River and Gravel Gold Deposits

River Deposits
After a stream is no longer a creek and joins other creeks together to turn into a river the same type of extensive placer is what is known as a river deposit. This can be distinguished by fewer boulders to obstruct dredging and the gold found in it is finer.

In higher elevations, river deposits were often times worked on by diverting the river and by building big sluices and digging the dry river bed down to bedrock. Nowadays bulldozers are used on some of the deposits. In lower areas where the river is quite a bit wider huge dredge lines were used.

Even though large-scale operations might seem like something alluring, keep in mind that this type of thing would require a great amount of testing beforehand. Due to the fineness of the gold and since it is evenly distributed in the river deposit, the kind of placer offers very little opportunity for amateur prospectors.

Gravel Plain Deposits
Even though there are many people that portray gravel plain deposits in a different way, they are normally talking about a large deposit of gravel, which is normally a big area close to the mouth of the river where it flows into plains or in areas where the river alters to a very low gradient in an especially broad valley. These are often times mixed up with bench places however bench placers are a lot smaller.

Gravel plain deposits are in most cases very easy to sample. The tests that were done in the past led to extensive commercial working methods and some of the deposits in California have produced as much as $100,000,000 worth of gold. They are not convenient areas for amateur prospectors though. 

Most of the streams in the country have been exhausted from their gold or at least exhausted to the point where the costs for testing it goes above the selling price. However this is speaking in the commercial sense, as the amateur prospector does not have to worry about this issue though. Remember that you will not need to be concerned about taxes, equipment, payrolls, supplies, shipping etc, etc. the only thing you should look into if you are thinking about doing prospecting in a certain area is that you obtain the adequate permission to prospect in that specific area. You do not want to be caught trespassing into someone’s property.

Stream placers are great for amateur prospectors or weekend prospectors to work with because they are always being replenished with gold every year.