Black Sands Question

[Flashinon]

I am a newbie gold panner, I'll say that right off the bat. I been practicing with paydirt at home and every time I have been able to find the gold, even the tiniest pieces just big enough to pick up with the most precise tweezers so I know how to shake the pan and how the gold behaves in a pan.

So today I took to the forest and found a nice rocky stream to try for the first time in the wild. Since I'm in Connecticut and know I'm only going to come across very tiny pieces that I gotta work through a lot of pans for I just had a large seasoned pan and a large kitchen strainer to get right to the fine stuff as I knew I wasn't gonna get anything bigger (did find plenty of neat rocks though, very quartz rich area).

So here is where I'm perplexed, for reference I live in a higher elevation and there is in the forest near me a lot of streams with dense crushed rock gravel in them which should give me the best chances at finding anything if I'm not wrong around the bends with a lot of rocks and from the deepest areas of the streams. Wherever I go around the area what I get composition wise is about the same. But no matter where I pan after I classify it with the strainer and get all the dusty crap floated off I am left with this. Whatever these heavy brown sands are they seem to be about as heavy as the black sands and when penning it back with a little material in the pan to check for any flour gold it will roll equally with it, the black sand appears to have slightly more resistance. It's borderline impossible to separate from it. Am I doing something wrong here or is there a material in some areas that behaves just like black sand but isn't? The volume of it is very high too locked with the black sands so I always make sure to constantly be stratifying it as I go.

As you'd probably expect in this state and being a newbie I didn't find anything today but I did get some good experience and can do it better and easier now though I'm having some "heavy" problems here. With how much stratifying and rolling back I'm doing I would think I'd have if there was any flour worth the tweezers gold down there but when getting it down to little enough to work with in the center to see if I have any I feel like I'm losing too much material but the browns just stick with the blacks. With this really crushed up rock stuff do I need to just work with much smaller loads at once? Can anyone help me out here?

edit - So thankfully I actually found some youtube videos of someone panning in CT here, it seems the gravels here are just like this. Seeing wild gold here in the video I definitely haven't seen at all today as it's an unmistakable shiny yellow that really pops. Still would be happy to know exactly what I'm seeing here. Tomorrow I got a day off so I'll be trying again and see if I can find a little something.

 

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[Lostpuppy]

There is alot of flour gold in aluvial til, leftovers from glaciers. Check out Dan Hurd on youtube. He is very education. So far Iv’e panned 23 gr from blacksand along riverbanks. It harder work than metal detecting, but both hobies still required tons of patience and 0 win days

 

[russau]

Screen all of your material. Pan your material of equal size . run a magnet through the material to remove the magnetic black sands. Pan each pan of material several times to make sure your getting it all. Practice makes perfect. Get yourself a 10 or 20 powered loop to actually see what your missing. Good Luck on your adventure !

 

[Flashinon]

There is alot of flour gold in aluvial til, leftovers from glaciers. Check out Dan Hurd on youtube. He is very education. So far Iv’e panned 23 gr from blacksand along riverbanks. It harder work than metal detecting, but both hobies still required tons of patience and 0 win days

I have watched a bunch of his videos actually and just checked out the alluvial/elluvial one, I'll keep testing around the area where the water is flowing from up high all the way down to see if there is any sweet spots around bends. The interesting thing about my little area is that there is many dried up areas or areas with very little water flowing going into the main streams to the lake so something much larger must have been flowing through the area at some point but likely due to some man made factor based on the area dried up. I should probably try a bunch of random material from the massive dried up what appears to be old river bed and gravel from an area much higher up in the forest where there is a huge mountain of rocks with a lot of broken material leading out from it. Must have been an original large source of incoming water since you can actually follow the rock trail of it to that dried up river bed area and to a stream coming from the same direction but a different area around it. I also want to try material directly from the edges of the lake.

I have metal detected before and in fact the old thing is still sitting in my closet. Metal detecting in my area is actually much more of a pain because of how rocky and rooty everything is. When you go to the shore with it you'll mostly just find everyone's loose change. Plus with gold panning all I need is my large pan, a small bucket, small shovel, a snuffer, and a kitchen strainer. I can carry all that around with just 2 hands and moving from area to area is so much easier. Plus when your panning the target is the dirt, when you're metal detecting it's IN the dirt. I prefer a target that can be anywhere.

 

[Flashinon]

So I went to a different area and did a bunch of test pans (this was a much more rocky area) as well as shook it so well that I got all possible dust out and got a much better idea of what was going on here. The last bunch wasn't as well panned out as I thought and had more super small heavy content in it. I did a sample where I took another pan and a tiny shovel tip's worth of the material and think I found the best way live to manage this. I'm going to try getting everything down to this, into a bucket itself, and handling it by the shovel tip since it's extremely easy to stratify and see what is going on without missing anything worth picking up (what I can immediately pick out as gold with the naked eye without squinting or playing the pyrite guessing game, if I need a microscope I don't got the gear to deal with that). Will update at some point on how it goes.

 

[Flashinon]

Update on how that's going as I was able to get outside today after work as this might help some people out since I'm probably not the only one who ran into this issue and had no idea what was happening (should probably just start a journal topic and include my paydirt explorations too but I haven't found anything in the wild yet and won't be paydirting until this weekend).

I tried filling a bucket up with the strainer and found very tiny shovel loads take way too long to pan down and this is also how I found I was doing it wrong. I wasn't getting much fine sands at all and tons of this pebbly stuff because I wasn't putting enough in the pan at once and I didn't wash enough off. The more mud in there and more carefully washed the more of that much more fine stuff with the heavy fine black sands you'll actually find gold in will be and it will start crowding out the ultra small pebbles in the ridges that passed the strainer.

Maybe I could even find the exact classification mesh size that filters them out and try that under the strainer over the bucket and check that stuff in another pan. I don't wanna go too fine though because with water flow when it's that fine there will be issues because I think it gets to a point where it can only be classified down dry but I don't exactly know what mesh size that begins.

 

[BoulderTroll]

I play in glacial till a lot and come across the brown sands that settle down with the blacks. Not sure what it is, but sometimes it has a pink tint, and that's most likely garnet sands. My solution was to not bother with it on the creek. I'll go out with a little 2 gal bucket, and I'll pan it down to that brown/black mix, take a peak, then throw it in the bucket. It takes way too long to deal with that stuff on the creek. And it's way easier to deal with it at home.
Once at home, I usually classify down to 50 mesh, get as much out as I can with the magnet, then pan it down in a smaller pan.

Other than that, sounds like you're doing a bunch of good self-learning. Keep paying attention to the details you're seeing and learning from it. Lots of good info on youtube. Watching other people doing it can give you ideas of new things to try. Good luck!

 

[AU Seeker]

Update on how that's going as I was able to get outside today after work as this might help some people out since I'm probably not the only one who ran into this issue and had no idea what was happening (should probably just start a journal topic and include my paydirt explorations too but I haven't found anything in the wild yet and won't be paydirting until this weekend).

I tried filling a bucket up with the strainer and found very tiny shovel loads take way too long to pan down and this is also how I found I was doing it wrong. I wasn't getting much fine sands at all and tons of this pebbly stuff because I wasn't putting enough in the pan at once and I didn't wash enough off. The more mud in there and more carefully washed the more of that much more fine stuff with the heavy fine black sands you'll actually find gold in will be and it will start crowding out the ultra small pebbles in the ridges that passed the strainer.

Maybe I could even find the exact classification mesh size that filters them out and try that under the strainer over the bucket and check that stuff in another pan. I don't wanna go too fine though because with water flow when it's that fine there will be issues because I think it gets to a point where it can only be classified down dry but I don't exactly know what mesh size that begins.

First and foremost, you need to be getting your material off of "bedrock" or a clay layer, because gold is heavier than anything else it will sink down in a stream bed until it gets to a solid layer that will stop it from sinking, which will be bedrock or a solid clay layer, so dig down until you find one or the other.

It's very unlikely you will find gold just mixed in with sand and rock, go down until bedrock/clay.

If you find solid bedrock be sure to get as much material out of cracks and crevices as possible by scrapping the material out because gold will get trapped in them, even if you have to break open the cracks.

When panning always pan the material down to almost nothing left in the pan, if you're panning correctly the gold will still be there as long as you're working the pan to keep the heavies at the bottom.

There's no reason to have more than a teaspoon or so of material left in the pan, it will take time to feel comfortable taking the material down that much but the gold if any is in your pan will still be there as long as you keep the material liquified as you pan so the gold will sink to the bottom.

 

[BoulderTroll]

It's very unlikely you will find gold just mixed in with sand and rock, go down until bedrock/clay.

When panning always pan the material down to almost nothing left in the pan, if you're panning correctly the gold will still be there as long as you're working the pan to keep the heavies at the bottom.

Hi AU Seeker, I want to put a disclaimer, I'm not trying to be combative, just trying to share information.

Not all gold is created equal, and it does not always behave the same. When I'm working a mountain stream or river, I agree that I cannot find gold unless it's on bedrock. When working glacial till, gold doesn't always sink until it hits something impenetrable. I'm usually catching flood gold that sits in the top 1-2 ft. I'm sure there's a clay layer down there somewhere that has more, but I'm not digging feet to get to it. I've seen 100ft layers of sand (bedrock is over 1000ft deep) in some areas.

And there's 2 reasons I don't pan down that far at the creek. First is it takes way too long when you're dealing with that dense black/garnet sands. And two, I've seen gold sitting in that sand, even after stratifying it a lot. Glacial gold is incredibly thin and flat, so it has a had time to sink through some densely packed black sands. It "surfs" as I've heard some people say.

 

[IDAu]

Gold is not always on bedrock. I have dredged bends and wasted my time trying to get to bedrock. After doing a ton of hard work it turned out the best gold was in the top few feet in the loose sand and cobbles. Once I hit that and stopped trying to move hard pack I did much better. There is no telling how it was deposited with different water levels receding etc.


Black sands are just one of many minerals. Here are some amber sands I have to deal with that have a higher specific gravity than your typical black sands. There is no magic trick. It's all physics, and if you have two minerals with the same density you're kind of screwed. All you can do is classify like hell and try to get everything uniform. Pyrite has a density around 5g/cm^3. Wulfenite is around 7. Black sands are just a common thing used as reference.