How to Find Placer Gold - Meandering low Relief Streams
In New Brunswick we have large valleys with terrains of low relief. Quite often you will find meandering streams in these areas which are slightly harder to prospect for gold in due to their rapidly changing nature. In the Picture below you will find a great illustration from www.Geologycafe.com on how these meandering streams can be prospected. Land Forms to look for and also what present day features we can use to find Placer gold deposits.
You can see at the bottom of the figure that there are several areas outside of the present day flow which offer the possiblity of finding gold deposits. These landforms are rather common in New Brunswick and within the vicinity of known hard rock gold deposits. Very little of these area's have been explored, with minor testing being carried out by the Government of Canada and Department of energy and mines in the form of Till surveys. Placer gold values are often nil to low in sediment samples due to the depth of these placer gold deposits. Techniques for exploring this type of placer gold deposit are usually reserved to soil core drilling, ground penetrating radar and trenching. All of these techniques are relatively expensive and are not always afforable by the prospector. I have put together a method in which I use to test these potential placer gold gravels.
When Exploring these valleys with meandering streams look for the highest benches in the valley. From there get as close to the valley edge as possible and try to locate evidence of past stream activity. From there dig test pits and look for a hard pan layer which is often rusted. From there break up the hard pan with your tool of choice and begin panning the gravel. In my past experiences I have found that these gravels are often so compact that you need to let the gravel saturate in your pan with water for a bit before hand. A simple way of processing this material is to have a 25 Litre pail filled about 3/4 of the way with water. From there drop your potentially gold bearing material in the pail and let it sit. Keep adding material until the bucket is almost overflowing. After letting the material soak for a few minutes, grab a stick and stir the material vigorously to help break up the material. Pour the material into your classifier. and pan out the gravel. You will often find small amounts of black sand in this material but keep in mind, the best stuff is yet to come. As you were stirring the bucket, any gold bearing gravels would have hopefully broken up and liberated the gold inside. As you stirred the bucket vigorously the black sands and gold should have slowly worked its way closer to the bottom of the pail. Similar to panning you actually classified some of your materials in the process. When you finally get to the bottom of the pail take care to rinse the bucket into your pan, ensuring any gold or black sands aren't stuck to the sides and bottom. This is where you will most likely find gold flakes, Nuggets or powder.
This is just one of the prospecting methods you can use when exploring these types of areas, I will wrtie further articles on how to find gold in low relief areas or meandering streams in the future.
NB Prospecting
