One Tough Creek To Pan!

[Eric Willoughby]

I was referred to a small creek by two separate gem mine owners that I am friends with, this creek resides in a town that is 60 miles away from where I live, so I drove out Saturday late afternoon and sniped with a Gold-N-Sand hand pump and did some panning, wow, what tough panning it was! To say the least the material was very interesting, yet aggravating at the same time.

I had sucked up a couple gallons of material from choice spots that would hold gold for sure, and what I got was not sand, but rather millions of small slate chips and tiny garnet gravel the size of grains of beach sand. This stuff was a nightmare to pan! Panning being based on the principles of removing the lightest from the heaviest was null and void in this scenario, as it was all heavy stuff...... and being the most of it was flat slate chips it wouldn't just separate and wash out of the pan, it wanted to slide it's way out taking everything with it and it was way to thick of material to try to leave in the pan and try to look around and beyond it. To top it all of, the underlying layer of it all was not the typical "black sands" but rather 100% pure Magnetite!!
The best way I could describe it is that it was like panning for gold out of a bowl of Cocoa Pebbles!! I never had a more aggravating and disappointing time of gold panning since I contracted this fever.

I did not get any gold this time around, although there is gold in it, and big chunky stuff from what I have been told, but getting through this geologist's grab bag of material is going to be tough, but I am far from giving up on this one as this creek is coming directly from a section of National Forest (where the gold is coming from) just behind the local houses that sit on this creek. All the homes on the creek are your everyday working Joe, and most of them are folks that will give you permission to pan it, but where the creek emerges from the National Forest happens to be the front yard of one of those rich, "elitist" type people that won't cooperate with you for anything.

You all know the type.... those that think they are better and beyond the average person, and any kind of splitting of shares is out of the question, because anything you might find and split with them is nowhere the kind of money that can match what they already make in shady business and land deals already.

So, in all of this, I am determined not to be thwarted. I know where very good gold is coming from, and few, if any, have tried to find it and even fewer actually know what they are doing, so I am pouring over terrain maps and looking for "legal access" around this obstacle I am facing.

Hopefully, this shouldn't take long to find.

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

Diving for Pleasure and Treasure - Grab it through Amazon!

[strickman]

next time classify the material first.plus get down in the bedrock deep.deep .deep.if it's there you'll find it.must be chattahoochie nat.forest.

 

[Astrobouncer]

Hey I know a couple spots where the concentrates are similar stuff. The stuff found there is what I refer to as 'red sand' because there's so much small red garnets in the sand, it looks red when you get down to the heavies. The whole stream seems to be rock chips with very little dirt. It's a real pain to pan too. The two spots I found this stuff at, though, neither one has any kind of significant amount of magnetite that I could find.

 

[Eric Willoughby]

next time classify the material first.plus get down in the bedrock deep.deep .deep.if it's there you'll find it.must be chattahoochie nat.forest.

Actually, it is in the Nantahala National Forest, large nuggets have been reported to have come from this creek ( 1 to 2 ounces), which is why I am very interested in finding the source of where this uber-chunky gold is coming from.

Oh, and I did classify my material after trying to pan out the chips, the small stuff is also so heavy that it is hard to move around in the pan, it takes some effort to get it to move around and when you do get it to move, it ALL MOVES, it is very difficult to get anything separated to find any of the fine gold. I am going to work this area a lot because of the learning curve it is throwing me, I firmly believe we should all have a tough spot where we can hone our skills, and this place will make all other forms of panning seem like child's play after you have spent some time on it. If nothing else, it will make me one heck of a skilled gold panner over time.

 

[Hoser John]

DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME TRYING TO PAN 100% IN THE BOONIES--CLASSIFY--FAST PAN AND TAKE IT HOME TO A CONCENTRATOR. Be it wheel,bowl or whatever-under controlled enviroment the fines become much easier to process and you way less tired/frustrated-tons a au 2 u 2 -John