Siletz River Panning?

[BeaverBeliever]

Hey all! First post for me on this website.

Heading down to the Siletz River, from Portland, this weekend for some fishing. Rain forecast is not looking so good for using the drift boat (not enough rain). Therefore might have opportunity to do some panning if fishing is slow from the bank. I have not been able to find anything online about the Siletz for panning soooooo thought I would ask all of you Oregonians! Let me know if anyone has any suggestions for locations. Thanks!

 

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[Fishenfool]

fish the upper siletz all the time, but never thought about panning there. But I have seen lots of black sand there.

 

[oregongold.net]

I grew up fishing on the gorge of the river near Logston, and tons of my family use to stay at Moonshine Park for two weeks every year. I have never heard of any Gold being found.

 

[cacarr]

Hey all! First post for me on this website.

Heading down to the Siletz River, from Portland, this weekend for some fishing. Rain forecast is not looking so good for using the drift boat (not enough rain). Therefore might have opportunity to do some panning if fishing is slow from the bank. I have not been able to find anything online about the Siletz for panning soooooo thought I would ask all of you Oregonians! Let me know if anyone has any suggestions for locations. Thanks!

Apologies for resurrecting such an ancient thread, but I thought I would leave this here for any future people googling "Siletz river gold panning" or something similar.

Recently I've taken an interest in the question of whether there's any appreciable gold anywhere in the Oregon Coast Range -- and if there is any at all, where would it most likely be located? I'm not very far along in this little boredom-spawned project yet, but I ended up looking at the Siletz River because I thought it might at some point in its course be cutting into some areas in proximity to lamprophyre (in this case, camptonite) dikes. I'm not a geologist, but it looks like there might be some sort of association between lamprophyric dikes and/or sills, and interesting mineralization.

So anyhow, I did find a few mentions of gold and/or panning in the Siletz. This one, a government census report on the Siletz reservation from 1890 (a rather sad little story), was the most interesting to me, because the author seems to have some knowledge of geology:

The soil of the rolling hills along the coast is made up of the decomposed miocene rocks, which contain abundant remains of plants and mollusca, giving to it the constituents necessary to abundantly produce plant life, Coal is known to exist in several places, and large pieces of chalcopyrite [also interesting], a sulphide of copper and iron, have been found in the bed of Mill creek, a small stream emptying into the Siletz River about a mile south of the agency. Gold in small quantities has been found in the gravel along the Siletz River.

Department of the Interior. Report on Indians Taxed and Indians not Taxed in the United States, Except Alaska at the Eleventh Census: 1890. Washington DC: Government Printing Office. 1894.

https://accessgenealogy.com/oregon/siletz-reservation.htm