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This is just a kind of drive-by thread about something I've done off and on at various times in my life in the out of doors. Gem hunting and prospecting/gold panning are super chill activities you can easily blend into a hike or a fishing trip if you live near areas where it's feasible (national parks, public lands, mountains, etc) As long as you keep your expectations and investments low, you can have a fun time with it, or who knows, you may get The Bug (which I think i'm starting to) and try to do something a bit more involved. Gem hunting and gold panning you can get started with a $20 investment and some googling about where it's legal to do for the public (don't try to do it guerrilla style with no guidance or on private property, you'll get a fine or some buckshot in your rear end, claim jumpin' is real poo poo) Here are some youtubes and info to pique your interest: Gem hunting For something like this you just need a spade/small pick and a mineralogy book, some patience and luck. You can find all sorts of interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3Q7a6OoI78 Gold panning I've panned several times in Colorado and a few other places, it's a perfect tertiary activity to add on to camping/hiking/fishing. A plastic sluice pan only weighs a couple pounds and you'll probably have a spade or collapsible shovel with you anyways. If you do it on public land where it's allowed and there's known gold, you'll basically be poring over well extracted creek/river beds to find some flakes and dust. If you drag your rear end a good ways from the access points, you might find SOME type of undisturbed gravel with more interesting payout, but probably not! It's still a wonderful feeling to tap that pan and see the shinies though. Here's a video of a few pros working a real gold claim, this is not typical for amateurs, more of the serious hobbyist level working known paygravel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpOXjUqEkgU Gold sniping if you have some scuba/snorkel kit, like to swim in fast/cold water, and live near known gold bearing rivers, this might be something you could do. I'm mostly just linking it because I think it's neat and Pioneer Pauly is awesome, I doubt (m)any people here have the tools/equipment/access. Basically it's taking on extra work to find gold in known gold bearing rivers. 90% of it gets pushed into the gravel bedrock on the banks as it traverses, but some will get buried in gravels/silts in the actual river itself, places that are never dug/mined because they're always underwater. Add a few hundred/thousand years of that tiny bit of gold being deposited and its kinda interesting how much can be there. Anyway, watch Pioneer Pauly snipe gold and holler about it, because its fun! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dlkBl385d8 Metal Detecting If you're hydrophobic and more about hiking, detecting can be a super fun day, however, you will probably have to hike in decidedly non-hikey areas to produce any type of interesting finds If there are old mines near you that are closed down, or known metal bearing hunks of land, you're pretty much free to go out with a detector and keeps whatever you finds, as long as it's public property. I've done detecting a few times and unless you find a really interesting spot, you're not going to find much of anything valuable, plenty of bullets, pellets, and boot nails though! Like it's absolutely insane how much tooled metal has been sprinkled over the wilderness by humans already lmao. You can find gold, and also silver ore, native silver hunting is super cool. Here's a video of some serious level guys doing some detecting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=os80NQUSikU That's kind of the entry level hobbyist stuff. As long as you're only expectation is to have a fun time digging in the dirt, you will probably enjoy these activities! Just for fun, here are some of the more involved setups and videos about them (just in case your interest is piqued) High Banking High banking is taking a portable setup to a gold bearing river/stream, finding some gravel, and processing it on site into what's known as "concentrates", and then either panning them out there or at home (usually home, so you don't lose anything). High banking is where you kinda get into the "i want a decent return on my time" level of hobbyist gold, there are some places where you can set up a banker on public land as long as you follow laws/ordinances, but also you may need to buy an actual gold claim and try to get your money back over the year digging the poo poo out of the ground. You need a banker, a sluicebox, mats, pans, a generator, a pump, etc. It can be a super fun time, but is usually more work than leisure. I have a friend back in Colorado who does high banking on the reg and I want to make prospecting friends and tag along for some sessions. Here's a video of Vogus highbanking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAsFEnuahDM A Legit No poo poo Extraction Setup For science, here's probably the lowest level of setup you could call professional, with the ability to process a ton per hour of just about anything, from gold / silver ore, to copper wire, to e-waste! The fundamentals are pretty much the same across the levels from panning to this type of setup; separate the heavies from the worthless material by using water and vibrations/shaking. I'm only talking about this because I find it interesting, and if you've gotten this far into the OP, you may as well. The Mount Baker channel on YouTube is an awesome look at a low level processing / smelting outfit. They work ores, circuit boards/computer chips and other e-waste, copper recovery, etc. and also usually do the recovery smelts, check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NBy_I2LqxY One of the most interesting things to me about all of this is that there's lots of easy gold still out there that the old timers missed because they didn't have the technology to see it or the precision equipment to recover it (a serious hobbyist today has better fine gold capture capability than a professional outfit in the 1850's), so all you need to find a real paystreak is the knowledge/luck and fresh eyes to see where it may have been missed. Also a lot of the serious hobbyists recover decent amount of gold just grinding up the tailings the old timers left behind. There's fabulous treasures in the earth waiting for you, just get your rear end outside!
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Jul 18, 2020 17:52
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