Gold Mining

This morning my dad and I woke up around six thirty and got in the truck. We drove two hours to a small mountain town to meet our guide. We were going to learn how to prospect for gold! We followed our guide (and his son who's 14) up a mountain pass on a dirt road for about ten miles to a small creek.

During the late 1800's miners got $20 per ounce. They found one ounce per yard in that creek.  They were mining placer gold. Placer gold is the gold that is mined from creek and river beds. It is eroded from mountain sides into these rivers and creeks. Lode gold is mined straight from the mountain side. The miners from the 1800's only recovered about 60% of the gold they mined due to their bad equipment. We were trying to get some of the rest of it from the tailings that were left behind. The miners used rockers and sluice boxes to separate the gold from the rocks. When they had the gold and sand left, they would use a gold pan to separate it even more.

We were trying to find big boulders that went deep into the river bed with sand behind them. I found one and started digging it out. Our guide filled his pan with the sand from behind the boulder and added water. He swished it around to imitate the creek current. The water washed away all the sand and rocks and left the black sand and gold. Then we tried it ourselves. Since we were beginners, we added tungsten beads to the sand. Tungsten has about the same gravity as gold, so wherever the beads are, the gold is usually there too. Gold's specific gravity is about 18. We got about twenty small grains of gold from that spot. When we were finished we also had two pebbles that looked like glass. I was going to just toss them back into the creek, but our guide told us that they just might be diamonds. So, we went back to the truck and found a beer bottle on the side of the road and did the "diamond" test (try to scratch the glass with the so called diamond without breaking it, and if it works then it's potentially a diamond). Sure enough, it worked! We had two "diamonds" that were both about half a carat. We gave one to the guide, and I kept the other one. I had a LOT of fun. On the way back we stopped at a jewelry store to see if the "diamond" was 100% real. The lady at the store tested it twice, but both times the machine denied it. Oh well.