Gold Mining Accessibility

Sometimes, it is said that while more difficult it is to reach an area there are more possibilities it has been exploited in the past. This is true only up to a certain point. One must be reminded that during the gold rush most of the west of the United States was mostly inaccessible, but that did not stop the 49ers. Nowadays there are highways, roads and paths that go across all those lands that have not been exploited since the late 1800s, and some of these places are still unspoiled ones, so it is not uncommon to recuperate some considerable amounts of gold very near from the paths, roads or highways.

One will also hear about these incredible discoveries in those inaccessible places. Today, thee are many accessible grounds that keep a considerable amount of gold yet to be exploited, so inaccessibility is not necessarily a factor that indicates there is gold now; although it is a factor to be considered so as not to make an additional effort in taking the gear. This is also something one should take into account in the planning stage; topographic maps can be of great help.

Below Old Hydraulic Mines
Some of the largest hydraulic mining operations removed so much material that entire sections of the mountain slopes were dragged in the process. Experts coincide in that a third or half of the gold removed by the hydraulic operations got lost due to enormous volumes of washed material, done through the recovering systems. The lost gold would have been thrown away along with the remnants of other materials. Locations in which hydraulics were washed up to the current streams and or rivers are always good places for sampling.

These areas have proven to be very rich once and again. A third or half the gold of an operation that deals with hundreds of thousands or even millions of cubic yards of materials with gold content could cause –at present- large deposits or a series of deposits within the downstream bed.

In a well-known area, two close friends of mine were seeking for gold around alluvial soil below an old material dumping ground from a medium scale hydraulic operation that was performed in the early 1900s. One of my friends noticed the sewer running under the highway was made of corrugated steel and it occurred to him that this could work as a rifle in a “sluice box.” There were also transversal rails of the railway system located at the edge of the sewer system seam to protect it from collisions of rock and other materials that could be dragged during storms. As they were sampling the area they decided to examine some of the material that lay at the bottom of the sewer. I think that the combination of the iron rails and the corrugated steel acted as a good gold trap. My friends ended up extracting some more than thirteen ounces in the next couple of days!

There is another similar example with a professional dredger I know. He is the owner of a claim located in a river in which a 1930 medium scale hydraulic operation left behind some material remnants. For some time it has been rumored that the claim of this acquaintance is so rich that he constantly extracts, through dredging, round a pound of gold daily and he has been doing this for years.

Now something that happens in gold-mining is that the stories tend to grow as they go from mouth to mouth. Personally, everything goes well for me when I locate a good deposit but a pound of gold daily for several years is too much for me. So one day I was there by accident while the dredge was in the final wash up stage after a days work. I could estimate in a conservative way that he had no less than 6 ounces in the bowl, and probably a 60% of it was jewelry-grade (nuggets). And for what it is worth he was obviously upset with that day’s production.

There are many other similar stories that have been confirmed, and some are even better, about deposits of gold that have been located below the remnants of material of old hydraulic operations that have been thrown into current water stream ways. Keep this in mind when seeking optimum locations.