Twapster said:
Dude, am I missing something? The gold you have shown in that pan is indicative of a primary source EXTREMELY close by.....so im expecting further gold finds. Looks like you are so close to the source its not funny....how much detecting have you done in that spot? That sort of gold tells me it has not travelled 50m. Anyone disagree???
Hi Twapster,
thanks for your obvious enthusiasm over my post.
The photo is perhaps a rather poor effort on my part - in my haste to get out of the hot sun, I just poured the gold out of the snuffer bottle into the pan and took a pic. What might appear to be quite coarse/chunky gold is mostly several/many bits of fine gold heaped upon each other. Let me assure you that the gold source is not anywhere nearby IMO - I have tested many, many spots over the past 2 years. I have taken small amounts of gold out of many places upstream and downstream, all the way to the property upstream boundary 1.5km away. Most of it is well water worn although some bits are a little chunkier/coarser - but not sufficiently so to suggest proximity to the source of shedding into the creek. To put some perspective on it, about 70% of the gold I have found in the creek is flour gold; 25% is fine gold that won't pass through the kitchen flour sieve; and 5% are pickers (of which most came out of one crevice on a rock bar in a section of creek 'rapids' that the oldtimers overlooked)
If the source of the gold is or was nearby, I am sure the oldtimers - in particular the Chines prospectors that were there for some time - would have done a lot more digging that what they did.
I wish I had a better handle on how far gold can travel, especially during a flash flood. In particular, I am curious about the chunkier small stuff that won't go through your normal kitchen sieve. How far could that sized gold travel assuming a flash flood every 5-10 years or so? Will it travel a matter of metres or a matter of kilometres?
As I mentioned in my previous post, I also captured a 10g piece of waterworn glass out of the same flood deposit that has travelled > 7 km in not more than 160 years.
Rest assured, I fully intend to continue my one-man crusade to find good gold in that creek.