Just a stupid question

[Bruce R]

I was watching that gold rush program and I was wondering, is there gold in the oversized tailings ? If there were a golf ball sized nugget, where would it go ?

 

[mike(swWash)]

Gold metal detectorists love tailing piles for the missed large chunks/specimens....

As far as watching both of the Gold Rush series, I wish I could process the tailings from just a days run from their sluice boxes. There has to be 1000's of ounces of flour washing away each season....the same goes especially for the short sluices used in the bearing sea winter series.

You look at what is dumped out and weighed up on tv and a very, very small percentage is flour...mostly just large, course chunks and nuggets.

Large gold is easy to catch, aim for the small....the large stuff will take of itself .

Like in the days of old, they only want to deal with the larger stuff even though there's more fine gold in the world than course stuff.

 

[Back-of-the-boat]

I have read stories where dredge workers have seen huge nuggets go out with the tailings.

 

[Bruce R]

I figured as much. I guess it would just cost too much to run the oversized tailings through a cone crusher and then through the plant again, or crush the material first.

 

[russau]

I think when they are ALL DONE with their cut that there is a lot of fine gold still laying on bed rock or down in the cracks & crevices and it would be just to much work to get all of it ! I just wonder how much fine gold is really left there when they are done Maybe running a street sweeper over the "done claim " would tell a additional new story !!?? Something to think about over a hot cup of coffee !

 

[Bruce R]

I was skimming over all the regulations about prospecting in the Klondike, apparently you can’t just wander around the countryside with your bedroll and gold pan checking out streams and so forth.

 

[OwenT]

Not sure about on the Canadian side but there's sure plenty of open areas in Alaska where a US citizen like yourself could do just that.

There are several areas I've heard of and probably many more where detectorist have found large multi-ounce nuggets in oversize tailings. There's just way too many chicken egg and bigger sized rocks and way too few nuggets that size for it to be worth it to run those through the sluices generally.