Snipping 4 Gold

[principedeleon]

Hello.. Everyone.

I would like to speak about certain things i have learned while looking for gold.

I also want to hear about everyones opinion of what works best for them while sampling. .

I have gone out sampling for gold with a 4" dredge but going up and down a creek with waterfalls and rockey places isnt easyy..

I have started to spend more time out snipping for gold and have started to use less my dredge. .

I would take with me my goggles, shovel , gum (4 stickin tiny Gold), large flathead screw driver and something to bust open bedrock .. that could be a large bar or ply bar.

I could carry all these things with me and move a over burden and sample up and down the river.

Where me and my partner work it looks like it was worked with a dredge.

i have been able to continue to find gold everyday without having to carry 100s of pounds and wasting gasoline..

Normally everyone who tries to go out with a dredge to prospect with a dredge end up exhausted before they could find a deposit spending a good percentage of their take from the last deposit mined.

It took me a while to learn to fan the overburden and create a eyesight for the gold but it was sure worth it.

With this method i have been able to work 90 percent of most deposit and the rest of the 10 pecent is not known to be worth the while dredging it. .

I would say shoveling overburden snipping or with a backpack dredge is better then running around with anything LARGER.

 

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[russau]

When I prospected a area I usually brought my GPS , camera , paper and pencil to write notes and plastic zip lock bags to hold samples ,a black magic marker to write on the plastics bags of what sample and where it is from..... and of course a small shovel /pan/and a 3/16 classifier screen. If a area looked good and panned well I'd be back with the equipment for the job and size of gold I got there. AND KEEP THIS INFO TO YOURSELF OR YOU WILL HAVE A CROWD MEET YOU THE NEXT WEEKEND!

 

[Reed Lukens]

Sample by sniping first, while looking to find the places to sample with the dredge in the deeper water. You can't sample 20' deep without air, and those can be by far the best... Where others haven't been....

 

[principedeleon]

There is a deposit i am working on with my 6" subbie. And part of it was worked with a gold pan and they have found lots of gold on that part but i believe it comes from a large pool but it is filled with almost 10-15 feet of overburden. .

I wasnt thinking on sampling it. But you got me thinkinggg reed . Loll

 

[Reed Lukens]

Figure 1" per foot of dredge size unless it's really rich. A subbie won't work in 15' of overburden. I've worked an 8" dredge in 15' of overburden and the pay was marginal... But then I've worked 25' of overburden with my 6" home built in really rich ground with 50' of hose and sank the back end of it with gold and lead crowned up over the edges of the sluice box and onto the floats... Literally a mountain of gold and lead, etc... And we were piling the gold on the bedrock 30' under water at the bottom, not letting any that we saw go up the pipe... Nugget city...

 

[jsurddy]

Figure 1" per foot of dredge size unless it's really rich. A subbie won't work in 15' of overburden. I've worked an 8" dredge in 15' of overburden and the pay was marginal... But then I've worked 25' of overburden with my 6" home built in really rich ground with 50' of hose and sank the back end of it with gold and lead crowned up over the edges of the sluice box and onto the floats... Literally a mountain of gold and lead, etc... And we were piling the gold on the bedrock 30' under water at the bottom, not letting any that we saw go up the pipe... Nugget city...

You’re making me drool, Reed!

 

[principedeleon]

Wow . . Now thats some rich deposit.
I have come to think is most placer gold out in the US so rich from all the hydraulic mining that was going on.

I havent tried going so deep with my subbie probably like 10' deep under water.

 

[Frank Tillman]

Im an old guy that did a lot of dredging, in my life the people who consistently got the most gold were those that really knew how to snipe with a 2.5 sn dredgeand large flat nosed screwdriver, and washing by using the power hose. They would always get ounces every 2 or 3 days. 2 to 5 oz not unusual.
Most had no air.

 

[Frank Tillman]

The trick is to find a place that once had a tremendous amount of big gold like many places in the
Mother Lode, and have been dredged to death, even had Chinese work it over. If there was a lot
of gold there once, any missed could be a lot. There are people that are very good at figuring out
where missed gold could be. They are still getting it, I know for a fact. With a little help from a flat
nose screw driver and flushing with the power hose of a small dredge.