Know Where to Look for Gold
I shouldn’t tell you this, but I know that you won’t let it go any further: The Southwest is full of promising places to look for some gold.
In the southern half of California, for example, you can find good streams to work, I’ve been told, on public lands in that area west of Lake Tahoe, including Placer, El Dorado, Amador and Calaveras counties. Farther south, down toward Death Valley, you can drive west out of Bishop on Highway 168 for a few miles up into the Sierra Nevada range, where you will find streams that may put gold fines and small nuggets into your pan. Still farther south, near Lake Isabella, at the southern end of the Sierra Nevada Range, you will discover public land with an area set aside for recreational gold prospecting (see the U. S. Bureau of Land Management Internet site:) With good luck, you might even find a little gold in some of the stream beds in the Los Angeles area.
At the southern tip of Nevada, you might find potentially rewarding stream beds in the Eldorado Mountains, especially around Eldorado Canyon, the site of a major mining claim in the mid-19th century. You can reach the area by taking U. S. Highway 95 for about 10 miles south out of Boulder City, then turning southeast on state Highway 165, which will take you down the canyon to public lands and the Colorado River, downstream from Lake Mead.
In Utah, you can find placer gold, usually associated with volcanic rocks, within the Colorado River drainage system, including, for instance, the Dolores River (near Moab), Green River (in northeastern Utah), Abajo Mountain creekbeds (southeastern Utah) and the San Juan River (southeastern Utah). You may find that American Fork Canyon, which lies north of Provo and northeast of Utah Lake, will prove more rewarding than some other areas. Near the canyon’s mouth, you might find a small nugget and some “flour” gold. (See the Minin’ Gold, Utah Gold Locations, Internet Site.)
Out of the 15 counties in Arizona, you can find gold in at least 10 of them, mostly in the northwestern and southern part of the state. Some prospectors like to work the drainage systems and hillsides in the Tonto Basin, west of State Highway 87, in the northwestern corner of Gila County. Others take to the stream beds in the Lynx Creek area, a few miles south of Prescott, in the heart of Yavapai County. (See the Arizona Gold Prospectors Internet site )
In Colorado, you will find both lode (deposited in a rock matrix) and placer (deposited by stream flow) gold in over half of the state’s 64 counties, primarily from the north-central to the southwestern parts. For instance, around Central City, a historically rich gold-mining area west of Denver, you can find placer gold in some of the stream beds and even find showings in the tailings of past lode-mining operations. In southwestern Colorado’s San Miguel County, one of the state’s highest producers, you have a good chance of finding placer deposits of gold fines along the San Miguel River from Telluride downstream to the Montrose County line. (See the Golden Optimist Internet site )
In New Mexico, you can find placer gold in the streambeds of about a third of the state’s 33 counties, but you’ll likely have the most luck in Taos County, on the sand bars of the Rio Grande and Red River; Lincoln County, around the arroyo’s of the Jicarilla Mountains; and Grant County, in Bear Creek. Taos County is located in the north-central part of the state; Lincoln County, in the south-central part; and Grant County, in the southwestern part. (See the Minin’ Gold, New Mexico Gold Locations, Internet site.)
In western Texas, you won’t find much in the way of opportunities to prospect for gold (although the area is rich in lost treasure tales, lore and legend). That part of the Southwest has yielded relatively few discoveries. Moreover, most potential prospecting sites lie in private hands rather than federal or state ownership, making access more difficult. Recreational gold prospectors of western Texas usually head out of state, to more promising areas, often north, into New Mexico.
Know What to Load on Your Devoted Donkey (or Your Devoted SUV)
You can get started in gold prospecting for as little as $50 to $100, about what it will cost for a plastic pan set, a plastic classifier (or, sifter), a plastic suction bottle, tweezers, a magnifying glas, decent safety glasses and maybe even an instruction book, but almost certainly, as gold fever invades your psyche, spreading like a virus, you will feel an irrational compulsion to buy or build more equipment, most of it aimed at giving you a special advantage in finding more paydirt and move and process more ore.
You can, for a few examples, buy a folding shovel, for about $10 to $20, to help move dirt; an economy geologist’s pick or hammer, for maybe $10, to split or chip rock and take samples; a mortar and pestle, for less than $30, to loosen up and grind tightly bound gold-bearing dirt clods; a metal detector, for $200 to $900, to help find nuggests; a motor-driven panner, for several hundred dollars, to process gold-bearing stream soil; a shaker table, separater and steel base, for about $2000, to serve as an oversized pan; a riffled sluice box and accessories, for a few hundred dollars, to help separate gold from stream-bed soil; a surface or submersible dredge, for several thousand dollars, that sucks up dirt and gravel from the stream bed for separation; a trommel, for several thousand dollars, to help screen ore; or a dry washer, for several hundred dollars, to help separate gold from dry soils. You can buy a GPS navigation system, for some hundreds of dollars, to help you pinpoint and relocate claims. You can even buy a miner’s head lamp for about $30.00 to $40.00. That way, you can keep working even after the sun goes down.
If you choose, when you’re not prospecting, you can spend time constructing your own equipment, designing it specifically to meet the varying conditions you will inevitably encounter in prospecting, for instance, in shallow flowing stream beds, deep flowing stream beds, intermittent stream beds, sand bars or dry desert arroyos.
Know Where You Can Prospect Legally
Often, you may have to negotiate a labyrinthine maze of rules and regulations to get legitimate access to a prospecting site on public lands, doubly so if you propose to move up from simple non-mechanized equipment such as pans to powered equipment such as a suction dredge.
In U. S. National Forests, which are generally open to prospecting, you will still have to check with local USDA Forest Service offices to identify accessible areas and local regulations. Without specific permission, you could not legally prospect on private land within the forest boundaries nor on sites with already established mining claims. Moreover, you may find that the Forest Service has closed some areas to all prospecting and mining.
On public lands administered by the U. S. Bureau of Land Management, you will have to check with local offices to identify the areas available and the rules for prospecting. You could not prospect on lands that the BLM has withdrawn from mining operations, and you would need specific permission to prospect on lands with current mining claims.
On public lands administered by the states, you will have to check with the appropriate offices for any regulations that would govern prospecting. You may need to secure a mining lease or permit.
In any event, you would not likely be permitted to prospect in national or state parks, monuments, recreation areas or wildlife refuges. You will find the Indians reservations and the military posts closed to prospecting.
If you discover a promising location on legally accessible lands, you may wish to establish your own claim, which you would file with the appropriate federal, state and county offices.
You can begin your contacts with the federal agencies at the following addresses:
U. S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service
Arizona and New Mexico
USDA Forest Service
Southwestern Region
333 Broadway SE
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87102
Phone 1-505-842-3292
Web Site http://www.fs.fed.us/r3/
California
USDA Forest Service
Pacific Southwest Region
1323 Club Drive
Vallejo, California 94592
Phone 1-707-562-8737
Web Site http://www.fs.fed.us/r5/
Colorado
USDA Forest Service
Rocky Mountain Region
740 Simms Street
Golden, Colorado 80401
Phone 1-303-275-5350
Web Site http://www.fs.fed.us/r2/
Nevada and Utah
USDA Forest Service
Intermountain Region
324 25th Street
Ogden, Utah 84401
Phone 1-801-625-5306
Web Site http://www.fs.fed.us/r4/about/
U. S. Bureau of Land Management
Arizona
U. S. Bureau of Land Management
Arizona State Office
One North Central Avenue
Suite 800
Phoenix, Arizona 85004-4427
Phone 1- 602)-417-9200
Web Site http://www.blm.gov/az/
California
U. S. Bureau of Land Management
California State Office
2800 Cottage Way, Suite W-1834
Sacramento, California 95825-1886
Phone 1-916-978-4400
Web Site http://www.blm.gov/ca/
Colorado
U. S. Bureau of Land Management
Colorado State Office
2850 Youngfield Street
Lakewood, Colorado 80215
Phone 1-303-239-3600
Web Site http://www.co.blm.gov/
Nevada
U. S. Bureau of Land Management
Nevada State Office
1340 Financial Boulevard
Reno, Nevada 89502
Phone 1-775-861-6400
Web Site http://www.nv.blm.gov/
New Mexico and Texas
U. S. Bureau of Land Management
New Mexico State Office (Includes Texas)
1474 Rodeo Road
Santa Fe, NM 87505
Phone 1-505-438-7400
Web Site http://www.nm.blm.gov/
Utah
U. S. Bureau of Land Management
Utah State Office
440 West 200 South, Suite 500
Salt Lake City, Utah 84101
Phone 1-801-539-4001
Web Site http://www.ut.blm.gov/
Additionally, you can find a lot of informative books about places to search for gold. (See, for example, the Internet sites http://www.goldprospecting.net/pages/rod2.html and http://www.mamasminerals.com/page/MM/PROD/BOP-PLANM.)
Join An Association
You may find that it rewarding to join one of the numerous recreational gold prospecting associations scattered across the desert Southwest, especially if you undertake the enterprise as a newcomer facing the stress of finding promising sites and negotiating governing regulations.
In all likihood, if you join an association, you would not have to give up a good woman, desert childen, buy a donkey, leave home, abandon cropland, drink inordinately bad whiskey, suffer undue hardship or even shoot claim jumpers. You might, of course, choose to follow some bad advice, ignore good advice, reveal some secrets and pursue adventure. You would surely make some very good perfectly disreputable friends.
You would certainly learn about potentially good sites for prospecting. You may get access to proven sites. You would learn more about prospecting equipment and techniques. You would find guidance about the federal and state regulations. More importantly, you could just go around having a generally and perfectly unapologetically and shamelessly good time.
You might consider joining the Gold Prospectors Association of America, which has local chapters in all the Southwestern states, except for New Mexico. You can learn more about the GPAA by visiting its web site www.goldprospectors.org or reading its magazine Gold Prospectors & Treasure Hunters in the Great Outdoors. The association’s address is:
Gold Prospectors Association of America, Inc.
43445 Business Park Drive, Suite 113
Temecula, California 92590
Phone 1-800-551-9707
Associations in New Mexico include:
New Mexico Gold Miners Association
3031 Prenda de Plata NW
Albuquerque New Mexico 87120
Phone 1-505-839-4234
Gold Prospectors Association of New Mexico
Los Griegos Community Center
1231 Candelaria, NW
Albuquerque, New Mexico
E-mail goldpnn@yahoo.com
Whether you take up gold prospecting by yourself or with an association, you will run a risk. As Mark Twain said in Roughing It, if you sense that you are getting close to a find: “Your breath comes short and quick, you are feverish with excitement; the dinner bell may ring its clapper off, you pay no attention; friends may die, weddings transpire, houses burn down, they are nothing to you; you sweat and dig and delve with a frantic interest”
Don’t say I didn’t warn you!
