Question

[FunWithTreasure]

Hi. I prospect here in upstate NY. I have a stream I preffer to go to and have a spot on the stream where I have permission. I have walked up and down this stream cleaning cracks in the bedrock many times. Never finding anything other than lead shot. But if I run the overburden from any sand deposit I see I can get a few specs of gold. It makes no sense to me. I have always heard clean the cracks but theres no gold in there but there is in the plain sand. Why do you think that is?

 

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[AU Seeker]

In the state of N.Y. you may rarely find a piece of native gold, but most all of the gold in the state of N.Y is glacial gold and not native to N.Y. , the gold is from Canada brought down by glaciers of long ago and as you know the gold is small, it is small because of the tremendous weight of the glaciers that brought the gold south with the grinding advancement of the glaciers and most of the gold found in N.Y. if not all will be within the grounded up rocks making up the glacial till, a lot of the till is now sand, the gold was grounded up more easily than the rock because of how soft it is and is much smaller than most of the material that makes up the glacial till, the small gold has a hard time making it's way to the bottom of the pile when most of the material is bigger than it is, even in a flood state the gold is so small it cannot overcome the water's force long enough to sink in the liquefied glacial tills, other soils and sands, thus what you're finding is "glacial flood gold", also when N. Y. get some decent rain but not enough to "flood" the streams drastically you will get runoff out of glacial till that is on up higher out of the streams and this will wash new small gold out of the till and down on top layers of the sediment in the stream that is not moving.

That being said I have seen some nice pickers and even some small nuggets from N.Y. that escaped the glaciers before they were grounded to fine gold, they are rare, they are able to sink to the bottom during flooding events and were found in cracks, so always check the cracks because you never know if you will be passing up that rare N.Y. picker/nugget, but focus most of your work on the sure thing in the sands!!

You will find that in other parts of the country that has native gold, that a lot of the fine flood gold is in the sands as well for the same reason as mentioned above, but the difference is how the gold became so small, the gold starts out either as fine gold or large gold eroded out of vein deposits, the large gold gets progressively smaller during major flood events from the grinding actions of very large, medium and small boulders and rocks that are moving in the rivers and streams during these major flood events.


Skip

 

[Hoser John]

Yes what Skip said-