Cutaways.
All the gold is not laying on the ground.
One day while I was out prospecting for a new spot to dig, I found a pile of rocks that had slid off a small 90º cliff
where the stream had made a cutaway from a large gravel bar. Well, the pile looked like it would be easy shoveling so, I thought I’d
give it a try.
I set up my dry washer and shoveled the small pile through it. When I did the clean-up, I found a few nice pickers
and an abundance of smaller flakes. Well, I knew that the color I found in my pan came from somewhere on that 90º dirt face.
So, I thought that I would take a closer look. I picked-up my gas powered leaf blower and used it to blow all the lose
material away from the small 90º cliff. This exposed an area on the cutaway that had several individual layers of material.
Every layer had fist sized and larger rocks set in pea gravel with a silty sand over the top. I took a closer look and
could see that each layer had a thin ban of black sand mixed in with the pea gravel just under the larger rocks.
Well, I picked-up my bucket and a flat headed screwdriver, I use for scratching out cracks and dug out the layers of
black sand that I could see. I had ran that bucket full of material through the dry washer and Wow, I had a great clean-up. I knew
that I must have found one of those ancient rivers. After all, I had heard of them from the time I first started prospecting so many
years ago. Well I guess you already know that I spent the rest of the day digging a fair sized hole in that gravel face.
A friend later told me that what I had found was not an ancient river. It was just a place where previous floods had
moved the channel of the stream from one side of the ravine to the other. Each time leaving a new layer.
I can tell you from experience, some of these layers can be quite rich with gold.
Next time your out looking for a new spot, take a glance for places that the stream has cutaway the bank to a 90º face
and look for the layers of previous floods. A fast sample pan or pass over with a metal detector could make your day.
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