For six millennia, we have been drawn to gold. As our civilizations – defined in terms of settled communities, complex social structures, agriculture, written language and technology – have risen and vanished, we have used gold as a medium for artistic expression, a symbol of stature and wealth, a spur for commerce, a plea for spiritual favor, a celebration of kings and gods, and a clarion call to conquest.

Our yearning for gold has been one of the steering currents of history.

For instance, as Spain launched her exploration and colonization of the Americas, King Ferdinand, according to the National Mining Association’s The History of Gold, exorted his conquistadors to “Get gold, humanely if you can, but all hazards, get gold.” Columbus, describing the results of his first voyage in a letter to Ferdinand, spoke of rivers that “contain gold,” great “mines of gold,” and “incalculable gold.” Hernan Cortes, explaining why he set out to conquer Mexico’s golden Aztec empire in 1519, said that “I came here to get rich, not to till the soil like a peasant.” In 1540, Don Francisco Vázquez de Coronado led his epic expedition across our Southwest desert land in a chimerical search for the Seven Cities of Gold. By 1660, said J. H. Elliott in his Imperial Spain, 1469 – 1716, the progeny of Columbus and Cortez had delivered more than 200 tons of the gold of the Americas to the famous Gold Tower on the Guadalquivir River in Sevilla. That gold helped rejuvenate the moribund economy of Europe.

When John Marshall discovered gold while building John Sutter’s sawmill near Sacramento in 1848, he triggered the California gold rush, a human tide of migration across the deserts and prairies of the West. In following years, prospectors invaded the mountain ranges that crossed the Chihuahuan, Sonoran and Mojave Deserts, heedless of Apaches and terrible hardships in an obsessive search for gold. They left abandoned mines, tailings, rusting shovels and pans, gloomy cemetaries, ghost towns and legends as their legacy.

What is Gold, Anyway?

Pure gold – like, for example, pure mercury, lead, silver, copper, iron or aluminum – is classified as a metallic element. (By definition, an element comprises only a single type of atom.) For comparable volumes, gold weighs some 19.3 times more than water, 1.4 times more than mercury, 1.7 times more than lead, 1.8 times more than silver, 2.2 times more than copper, 2.4 times more than iron and 7.1 times more than aluminum.

If comparatively rare, gold nevertheless occurs on every continent on earth and in the waters of the sea. It is, according to the Prospectors Paradise Internet site, “mined in deserts, high mountain ranges, in the deeply weathered soil of the tropics and in the permanently frozen ground of the Arctic.

“In America nature was extremely generous. Thirty-two states have recorded significant commercial gold production. The highest yield areas are located within the western states. The recreational gold prospector can find gold in practically every state of the union.”

Treasured by the craftsman, gold, more than any of the other pure metals, can be hammered, bent, drawn and carved into shapes as massive as the dome of an Islamic mosque and as delicate as the web of a spider. “A solitary ounce of gold,” says Prospectors Paradise, “can be drawn and stretched into an ultra fine wire of 50 miles in length without breaking or hammered to the amazing thinness of one hundred thousandth of an inch without disintegrating.” Further, gold resists corrosion and rust even when exposed for thousands of years to seawater, soil, air, heat or cold.

Also treasured by scientists and technologists, gold has been used to treat some forms of arthritis and related conditions. It has been used to tag proteins in studies of human disease. It has been used to tint the visors of astronauts’ helmets, coat the impellers in the space shuttles’ liquid hydrogen pumps, and to coat the mirror of the Mars Global Surveyor telescope.

It is no wonder, as Prospectors Paradise says, that our ancestors “believed gold contained a hidden, internal fire, a gift from the Gods with mysterious healing and magical powers.”

Video- Riding Your SUV or ATV Over Gold One of the most famous prospectors of the time, trapper/gold seeker “Pegleg Smith” traveled through the Anza Borrego region. It's rumored he discovered black gold somewhere in the east part of the Borrego desert.

How Did Gold Get Here?

Gold, the alchemists believed, could be made in their dark and primitive laboratories, provided they could just find the magic tincture they called “Philosopher’s Stone.” They believed that this mysterious substance could not only heal the soul, cure the sick and extend life, it could transform the lesser metals into gold. It would open the way to universal happiness. (If the alchemists failed in their search for Philosopher’s stone, they did lay the foundation for modern chemistry.)

Gold, a part of the primal stew of elements that gave birth to our planet, settled well below the surface. With the passage of time, some gold came into contact with ground water that had been heated by molten rock. If pressures were high and the geochemistry was right, the gold as well as other minerals like quartz, galena and pyrites dissolved into the water. Superheated, the water, laden with its burden of gold and other materials, surged upward, driven by pressure toward the surface. It intruded into fractures and folds of fault zones, contacts between differing rock types, openings of porous rock formations, and other cavities near the surface. As heat and pressure diminished, the water yielded back to the earth its load of gold and the companion materials, which precipitated out of solution to form veins, or lodes.

Chris Ralph, in an Internet paper called “The Geology of Coarse Gold Formation,” said that “The most common conduits for these solutions are natural fault zones; this is why most veins are shaped like fault zones, a long and narrow plane. This is the process that forms nearly all gold-quartz veins.” In other instances, gold and accompanying precipitates may have filled small parallel fissures, creating a network of veins called “stockwork zones.” In still other instances, they may have filled tube-shape cavities to form “plugs.” Where the water invaded porous rock formations, “you may get a big disseminated deposit,” says Ralph.

In those instances in which the water flowed rapidly into large openings, where temperatures and pressures drop rapidly, the gold precipitated out of the solution quickly, often in the form of fine grains. When the water flowed into small openings, where temperatures and pressures fell less rapidly, the gold precipitated more slowly, as larger, if often dispersed, nuggets.

Over long periods of time, the gold, freed by erosion or disintegration of its host rock, issued into washes to be transported downstream as flakes or grains or nuggets by the flow of water. According to Prospectors Paradise, “Gold particles in stream deposits are often concentrated on or near bedrock, because they move downward during high-water periods when the entire bed load of sand, gravel, and boulders is agitated and is moving downstream. Fine gold particles collect in depressions or in pockets in sand and gravel bars where the stream current slackens. Concentrations of gold in gravel are called ‘pay streaks,’ or placers.

Although they probably did not understand the geologic processes that delivered gold to the earth’s surface, many early prospectors, often possessed by their dreams of a rich strike, knew enough to search the deformed and fractured rocks of faults, the contacts between strata, the cavities of geologic formations, the bed-rock exposures and sand and gravel bars of streams across the desert basins and mountain ranges of the Southwest.

If you are interested in prospecting for gold, you can follow in the footsteps of those early prospectors. You will likely find that the most immediately rewarding places will be possible placer deposits in the sand or gravel bars in washes downstream from known lodes. You will need no more than the simplest of the prospector’s tools—a shovel and a pan.

How Do You Pan for Gold?

“Regardless of whether you are a new prospector or a pro,” Prospectors Paradise says, “the gold pan is still the most indispensable companion you can have. It is one of the first tools used in locating gold and is one of the last used, even in commercial mining to check the value of ore being processed.”

The older gold pans may have been produced by machines from metal or fashioned by hand from wood or even cow horns. Modern pans are made from metal or, more recently, from plastic. A typical pan, two to three inches deep, measures from about a foot to a foot and a half in diameter at the top and several inches less in diameter at the bottom.

Prospectors Paradise favors the plastic pan. “Firstly, it is rust and corrosive proof. Secondly, it can be textured with a fine ‘tooth’ surface to hold the gold better. Third, it is about one quarter the weight of a steel pan, and fourth the color can be made a permanent black so that even the tiniest flakes of gold can easily be seen.”

For maximum recovery while panning, said Michael Silva, “Placer Gold Recovery Methods,” Special Publication 87, California Department of Conservation, Division of Mines and Geology, “…the material to be panned should be as uniform in size as possible. Panning is best done in a…pool of still, clear water. First, fill the pan one-half to three-fourths full of ore or concentrate. Add water to the pan or carefully hold the pan under water and mix and knead the material by hand, carefully breaking up lumps of clay and washing any rocks present. Fill the pan with water (if not held underwater) and carefully remove rocks and pebbles, checking them before discarding.

“Tilt the pan slightly away and shake vigorously from side to side with a circular motion while holding it just below the surface of the water. Removal of lighter material is facilitated by gently raising and lowering the lip of the pan in and out of the water. The pan may be periodically lifted from the water and shaken vigorously with the same circular motion to help concentrate materials. Large pebbles should be periodically removed by hand. Panning continues until only the heaviest material remains. Gold may be observed by gently swirling the concentrate into a crescent in the bottom of the pan. Coarse nuggets are removed by hand, while finer grained gold may be recovered by amalgamation [a process in which the gold is mixed with mercury, concentrating it for later recovery]. An experienced panner can process one-half to three-quarters of a cubic yard in 10 hours.”

In addition to using a pan to work stream deposits, some prospectors employ equipment such as a rocker, which is a box-like structure equipped with screens for sorting gold from stream deposits; a shaking table, which is a motor-driven flat structure with riffles for separating gold from the deposits; or a sluice, which is a channel structure lined with riffles to separate the metal.

Where Should You Look for Gold in the Desert Southwest?

If you are an aspiring prospector, you might consider first exploring public lands under the jurisdiction of the U. S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service or the U. S. Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management. You will, of course, have to contact the agencies for information about authorized prospecting areas and governing rules and regulations in the area where you wish to work.

A U. S. Department of Interior pamphlet called “Staking a mining claim on Federal Lands” says that “Public land records in the proper BLM State Office will show you which lands are closed to mineral entry under the mining laws. These offices keep up-to-date land status plots that are available to the public for inspection.”

If you wish to prospect on private lands, you will obviously have to secure the permission of the owner.

Alternatively, you might consider joining one of the gold prospecting associations or clubs in the Southwest. The Gold Prospectors Association of America, for instance, connects you with the community, offering information on site availability, traditional and new tools, training opportunities and local support. The GPAA also publishes an informative bi-monthly magazine called Gold Prospectors & Treasure Hunters in the Great Outdoors.

Where Can You Sell Gold?

You will discover on the Internet numerous companies, for instance, in the U. S., Australia, Thailand, Zambia, South Korea, Nigeria and Ghana, who purport to buy gold. Unfortunately, as one company said, “There is a very high amount of fraud in this industry…” That suggests that one should check references and recommendations very carefully before committing to a sale to anyone.

The price you would receive from a reputable buyer for your gold is based, not only on the prevailing price at the time, but also on its purity, rated as follows:

Purity (%) Karats Fine

100 24 1.000
75 18 0.7500
58 14 0.5883
50 12 0.5000
42 10 0.4167
33 8 0.3323

Will You Get Rich?

Although the search is inevitably exciting, getting rich won’t be easy.

“Many believe that it is possible to make wages or better by panning gold in the streams of the West, particularly in regions where placer mining formerly flourished,” Harold Kirkemo said in a U. S. Geological Survey paper called “Prospecting for Gold in the United States.” Gold is, after all, trading at near-record highs, some $950 per ounce as of April 2008.

“However,” said Kirkemo, “most placer deposits have been thoroughly reworked at least twice—first by Chinese laborers, who arrived soon after the initial boom periods and recovered gold from the lower grade deposits and tailings left by the first miners, and later by itinerant miners during the 1930’s.” Modern investigations by geologists suggest that “few, if any, recognizable surface indications of metal-bearing deposits were overlooked by the earlier miners and prospectors,” even in the most remote regions. Most successful gold mining enterprises in the Southwest lie in the hands of large companies, who have the capital and technology to profitably recover and process even low-grade ore.

Nevertheless, Kirkemo said, “Some degree of success in finding gold still remains for those choosing favorable areas after a carefully study of mining records and the geology of the mining districts...” Additionally, technology, for instance, metal detectors, gives modern prospectors an advantage over their predecessors.

The magic remains, that internal and ancient calling that summoned half a million people westward, to California and the desert, a century and a half ago. As Carolyn Dobbs said in her article “Out of the Diary of Mountain Millie” in the May/June 2006 issue of Gold Prospectors & Treasure Hunters in the Great Outdoors, “Regardless of time or season, gold can also be found in the tunnels of the human heart!”

Next we’ll explore in more detail some of the desert Southwest’s best gold-prospecting locations, applicable rules and regulations and recreational gold-prospector organizations. Next Page