I was crouched over a pan the other day and thought "How on earth did the old timers get here? No road, no 4x4 to get them to the site and definitely no GPZ or Google Earth to make life easy. Gee they were tough old dudes. That got me thinking about the work they must have put in to find the gold.
Alluvial gold I can get my head around. A shovel and a pan would soon be able to indicate whether a creek holds gold or not. But finding the source of the gold is a little more difficult to understand.
I decided to leave most of the gear at home and take a pan, a pick and a piece of modern technology (iPad) and just "look." It's amazing what you can see if you take the blinkers off.
The first move was to walk a stretch of my favourite creek to see what I could find. Looking at some bed rock and some large boulders had me thinking "I wonder what's up on top? Would the old timers have looked up there?"
When I got the the top of the bank, I had a bit of a scout around and this is what I saw.
Iron bark trees. They usually grow on ridge lines or in shallow, rocky or infertile soil. After looking a little more, this is what stood out
There was evidence of quartz everywhere. In many places it was covered in leaf litter but was easily uncovered. Some of the quartz showed interesting colour:
Looks like iron stone to me (need some help from the experts on the forum to educate me)
And then finally what I was looking for:
The old fellas had been up there loaming. I assume that they would have taken a sample and panned it out to see if there was any evidence of gold. I decided to take some material from the benched area and see what it looked like.
Clay covered gravel of varying sizes. After washing the gravel this is what showed in the pan:
Quartz, iron stone, shale and a variety of other material that I can't identify. (Where are the geologists when you need them? Help me out here.)
Some of the quartz showed evidence of mineralisation.
After panning out the material only one small spec of gold was present (too small to photograph.)
I followed the creek about 50 metres up from the bank and saw evidence of loaming at regular intervals. It's funny how "seeing is believing." It was much clearer now as to what they were doing. If the prospectors found evidence of gold In their pans, they would start test panning up the slope until they were able to find the source of the gold. So clever yet so simple.
Anyway, time to get back to splashing around in the water. Please comment on anything that is not correct in the post. There is so much to learn and there are so many of you out there with an extensive knowledge of prospecting.
Cheers for now
Les
Alluvial gold I can get my head around. A shovel and a pan would soon be able to indicate whether a creek holds gold or not. But finding the source of the gold is a little more difficult to understand.
I decided to leave most of the gear at home and take a pan, a pick and a piece of modern technology (iPad) and just "look." It's amazing what you can see if you take the blinkers off.
The first move was to walk a stretch of my favourite creek to see what I could find. Looking at some bed rock and some large boulders had me thinking "I wonder what's up on top? Would the old timers have looked up there?"
When I got the the top of the bank, I had a bit of a scout around and this is what I saw.
Iron bark trees. They usually grow on ridge lines or in shallow, rocky or infertile soil. After looking a little more, this is what stood out
There was evidence of quartz everywhere. In many places it was covered in leaf litter but was easily uncovered. Some of the quartz showed interesting colour:
Looks like iron stone to me (need some help from the experts on the forum to educate me)
And then finally what I was looking for:
The old fellas had been up there loaming. I assume that they would have taken a sample and panned it out to see if there was any evidence of gold. I decided to take some material from the benched area and see what it looked like.
Clay covered gravel of varying sizes. After washing the gravel this is what showed in the pan:
Quartz, iron stone, shale and a variety of other material that I can't identify. (Where are the geologists when you need them? Help me out here.)
Some of the quartz showed evidence of mineralisation.
After panning out the material only one small spec of gold was present (too small to photograph.)
I followed the creek about 50 metres up from the bank and saw evidence of loaming at regular intervals. It's funny how "seeing is believing." It was much clearer now as to what they were doing. If the prospectors found evidence of gold In their pans, they would start test panning up the slope until they were able to find the source of the gold. So clever yet so simple.
Anyway, time to get back to splashing around in the water. Please comment on anything that is not correct in the post. There is so much to learn and there are so many of you out there with an extensive knowledge of prospecting.
Cheers for now
Les
