Alaska Gold Panning

Alaska is one of the most important places where gold prospectors are located since much time ago with objective of finding gold by panning in any place of this cold place. For example, field tests are practiced in many claims like bedrock areas. Placer deposits are in flood gravel deposits with no bedrock concentration. Gold panning traditionally is carried out in rivers, or bench deposits.

Gold panning has been probed into all sorts of material from sand to gravel to big rock gravel. It has been tested against big rock deposits and even bedrock underlying gravel and its simplicity for obtaining good results has been awesome.

As far as results obtained are excellent. Bench tests and field tests are the most important signal of reliability. When a prospector says gold, it means that the right place has been founded and probably other precious metals can be present in the deposit (e.g. silver, platinum). Obviously, all prospector employs different level of discrimination in order to judge a potential gold deposit. Don’t forget that purer gold or small particles of gold are no matter the important aspect is to find gold.

Black sands are an indicative of a gold area. A gold prospector can detect hotspots for gold by identifying heavy sands. The prospector can track both gold and heavy material and then will be important to take a sample for panning. Of course, a prospector could be in an area that has other heaviest than you can imagine. Location of gold bearing material can be covered and discover to right place could take time. It is evident that several prospectors had begun test pits, but had quit too early as there was no indication of pay until hitting gold bearing gravel. Maybe, some place was easy to dig and find gold, but problems can appear and then imagination and skill are the best tools that any gold prospector can have in his mind.

Other zones to prospect for gold panning is located across gravel bars. A good idea can be to check for placer indication in flood gravel layers on bedrocks. It is important to test an area of dry ancient river gravel that was exposed by a road cut. Similarly, to test old tailings piles. Rumor has it that these deposits could have been cyanided and some times, particles of free gold are still there. An attractive possibility is to try to track the gold bearing portion of material that had been through a screening plant. These plants produced washed, screened gravel and as result, the fine sand tailings carried important amounts of fine gold. They had left these tailings in large piles and over the years since the plant closed, the piles had been eroded almost flat. Probably, certain parts of the gravel deposit can be gold bearing, so only certain tailing piles could have gold in them.

One alternative very practiced has been to test by panning flood layers in a river to see the possibility of finding a gold deposit or potential zone. If some results are good after panning several samples, it will be interesting to estimate the relative value of the area by using more detailed study.