Panning for Gold

 

One of the more interesting things we did on out Arizona vacation was pan for gold.  The place has a number of old mines - including a gold mine.  The gold mine even has a cement arrastra where the miners once ground down the ore to extract the gold.  I had recounted to the cousins how back in the late1970s my brothers and I had panned the tailings from the mine and found gold.  So when Polly actually found the old pans that we had used back in the day we decided to give it a try.

So off we went to the gold mine to fill up buckets with the tailings (dirt with ore in it).  Sam even went down into the mine shaft and tried to get more gold rich stuff from the actual gold vein (his ore actually ended up more iron rich with very little gold). And then came the hardest part - carrying the ore back to the house where we had a hose.  Carrying 2 heavy buckets full of dirt reminded me of my summer job on an archaeological excavation - I flashback to the hundreds of buckets of dirt I carried last summer to the back dirt pile.  

Back at the house I showed everyone how to pan for gold.  Basically fill the pan with dirt and water and stir it all up so that the heavier gold settles to the bottom.  This is a slow process.  And then you scrape the sand and gravel with no gold in it off of the top. The hardest part is at the very end when you got to get the gold out of the pan.  We did not even try to do the final separation of getting the gold out of the final bit sand and iron ore.  

Anyway, it was cool to see the gold color in the bottom of the pans, and it looks like we got more more than there actually is because the pans are black and gold 'color' shows up nicely on black.  We ended up half filling a little spice jar with the 'fines' of gold, iron ore and sand.  We probably got enough that, if we were able to separate it out and sell it, we probably could have paid for the water used to do the panning.

Patrick