Want to pan in Ohio

[longtime]

Hey everyone. Im new to the site and new to the game. I have been reading posts on here for quite a while now and doing research on Ohio gold prospecting for a year or so now. I have a great secret place down in Chillicothe/Ross county that i have access to that is bound to hold amazing gold. My question is, i need a decent local place.One close to Columbus. I am trying the Big Walnut creek and Three Rivers park area also. any tips or hints or ideals other than that? thanks for the input.

 

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[Sick4gold]

Although I can't point you to a spot right by Columbus I can tell you that people have had luck in Mansfield, Newtown, and I hear a lot about mad river but haven't checked it out for myself.
I don't want a fellow Ohio-Ian's post to go unanswered so although I can't directly tell you a spot I can at least try and point you in decent directions.
As far as Chillicothe area I suspect there are good deposits there as well IF IF IF you really know what to look for. The ancient Teays river dammed up near Chillicothe and eventually broke free to carve the present day Ohio river. The damming up of epic flood waters could produce good deposits but be careful as drift thickness may be very thick. If that's the case you'll most likely find tiny gold. Check out ODNR website for drift thickness maps and try to locate spots where bedrock is decently shallow.
Hope this is helpful

 

[longtime]

thanks for the tips. i have access to mad river and i duck hunt it every fall/winter so i ll give that a try. down in chilly i have access to property that goes from 900 ft elevation and drops down to 5 foot elevation and has an old dried up waterfall. the creek at the bottom is all bedrock. it is right at the bottom of where the glacier stopped as well. got pretty high hopes for that spot

 

[longtime]

 

[longtime]

thats the findings out of 4 buckets of dirt. not to bad for ohio i suppose. on the downside, we are lossing any small gold. im sure if there is pickers that there would also be fines. we have no fines in the pans at all basically. so back to the drawing board on pitch and water speed. we are using a mini high banker and added a river sluice to the end of it in hopes that our recovery rate would raise, but at the point our pump was getting clogged and started having flow issues and shortly after blew out any gold we had in the finally clean out of the last two buckets. one question i have is how long should we run on mats before we do a clean out? is it ok to run for a long time? it takes a while to run a few buckets (maybe 20-30 minutes per). then we do a fast clean out and i pan down the clean out while friend feeds again.

 

[Jimmydolittle]

Great looking stuff there, if it weren't for fine gold, I wouldn't have any here in Indiana. This is what I have found in the 4 years I have been going out, don't get out that often though. If you don't see stuff like this, then you are loosing it for sure. Good luck.

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[longtime]

im going to be getting gold hog mats in a couple weeks. that should really help out. i did a lot of studying today and found out that i was not finding the sweet spot in the highbanker i was just setting it up and running it. now i now how to tune it in so that will help. on the upside, we have all our tailings saved, so i didnt really lose anything just yet.

 

[Jimmydolittle]

In my humble opinion all you need is vortex matting, I have Gold Hog in my highbanker, but I think vortex will fill the bill a lot cheaper. Are you a member of any club? They can teach you a lot of hands on stuff that will take months to learn on your own.

 

[Reed Lukens]

yep, vortex mat & take and pan out some tailings to see how much you lost.