards)

Ive done panning with my uncle Stash in NM and Az when I was a kid. Ive also panned on the AMerican River near Folsom and have panned in Lancaster county Pa and near Spruce Pine NC.
It takes just a little practice to learn how to handle a gold pan. You should start with a few tiny pieces of gold in a sand mix and swizzle it around and try to remove the sand in a water mix but still keep the gold pieces in the bottom of the pan. Youll never learn unless you know that theres some gold in the pan. That way you develop a "touch". Its not hard. Just dont screw up the streams with water blowers or a backhoe. Guys that trash up a stream for gold panning are a bunch of pigs. .

Sorry to break the thread but < Im building a small wooden boat that can be rowed and quickly set up to sail. Its an Irish sea craft that has an upturned snout and is very seaorthy but Im gonna modify its length and add an ama and aka. I also want to set up a quick deploy sil and jib that i can stown in the bottom of the boat rolled up in a plastic or nylon sleeve.
What Id like to know is what do they call those big long paddles that the HAwaian boats use . The kind with the really big paddle ends so that they get a huge purchase in the ater?
I tried putting "long paddles" into google and got some unusable stuff. Im looking for a Hawaian name if there is one.

like this one?

http://www.tikimaster.com/product/KOA1472?meta=FRG&utm_source=GBASE&utm_medium=CPC&utm_content=&utm_campaign=

Koa is the name of the wood that the paddle is made from, not the hiawian name for paddle

HOE pronounced hoa real fast is the oar
WA'A is the paddle

HOE WA'A - the oar paddler

I have one but the end is chewed up. My best friend in Hawaii was a champion paddler out of Maui and she has a beauty that possibly has never been used.

Paddling is really rough on the back and she had to give it up.

I've panned a bit of gold in my time.

There is at least one minor gold mine in the area near here, A1 mine at Woods Point. Its real "Deliverence" country up there. They use a mercury method similar to that mentioned above. Despite assurances that holding dams had thick rubberised linings and would NEVER leak, one day a stick speared down from a tree close by and perforated the lining. I cant remember what environmental damage was done so it was probably not significant

Flecks of gold are the best i've ever done. My first find was at around age 7/8. I think my granfather salted the pan.

My brother set up a river dredge with a pump on a few boards mounted on a tractor inner tube this was floated down the river whilst my brother skin dived with the inlet hose and sucked the sand and gravel mix off the bottom of the river. the sand gravel mix was pumped over a ripple board to separate the gold from the frass. He found a small nugget about 1 oz using this method. FM's right, not good for rivers.
Another friend found a nugget about the size of pork chop using a metal detector over in the golden triangle near Heathcoat.

Then there was the wild man who lived in the bush and would come into town once a month, sell the gold he had found to buy his groceries and head back to the bush. From what i gather he made almost enough (but not quite) to survive at a subsistance level on.

all in all I'd say go, have fun, but dont give up your day job.

Will stay in touch Thanks.

This is just for fun and I wouldn't want to hurt the environment.

A friend of ours from Maui wants to take his granddaughter, so Colorado sounds good. Maui friends best friend lives in Boulder, CO and my son and his family are next door in Longmont.

Get a state geologic map and try to stay near a place where the igneous rocks are in contact with the nearby county rocks. Then look for quartz stringers called "Pegmatites". (ALSO, theres a national gold hobby club , dont recall the name) They publish maps of good gold areas. Using a metal detector in a dry soil area is often more productive than panning a stream cause you have to understand that the stream must "cross and erode" a gold bearing strata and if the areas are rich (like the Pikes peak, Cripple Creek complexs), Youll find the areas already heavily mined using CYANIDE leaching.

I very much surprised that gold is that common. A nugget the size of a pork chop would be worth a good deal these days, with gold running $100 US an ounce.

So, some Diggers are still diggers, huh?

you mean 1100$ an ounce. Gold prospecting is a very popular hobby and a means to supplement incomes in some areas. My uncle was a PhD geologist and was still a prospector . He ;loved the life and , truly, It can be addictive