So tonight’s topic of interest is kind of near and dear to me, I’m going to start with the first slide; Rocks and Gold Clues. What rocks tell you about where to find gold, there are clues that they give and those are very important if you’re going to find gold and that’s what we’re here for; right? Hi, I’m Prospector Jess; this is another hangout regarding gold prospecting and how to find gold. I just want to make sure that everybody is in tune with where we’re going. The adventure for tonight is about rocks and gold and how the two are connected together. I have a background in geology and engineering, primarily from UCSD. I have been an engineering manager for a number of years and then more recently I’ve been doing work helping with gold prospecting. The gold prospecting part I started it as a family adventure but actually, it’s deep in my roots, my great-grandfather was a prospector in 1849. So it’s one of those things where I learned about it as a child and then learned again when I had children. And I think it’s important to recognize that a certain amount of excitement and history that goes along with gold prospecting that I will share with you as we go along.
So first take a look at this picture, you can see the water rushing down. This is a Lake Spring flow after rain but what you see is the nature of the rocks that you’re looking at. These are basically the stream bed, bedrock. But there’s something interesting I wanted to call your attention to; two things on this, one is that the number one item arrow points to some white lines running horizontally. You can see them striping the opposite bank of this creek or ravine. Those lines correspond to gold potential being injected via corts veins or corts stringers. So these are actual cracks that were exploited by hydrothermal venting into the host rock. The host rock, being this number two which this green stone commonly is known as serpentine. And that material basically is formed at great depth; it’s heavy in iron and other minerals that make it tend to be weak when it comes to the surface. Water that comes up through the surface material gets injected into those cracks in the form of hydrothermal vents. I will talk more about that in a little bit, but that water can have a high concentration of silicon in the form of corts but it’s more of a fluid kind of corts. So it’s this liquid with water in it and being that it actually becomes acidic and dissolves the metals and carries them with it until it hits certain conditions like corners and changes in size. That will cause it to precipitate out the metals that are in solution that precipitate forms load gold deposits.
Those are things that you’re looking for but our primary adventure here will be with the load gold after it erodes in the creek in the form of placer deposits down in these creeks below where the load rolls out. And as you can see with that water rushing through there and the rocks and boulders and material coming down, it’s like a giant (4:37 spelling) or a grinder through there through the winter season. So especially in high flood and that will break down all that materiel and that smashes that stuff and the corts is very brittle and will essentially break apart and release its contents in the form of load materiel. We will talk a little bit more about that in the second. So to find gold you’re going to need to know where the gold came from in the first place. That’s why I hinted at that with those injections because there are several different sources for gold. One of the primary ones is these hydrothermal vents. You can also have metamorphic gold which comes up from the reformation or compression of old sedimentary deposits under heat and pressure. Or in some cases even sedimentary deposits that may have concentrates of gold that are concreted with other materials with them. So it’s important to understand the nature of that material and how it connects between the materials you’re looking at and the kind of gold you’re looking for in this location.
I also connect the rocks that come with gold along with the water and the flood effects on those golds; how it affects them. Softer rocks tend to deteriorate more rapidly, harder and tighter welded rocks tend to be affected over longer periods but slowly. What minerals go with the gold? So one of the key things here is to know the chemistry of the metals involved and some of the other elements that go along that might affect the way the gold deposits. And also what might show up nearby in the way of minerals or corrosive materials that would show up and give you the kind of traces in color and luster etc. So then you would know what to look for. So let’s take a look at an example, this is a corts stringer but notice it doesn’t look like the one that we saw originally. It’s not that smooth, long thing it looks rather corroded and it has a whole bunch of likens and other stuff living in it. But the reality is, see the reddish earth and the black background and that white stringer that tells you that the host rock is basically deteriorating rapidly. And the reason for that often times in this kind of material, I know a little bit about this one, is there are sulfides nearby. So the acid helps to erode the host material as well as the corts itself and the stringer. Especially if there’s manganese involved and that’s a purple, black mineral.
They will act as a catalyst in the reaction between the corts and the sulfuric acid that’s released by oxidizing those sulfides. Now the sulfides are commonly in the form of something that we’ve all heard you never look for when you’re looking for gold and that is pyrite. Pyrite has part iron and part sulfur and when that iron starts to corrode out the sulfides basically between water and air can turn into sulfuric acid. What you also may not know is, with those sulfides can go other minerals, other metals in particular. In this case it was copper with some gold, about five or 10 percent in this load. So it turned out to be a valuable thing to mine, the recovery of the copper would yield the gold, so that’s what they did. So what are rock and gold clues? Gold has unusual elemental properties; those properties will lead us to understand what it is that gold will do. Now let me give you a little bit of a background on some of those properties. There is density, malleability; gold is a very dense and gold is very soft. It has an unusual color and its alloys well with certain other metals such as silver, platinum, copper as we mentioned a second ago. It is also relatively entered chemically compared with those other metals with exception of platinum. So when you look at that it will out weather those other metals and so if it is found in ratio because it’s an alloy, that solution on the surface when exposed to sulfuric acid and the oxidation of air and water will tend to enrich the material that it is in.
And there are certain placer deposits that will show just that, that is the nuggets are richer than the original load stone in some areas because of how the silver has corroded out differentially compared to the gold. It’s an interesting property and what it means is, you can oftentimes tell where a certain piece of gold came from if those other rocks and other minerals such as sulfides are in the area, Because you will see that the gold is very rich, de-yellow color not silvery gray like some other areas are when you see placer gold in the river. Also we need to look at the near neighbors and what they’re elemental affinity is for each other. For example; looking at iron, silver, copper, platinum, sulfur and manganese. Each of these minerals is often found in conjunction with gold or gold minerals and what it can do is affect the chemistry in such a way that you will spot those materials much earlier than you will the gold that’s around them. And so one of the things you want to learn to do is how to spot those kinds of rocks by the mineral stains that they leave behind and we will talk about that in a second. So how do you spot these rocks?
What are some of those rock and gold clues that we’re looking for? Rocks have characteristics, they have density also. And the ones we’re looking for will be heavy and the reason is, if you look at those minerals we talked about earlier iron, silver, etc. they tend to be heavy in terms of where they are on the periodic table. And so the minerals that form out of them tend to be heavy in terms of their density, relative to corts which will considerably be a base background material. So what we’re looking for are those kinds of things, also they tend to be sulfide loaded and that leads to other things like corrosion. So the colors, what you tend to look for are redder the better; that’s a saying, remember that. Also black or blue green, in other words rusty, corroded-looking stuff is a big hint that you’re heading in the right direction when you start pulling out rocks. I will have a little show and tell here in a minute. So the former shape that those rocks take, mainly you’re looking for the crystalline forms of the minerals inside of the rocks. That is things like the cubit forms of pyrite, the rainbow colors and fractures chalcopyrite which is a copper pyrite, often found in conjunction with gold. As well as other minerals like corts that has its own concoital fracture and shape. It doesn’t form crystals, except when you find things like that amethyst and stuff like that.
That’s really not what we are looking for as much as we are these injected corts stringers. And typically they don’t have much in the way of what they call crystal habit or shape. In addition were looking for other minerals, I mentioned that manganese, those purple-colored, the iron. You won’t see iron in its reduced form as a metal like steel, what you’re going to see is rust, really deep, dark, reddish, stained grimy stuff maybe even down to black. As well as black hematite and other magnetic materials that go along with it and I will show you a little demo on that one. Igneous, metamorphic sometimes sedimentary but start primarily with the igneous and hydrothermal injection for your primary candidates in the rock area. And then when you get to the creek bed you’re going to be looking for corts and large corts rocks that break out and carry with them potential load material. And also some of these crystalline hints and mineral hints that go along with it. Again how do you spot these rocks? So what we’re looking at right here is a rock that my wife is holding and this is jasper like materiel. Notice it has what we call concoital fracture. Its cut and looks almost like broken glass through it. And then if you see it in water, this thing is almost deep blood red or dark, dark brown red. So when you see a bunch of these showing up in your pan or in your sluice box, that’s a good sign.
This is the high end iron content that’s what gives it the reddish color; it’s also very dense so it hangs with the minerals that hang with gold. The key is density, gold likes to go to the bottom and things that are heavy and dense like iron, maybe even steel parts from a car or bolts and nuts will actually go down and hang with it. So you are looking for those clues because they all tell you earlier than you will ever find the gold that you’re in the right area to start finding it and then you want to intensify your search. So rock and gold clues, the rock types and mineral composition tell you what you’re looking for. We talked about having a lot of heavy minerals. a lot of iron and other stuff as well as sulfides and oxides which will give it a bluish or greenish tinge, things like that. The characteristic colors typically are darker than lighter. Specific gravity is going to be heavy, were talking something that feels like you’re holding up a piece of steel as opposed to something that feels like you’re just holding a rock.
Sometimes they are magnetic in their nature; these are hematites also related minerals and their elemental compositions. I showed you some of those green stones, I will show you a few more in a second. But those are things that hang with gold. These gold rocks and there’s a whole bunch of topics here, are important to understand but what I’m doing right now is giving you this overview of which ones you’re looking for and some rules of thumb that I use all the time to help find gold. Before we go into this section, I want to spend a second going over some show and tell. So let me switch cameras here and go live. So with that; let’s set up some walk-through to demonstrate what I’m talking about. So I have some rocks with me, I’m going to show them to you on the camera and to do so I have to change the focal point of the camera so you can see the crystals and the colors and things like that. I’m going to put them here and I have to have both the rocks and the camera set up right. So let me adjust the lighting a little bit; okay can everybody see that? This is what looks like an ordinary piece of corts that you will find a (18:24 spelling). It’s rounded and shaped on the bottom of a creek bed that has placer gold.
Now what caught my attention were these (18:34 unclear) marks. Do you see these little spots on the surface that look like little dental cavities on a tooth? Those (18:41 unclear) are where they use to be minerals such as pyrites and other metals that have eroded out of this corts stringer, this used to be a corts stringer. When you look inside and break the rock open you see something quite interesting and that is these colors. I’m going to have to drop this down some more and maybe boost the color intensity so you can see the colors better. Now, see the colors and the glow, notice rusty things start looking inside the rock and in particular notice this spot over here where it’s very dark and purple, that’s that manganese that I was talking about. So what you’re looking for are rocks that are full of these kinds of mineralizations and typically are much darker on the outside than this and I will show you some of that later. But this is stuff that heads towards a tertiary type of corts deposits. The tertiary ones will be very dark, maybe even blue to black in their coloration not so much white on this outer surface. Here’s another shot of that same rock, notice we’re starting to get really dark stuff. This is the same rock, this is a better sample. Notice how dark and black the corts gets, now you start looking in this kind of mineral for a couple of crystals of corts. Inside this kind of stuff can easily be basically crystalline corts which can be quite valuable.
You kind of decide how you want to break it up but at the same time if you’re just sampling and looking for this stuff then you can go this route. I will show you in a minute how to do that without breaking it open. Here is another one, notice how this one is just totally packed and look at all that rust. You see that mineralization and the crystal habit that used to be in there leaves a dent in the shape of what used to be a crystal. But it’s been out and the corts starts looking a lot less like corts and a lot more like a cavity or a bad tooth, a lot of black in there. Now we’re heading in some good territory but again this is a piece of leave a right, leave-a-right-there. Now I want to call your attention to another type of rock, pretty important and that is some of these dark mineralizations like this. These heavy peridotite or serpentine type rocks, these are actually high end in ultra-mafic. So it’s magnesium-ferric in its basis. And that tends to make them extremely dense and they also tend to be areas where there’s a lot of intrusive volcanic activity. And that’s paired up with finding gold and load gold at that. And of course this is a piece of magnetite and I’ll show you in a minute what that means, actually I will show you right now.
I brought a magnet and a piece of steel and our magnet attaches. If I take a piece of magnetite and take my magnet and go to the surface it sticks to it just like it did to the steel. In fact this guy will set off a compass or any other device and I will show you that in the second when we work with our metal detector. Because this can play havoc as a hot rock but this is one of those things that still is an indicator that you’re in the right area for gold. And when you start finding ones like this and your down near bed rock and you want to make sure you clean those gaps in the bed rock cracks thoroughly. Other rocks you might find in the vicinity are things like slate, this is a metamorphic rock. Basically it’s made out of the material that once was basically a clay materiel. That hardened and then metamorphosed. Now why is this significant? Well one, it can have layers of fine gold that’s embedded in it from previous gold placer deposits. These are ancient ones that are re-welded into this rock, so that’s one piece. Another thing is if this rock is long and vertical, notice it has this linear structure to it that makes a great gold trap. So when you see these rocks sticking out of the bottom of the creek and the water is flowing over them; it looks just like a ripple doesn’t it? That’s because it will act just like one too.
So that’s an important kind of rock to keep your eye looking for anyway. The other kinds of things you’ll run into are rocks like this, where there is this kind of metamorphic structure but fine gradation in there. Sometimes in a rock like this they will actually mine this kind of stuff as they did at the home state up in South Dakota. Where these rocks had micron gold embedded in them from ancient water flows that have since been welded into this rock and there was sufficient gold that was a very high production gold mine up until more recent history. So it’s important to consider everything you’re looking at, not everything will show up as a visible gold deposit. I mentioned earlier about serpentine and that kind of material, here’s one that’s interesting. So you start to get into serpentine and then these slick areas on the side are indicators of other materials such as stuff that will turn into asbestos and that kind of structure. This is a very heavy rock, dense material; it will go in the area where gold is found. So it’s important to keep your eye out for this kind of structure. By the way the micro crystalline form of this is a little bit more metamorphosed will be jade, if you’re familiar with that. So these are all different kinds of rocks and have different properties. I thought I’d also show you a little bit about what happens when you take a few of these, such as this one which is dull and uninteresting. But yet it has an interesting tone to it and I’ll just wet it down and show you what it looks like when it’s wet.
Notice how dark it got and notice it has those red overtones we were looking for, for the rust and purple. That is not uncommon, the mineral structure will look very dull when it’s dry but when it’s wet it will look quite different. Some of these things are night and day and so you want to keep that in mind when you’re looking at the mineral that you can’t always tell. Now I mentioned earlier the possibility of having some minerals that have pyrites associated with them and some gold. I want to show you something, this is heavy in chalcopyrite. See the rainbow colors and the brilliant luster to that mineralization. There is a story behind this; this is gold ore and its chalcopyrite, so it’s high in copper and high in gold. So high that recently the mine that came from was approached by some people from China to basically export shiploads of that material to process in mainland China, not even where the mine was. So the value of what you see and what you’re looking for can be quite different than what you think. And that’s part of what I want to do, is open your mind to being ready to explore the difference things you’re seeing and challenge yourself with what it is that you’re looking at to understand what it is that it really might be worth and where it’s telling you to go next.
And I think that’s about it for our rocks. I did want to show you one more thing. I have a Falcon MD 20 detector here, let me show you what this is. So this is a metal detector a really handy gold tracker and what it does, is it’s a pin pointer. It’s a small little metal detector very precise and a very useful tool to solve that problem I mentioned when you’re looking at a stone and don’t know whether it might have gold in it of significant size or not, So I’m going to tune this thing up and then we’ll take a look at what it tells us about the rocks we just looked at. So hang on one second, when you hear that beeping sound, that’s the alarm going off telling us that we have something as a target. I’m tuning it to where it sounds just like a bee in the background or a mosquito. So I have gold on my finger, as I approach this it makes a distinctive sound on approach, that’s a positive signal for gold, the way this thing works. If it goes and makes a signal on the way as I pull away from it, then what we are talking about is not gold, it’s hot rock or usually iron oxides. So here is our good friend the magnetite and so when I approach it, not just one signal but many and that’s basically the way the wave forms collapse as I approach. See it’s not making any noise as I go towards it, it’s as I go away, so that’s negative.
Now we have some of our corts, now this thing is so sensitive that the way I just dialed it in it will sense gold the size of a head of a pin within about an inch or maybe half inch. So I detect all around this piece and nothing is happening. Remember this guy, as I approach, so that’s significant, that’s a really good rock not a hot rock. So it’s really important to have the right tools and to know how to use them to keep yourself from being confused by what you’re looking at. It’s also important to know what you’re looking at because the best tool you have is right here; your eyes and your brain, that beats one of these 100,000 to one and there’s no question about it. But it is important to know that as you’re looking at rocks you can have all kinds of rocks that have properties that affect essentially their ability to carry gold. They can look like something as plain as a piece of slate that might have a stringer of gold embedded in it and if it did then a bunch of slate around it might be well worth going after. But if not then don’t bother. And that was it for today; are you ready for Q & A? Let’s go.
I wanted to bring up one thing; a lot of people ask me where I get this information. This is actually out in print now it’s Earth by Preston Seaver. I’ll give you an idea I just looked it up on Amazon and I can get a copy used for about 90 bucks. This was $14.95 when I was in college, so things have changed. Maybe better would be to get your hand on a couple of books here, one of course I had mentioned to many people and that is Gold Prospectors Handbook by Jack Black. And then the other one is this series Gold Mining in the 21st trench Century by Dave McCracken. Both of those books will give you a good start on gold prospecting in general. The problem is that I found with many of the books is they don’t go into the details that I just showed you about what you’re looking for and how to look, so that’s why we are here. So time for questions, before we go to questions I wanted to cover one more thing. Let me go back to the slides for a moment. So before we go to Q&A, if you want to know more about how to find gold then you probably need to check out the Gold Prospectors Bonanza Club to get access to prospecting courses, newsletters and more golf finding insight starting today. You just go to this link at hunting4gold.com/get/gpbc/membership, that’s gold prospectors’ bonanza club membership. And take a look at what it has and the basic topics that we cover and the benefits you get. So if you want to, that’s where you can go next.
And now we start into our Q&A session. Here are the brief rules of engagement; so please stick to the topic of the day if at all possible these will get top priority in my answer queue. The time is limited to roughly 30 min. for all Q&A’s if possible. If you have more than one question go ahead and put it in there, pick your biggest issue first. That’s okay to have more but I’ll only be able to answer one per Q&A cycle. And as we found last week there may have been a few that I didn’t get to. We’ll queue those up for answering but if we don’t have time, we don’t have time and I’m sorry about that. So let the questions begin, ask your top gold prospecting question for today’s topic of rocks and gold clues. Be specific, restate the one question with a small back story if that helps you, so that I can rephrase that and put it out there for everybody else so they understand the background of what your question is.
Type in your questions in the Q&A section on the page and then I will be monitoring that and talking back with you about what the answers are that I have for you and we’ll see where we go from there. Let me adjust our cameras a bit, I could not make my face and a rock work the same way, I don’t know why. So let’s have the questions I’m going to switch over to the other screen and trust that this stays live, if it does not my compatriots will come and get me. Too intense on the color and not enough on the contrast. Okay, so type in your questions, I’m going to switch over to the other screen. You can see me but I cannot see me, what I’ll be looking for is your Q&A’s on the site. The chat has been closed, okay here we go. People enjoyed the last session; I’m going to pick up on todays, so
Q & A
Stepotto says: For the geo on one of my mining claims in Idaho, I found a bunch of material I’m not used to seeing it called amber sands because that’s what it looks like. Under magnification it looks like golden corts, mouse turds.
Prospector Jess: That’s an interesting description
Stepotto: They are heavy, more so than the black sands and I found that if I powder them with mortar and pestle I can pan them and extract gold. There is a bunch, so much so that within an hour or so it fills the ripples in my sluice and I have to clean out often. They also make it real hard to separate the actual gold. Any idea what it is?
Prospector Jess: Not exactly, you are describing that you are actually able to crush it and extract real gold. Have you had that assayed for the concentration? Take the amount of material that you have, a fixed size of, grind out the material to reduce out the gold, pan that out and then essentially make sure that you know what the percentage of gold is in that. That requires a fire assay, from that you can take the original volume or the original size weight and figure out how much gold per pound you have. That’s an important factor when you’re looking at something like this. Now the fact that you have gold coming out is pretty cool, I’m not familiar with amber sands and if anybody in the audience is, I will be glad to have them pipe up because I haven’t heard of this. Usually a black sands do this kind and typically not amber. Now amber can go along with sapphires and other heavy crystal mineralization such as garnets and things like that. And they typically pan out along with gold because of their density, so it’s not unusual to see that. What is unusual is to see large quantities of a particular coloration that could indicate that you’re sitting in the area that has sapphires and garnets and things like that. And that might mean that you have gem possibilities in your future and you might consider putting a grease plate at the end of your sluice because it will capture those crystals that might otherwise just bounce on through your system. But it sounds like you’re capturing them, so that’s a pretty cool thing.
Q & A
Danny: How do you get kids interested in a career in gold mining/prospecting?
Prospector Jess: I like to give my kids toy versions of the tools we regularly use in prospecting and mining like rock tumblers and even metal detectors and so play then becomes very much centered around how to find things like gold, silver, and emeralds.
I find that children are super curious about the world around them and having the knowledge of where to find gold is something that kids really want to know more about. Making sure they have the right tools (even if they are not like the real thing) is a great experience and is far better than another kid in this world being glued to his/her game console. Both my sons studied geology and both I am proud to say they both have high flying careers in the gold mining industry.
Anon: Last week was easy, I have nothing and getting gold chat going took me a half-an-hour is there a link to the video.
Prospector Jess: I don’t know and that’s an interesting problem.
Erosinbox: I would like to know more about the colors of the rocks to look for. Do you know of any online photo references available?
Prospector Jess: Actually I don’t know of any online ones, I do know of a really good one but none that really focuses solely on gold. The one I use is called MINDAT and that site is worth its weight in gold but it also covers just about every kind of mineral you can think of. It’s one of the world’s largest collections of mineral photos and it’s great in the way that it is tagged and grouped so that you can search it. It also has extensive chemistry and mineral properties descriptions along with each sample. So for example those amber sands, I might want to go in there and look around a bit to see what can be found because that’s a pretty powerful site. It can be used to find that stuff MINDAT.
Erosinbox: How can a small timer with only gold pan process micron gold?
Prospector Jess: Primarily the old-timer with gold pan would not be able to process a lot of micron gold. Especially if you’re talking about micron gold found in black sands without either a mortar and pestle or a small rock tumbler or a cement mixer with some metal parts in it to crush the rock down to really fine sand to release that micron gold and then a treatment using salt and some other heating agents etc. It’s a little long to go into in this session but there are ways of releasing it that utilize stuff that a small timer could use. Is it bigger than a panning project? Yes, sure, but at the same time if you have good concentration of micron gold like was mentioned earlier it could prove to be worthwhile. And then you might want to invest in a rock tumbler or something like that. To start with I would just invest in a mortar and pestle and crush out a small sample or two and see what you find. And then learn how to do that, there are several sites that have information about it. But what you want to do is combine it with salt and heating and drive off any excess chemistry, sulfides etc. to release the gold from the matrix and then basically reduce out the gold and pan out the result. It’s down the scope of this without a demo.
Related: Best Rock Tumblers Grit
Q & A
Greg: Can gold be found in lighter sands in brooks or will it always be found with black sands?
Prospector Jess: That is a really good question. Remember this guy I brought up earlier, magnetite, your black sands are composed of iron rich particles. Iron should be a big hint, iron is quite a bit heavier than corts which is what most of your light sands are composed of. So what’s going to happen; corts and feldspar and a couple other lighter aluminum silicates; aluminum tells you. How does aluminum compare to iron? Night and day in terms of density, same is true of the minerals they form out of. So what you’re looking for are these iron dense minerals and the reason is, they are dense like gold. They also have some chemistry that favors gold but the big thing is the density. So when you start seeing black sands you’re getting to the bottom layers of those sands. Now will there be cases where the blackness of the sand isn’t very rich and there is gold? Sure but the reality is in most cases you’re going to find that those things that will collect with your magnet. The stuff that you play with kids in sand pile is going to be attracted to the bottom with the gold. The density is the key; it’s not that they’re magnetic. Gold is not magnetic, it’s not that they have any chemistry in the sense of favoring one another other than certain weathering characteristics and that they form together but the big thing isn’t magnetic its density. These things are massive per unit volume and so is gold, so they go down to the bottom together under the lighter corts laden rocks. Think of this as a grain of sand and this as a grain of black sand, the black sand is going to go underneath that grain of sand and the gold is going to go underneath all that. That’s how you find these things but that’s what you’re looking for. So in most cases the black sands is going to be down there with the gold. Are there exceptions to the rule? Always, just not that often.
Q & A
Stepotto: In my clean outs there are always a lot of red garnets and clear gems and black gems, mainly red.
Prospector Jess: That’s a good sign. Those gems, especially those garnets are high in iron and chromium etc. other minerals that are dense like the iron and gold. So in general they tend to go down into the sands in the bottom and congregate where the gold congregates. So it’s not uncommon diamonds included for people to find that there is gems stones that there is gem stones that they pass through their sluice box because they didn’t have a grease plate to capture the gem stone. The grease plate is an extension to your sluice box that you coat with a thin layer of grease. You use grease because you don’t want the oil to float off and so forth but you want to after you’ve finished sifting out all the gold because you don’t want to contaminate and cause the gold to flow out of your sluice box. But what happens is all the fine sands float over the grease and because the facets have a particularly interesting affinity for water and grease sort of breaks that and so they stick to it, Once they stick they stay stuck and so those plates will actually concentrate the gem stones in that end of the plate. Now you can also use an ordinary gold pan to concentrate, there is also special pans that are made just for basically sifting out and concentrating gem stones and you’ll see some things on YouTube about those etc. But primarily if you’re looking at getting red garnets and gems in your clean outs that’s a good sign that you’re in a good area that you should fight gold with it.
Q & A
We also have somebody asking on YouTube from last week’s replay; is there gold in emerald ore?
And the answer goes along with what we just mentioned and that is emerald and chromium bearing minerals tend to be heavy along with gold bearing minerals. In fact there often times found together, if you look at the government gold maps thing we talked about and you look at the US GS MRDS, other than gold you can select diamonds and you can select gems and things like that. And it’s often times instructed to flip the target from gold and look at the other gems and minerals that are found adjacent and you’ll start seeing these parallels between there are gold mines here and look over here there’s a garnet mine used for sand paper garnet or for gem stone quality garnet. And that’s an interesting thing, same kind of thing you’ll see with chromium and emeralds and things like that. Not so much here in the states because that’s a rare mineral to be finding here but you will find diamonds down in Murfreesboro and down in the South where the gold belt runs through. So sometimes it’s instructed to go look for those minerals using the US GS MRDS along with looking for gold like we do in government gold maps; same tools just flip what you’re looking for.
Q & A
Is pyrite worth keeping?
In general the answer is no, it can be pretty with one exception or two. This is chalcopyrite when it has this rainbow glow it’s because it has copper in it. Copper and gold alloy together and often times go together with gold. At that point you’re going to want to do a little bit more to – if you find a significant amount of this to have a sample sent out for fire assay and find out the percentage of gold it has in concentration. Because you could be sitting on a pretty good find if it has a good concentration of gold measured in terms of percent, that’s a significant find. This particular rock is pretty dense, it compares with this magnetite in fact it feels a little denser when I heft the two. It is a bigger rock but when I feel it feels heavier. Now that can be copper but it can also be the significance of gold in this content which I happen to know is relatively high. So it just depends, pyrite in general is full gold, so when it glitters and it has those nice square facets it’s usually not that interesting, it’s distracting. But it also goes with gold in load, it gets injected with the same gold. They just typically precipitate a little further away from each other with exceptions like that when there is an alloy of silver or copper with them. When you get a high concentration of silver they call it electrum. The high concentrations of copper, typically chalcopyrite or copper itself and it can have gold with it and you will see that in places like the gold built up in Michigan, where there is a fair amount of copper and gold nearby. Good question by the way thanks for asking.
I had some questions here that were asked from the last few sessions and then I rearranged things just before, hang on one second. I clear everything out and then I lose it. You guys don’t ever have that problem do you? Well we’ll pick them up next week. I think at this point we’re good for go we are running right at one hour. If there are any more questions please let me know otherwise we will close for tonight and I will find my list of questions for next week and we will pick up. Next week were going to move the session to Friday night or Thursday but I think it’s going to be Friday night. Basically we have surgery coming up and my daughter is going in to have some knee work done and so we need to get that all squared away and that’s going to take us out on Wednesday night. So I would like to get a little space and make sure we can get our Q&A’s up. So if you don’t mind we will move it and I will let you know; any other questions? Okay, then we’ll wrap it up; let me go to a slide or two that I wanted to close with. So again what to do next; if you want to know more about how to find gold then you ought to check out the Gold Prospectors Bonanza Club. You can get access to these courses, the newsletters, finding insight also we’re going to be putting a back log of these webinars as we start producing them. They’ll go inside the club area so they will be up for a limited time on replay between each week and then they will go into archives inside the Prospectors Bonanza Club. So it’s another reason to join and go on to this link at hunting4gold.com/get/gbpc/membership and that’s how you start. So thanks everybody, thanks for joining and we’ll catch you next week. Prospector Jess over and out.