Creekside...

        The most often asked question by those new to prospecting has got to be, “where do I dig?”

        We’re going to talk beyond the commonly given advice of inside curve of the stream and behind large boulders.  If you’re out to pan one weekend, that might merit you a few flakes and you’ll be content for the rest of your life that you found gold!

        The more likely scenario is that it gives you the bug… gold fever, and you want to find more!  Curiously it is finding gold, the hunt, that strikes a cord with most prospectors.  We’ll repeat… it’s a lot of work for a little gold; we don’t do it to get rich!

So now you’re serious, right?  You prospected as a guest on someone’s claim or paid for a pan or the right to dig.  Someone somewhere started that process by prospecting.

We’re going to explore gravel bars as left by the process of erosion:  freezing, thawing, fire, flood,.. just a few of the elements that contribute to placer deposits. Most of this occurred long before the gold rushers, but each year of flooding adds a new layer.  A major flood, however, can strip those layers and re-deposit them elsewhere!

Each spring when we re-visit one of our claims, we have to reorient ourselves because the spring floods are extensive enough to re-arrange things.  That big boulder that someone dug behind last year might be 100 feet down the creek; our previous year’s diggings may have been flooded and the entire creekbed re-landscaped!

The reason you are instructed to look to the inside bend of a creek is obvious… water slows and drops out the gold.  Now if you are looking at it with the right perspective, that happened not only last spring but every spring since the creek adopted its current route.  If the stream has been at it a long time, a gravel bank has developed.  So where would the quantity of gold have deposited… in the stream or the gravel bank?

        So get out of the creek and wander around, looking if there is sign of old digging on the banks.  Those old-timers didn’t keep digging unless it was worth it! 

        First on the agenda is to remove sloughage… try to get a look at what they were digging for by depth of digging.  That will be a pretty good indicator of how deep they needed to go for good gold.  It’s also a lot easier to dig into the bank vertically rather than horizontally!  This top from someone, who out of necessity, applies herself to digging in the most efficient manner since I don’t have the size or muscle for heavy work!

Now take a good look at what you’ve exposed, then sample, sample, sample.  Recent floods, again, may have deposited in top layers.  I prefer to test pan each layer exposed, but have become pretty good at selecting what will probably pay.  You don’t need gold in every pan… black sands or nodules will tell you if further testing is merited.  Better yet, if sands and/or nodules are present, classify out a bucket and sluice!  It’s faster, and if you use ribbed matting you’ll probably see the gold as you sluice!

One word of warning… if there are clay layers, which will usually be red, gray or yellow, pay attention to if they dissolve in the pan before running it in the sluice box.  If they “ball up” in your pan, they’re going to do the same in the sluice, gathering gold as they go! Here’s another reason we like to use a piece of ribbed matting sized to the funnel of the sluice, but not glued in.  The matting can easily be pulled, cleaned and re-inserted before you run suspicious clay material.  That way you’re not out your previous hard labor!

Once you isolate the pay zone or zones, it’s your decision whether to run all the material or “high grade.”  You move the same amount of dirt, it’s just a matter of how much you want to run through the sluice box.

A final word of caution… it’s easy to get excited and want to mine only the gold zone.  Remove overburden as you go.  We’ve seen too much unsafe undercutting trying to mine out the pay zone.  It’s not safe… Black Hills history tells of several incidents where placer miners were buried in gravels as they tunneled in.  Some lived, some didn’t.  It may not look like that much, but a half ton of gravel falling on you could be fatal.