Great info to know. I’m in Burlington county too and think I may have located a nice lode of flour gold mixed with black sand. Can you pan this gold or do you need to Sluice it? I couldn’t believe my eyes when I first saw it glittering back at me mixed in the black sand. I figured it was just pyrite at first but now I know it is most likely gold since it in magnetic black sand. It was some rather large flour and quite a good bit of it mixed in with the black sand. Hopefully the water will go down soon so I can suck some up with a squeeze bottle to test it. The current is so high & fast right now I won’t be able to see it. Can wait until I can get out there!
Hi Born2fish, and welcome to Treasurenet.
So...about this black sand and other material that you are investigating: I certainly do hope it's gold, but I feel like I have to caution you that gold isn't very common in NJ. It's almost certainly not going to be visible to the naked eye mixed in with black sand. Sorry to rain on your parade.
I've been recreationally prospecting for about 5 years now and I spent a lot of time as part of the Delaware Valley GPAA chapter; we would meet over in the Leigh River area of Pennsylvania and dig on some private properties there. After some hours of digging, sluicing, classifying and panning we'd end up with a few pieces of flour gold - if we were lucky. I'll put a picture at the bottom of what we'd typically recover.
And that was in an area that was covered by the glaciers that came through northern PA and northern NJ thousands of years ago. (Apparently the glaciers brought with them a little gold from Canada, or something like that).
If you're new to panning I'd recommend buying a pan and some pay dirt from a reputable provider (I've purchased from Dirthogg Paydirt up in Canada and from Carolina Prospectors - I have no connection to either operation and hope that naming them doesn't break the rules here). Panning that pay dirt will teach you how gold behaves (pan it into a plastic tub, like a cement mixing tub, so you can re-pan the material later).
Then, once you feel comfortable as to how gold behaves, grab some of that black sand you're finding and pan that. (If you already know how to pan jump right to this step.) You can use a magnet in a plastic bag to remove the magnetic sand (without it sticking directly to the magnet), and that'll make it easier to get the other material in the pan by itself.
Anyway, I hope you find gold in NJ, and please tell us about it. Thanks for renewing this thread - I love chlsbrns' idea of pounding pipe into the ground and then panning that material, I may have to try that here in Morris County where I live.
- Brian
Picture of flour gold from the Lehigh River area of PA:
I may try it this spring!? I am assuming that your test were on the light pink side of the color spectrum? Why else would you give detailed gold areas as you mentioned the Medford location that you know I am familiar with? Nice guy?
