Gold in Sacramento?

Onedigger

Greenie
Jan 4, 2014
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I took a hand auger down to 12 feet in my backyard after finding six colors in a pan taken from my front yard on top of hardpan. Went through 4 feet of topsoil, 4 feet of cemented gravels and then hit loose, course sand. Tiny specks in the sand. Thinking about opening it up to 4x4feet and get past the sands as this area was not dredged.
 

tamrock

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Jan 16, 2013
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I would think so. I worked for a mining equipment company in the later 1980s there in Rancho Cordova. Much of the American River basin was dredged for gold with these big bucket line machines. The ground on where our shop was was dredged up by a mining company called the Natomas Company. The landlord who owed our building had been around since the dust bowl days as he was a kid when his Okie parents lost it all and headed for California. He knew a lot about the old gold dredging operation there in the Sacramento Valley and I believe he told me he purchased much of that land around there from the Natoma Company after they dug it all up. I'm sure there's still a little color left around in the creeks and maybe even the irrigation ditches to pan out.
 

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mofugly13

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Jan 30, 2015
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Did these dredged scrape down to bedrock? Thats the idea right? But, I cant see that those buckets effectively scraped the top of the bedrock... and if those gold fields had gold suspended in the aggregate.... wouldn't it stand to reason that there would be quite a bit sitting right on top of the bedrock that a giant cast iron bucket would be unable to catch?
 

tamrock

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Did these dredged scrape down to bedrock? Thats the idea right? But, I cant see that those buckets effectively scraped the top of the bedrock... and if those gold fields had gold suspended in the aggregate.... wouldn't it stand to reason that there would be quite a bit sitting right on top of the bedrock that a giant cast iron bucket would be unable to catch?
I've wondered that myself.
 

SchoolOfHardRocks

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Apr 30, 2014
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This is true, there is undoubtedly pounds of AU left on the bedrock that the bucket dredges couldn't get.... The issue is: Getting down to bedrock to get the gold. This is a perfect example of the common theory that most of the gold is still there. The problem is that the majority of the good gold that still exists is too difficult/ not profitable to get to.
 

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