First I would like to give you a little background on my interest in gold. I grew up in Florida after my dad retired from the Air Force and after we lived in Missouri for a few years. One of my friends, Herman Jones, dad was a science teacher and a diver. Mr. Jones had a collection of artifacts he gathered from shipwrecks he dived on, it was a cool collection and sparked my imagination of treasure ships loaded with gold and buried pirate treasure chests. Needless to say I dug a few holes in the sandy soil of Florida only to discover that Florida's watertable is not very deep where we lived. After a few years we moved from St. Joe Beach to Carrabelle another small coastal Florida town.
I soon lost my interest in buried treasure but not in gold. What got me interested in gold prospecting / panning was watching western movies with dad. Well In some of them movies there were some old time '49s who would pan for gold. The imaginative child that I was seized on this so I found a aluminum pie pan and set out for the backyard. The only think I discovered in my panning was sand, sand, and more sand. It was my dad who told me there was no gold in Florida. After this my dreams of striking it rich went down the tubes.
I eventually grew out of my childhood dream of finding gold. I graduated High School joined the navy where I served as a Navigation Electronic Technician on Submarines. I spent 11 and a half years in the Navy before I was medically discharged; a back injury, depression, and Social Anxiety did me in but that is a story for another day. Well, after I was discharged I went through a divorce and a reall dificult time in my life. What got me back on my feet was meeting my wife, Diana, a golden treasure in her own rite. Diana gave me strength to do things that helped my family and get me on the right track.
Five years ago I came across a show that sparked my interest in gold prospecting once again, that was Gold Rush. That season was the first season when Todd Hoffman and his crew where mining up in Alaska. I like the story behind the show of how Todd and his dad gathered some of their friends who were down on their luck and take them to Alaska to make a living Gold mining. That season was not the best but they came back the next year and went at again. These guys had determination and they had faith in God they were not afraid to show on TV. I loved it.
I watched the show every season and watched the ups and down, people come and go, and watched them try different places to mine. I did not think Todd made the best decision to go to South America but I still rooted for team Hoffman. While the South America adventure turned into a big toilet flush, Todd and his dad kept the dream alive and with the help of the rest of their team bounced back up in the Klondike.
The Hoffman's aren't the only reason I like Gold Rush, I loved seeing the other crews. I was impressed by Parker Schnabbel and his drive to find gold though his management style needs to changed, he will learn, you can tell he has learned a little already.
Seeing the huge cleanouts with all the gold is exciting but seeing the people on the show interact with each other to overcome issues to reach their goal is uplifting. Heck, I even get a kick out of Tony Beets and his style of getting things done (his methods would not fly in the Navy due to safety issues). His cursing does not bother me that much as I was in the Navy and if Life had a sensor to bleep bad words all you would hear on a sub would be long bleeps with an occasional word getting through.
Now here is what I have learned about gold on my own; some of it might be boring. I will discuss ore genis first, not the creation of Gold from supernovae but how it forms veins and gets deposited.
The gold that is mind today originated from meteorites that struck the earth millions of years ago. The crust was molten at the time with some of the mantle so the Gold did not sink to the core like the gold that was present during Earths formation. (Here is a fun factoid: Most of the gold on the earth is located at the earth's core were it sank when the whole earth was still molten. So if you want to find the biggest gloryhole the Earth's core is it. That is a heck of a lot overburden to move plus you will have to seperate the Gold from the nickel and Iron that make up most of the core.)
How does the gold get from the mantle up into the crust where it is found as ore or in placer deposits? Will one of the ways I have learned, in theory, is that water gets superheated under pressure and rises up through cracks or makes its own cracks, in that superheated water are elements and compounds, some is silcon based and there is gold plus a few others. The silcon compounds form quartz and gold in the superheated water is deposited there too forming the veins of gold ore found in many mines.
This is just one way gold ore is formed. Now alluvial gold originates from veins or areas that gold is deposited by various methods and weathering of the exposed veins breaks this gold free and it is swept away by water, glaciers, or slides. Gold being 19 times heavier will settle out in a river where the speed of water and pressure is not strong enough to keep the gold moving. So it is only Logical that gold nuggets will drop out sooner while finer gold will go a little further. Remember this is dependent mainly on the speed of the water. Now many things determine the speed of water such as depth, width, volume of water, obstructions, and bends. I have learned that the inside bend is the best place to look for gold. Remember rivers shift their course over the years depending on geology, topology, and other things. When a river meanders shifting its course the bed it leaves behind contains sediments and some of that could be gold that is now buried high and dry. A good think to look for are oxbow lakes that were once bends in a river but were cutoff from the river when the river shifted its course. I bet that in gold country if you sample the area between the inner part of oxbow lake to the river it originated you probaly will find varying amounts of placer gold.
This is just a little of what I have learned coming just from memory. I also learned some geology of the various areas that have gold, especially placer deposits like the Yukon. I learned about the formation of many of the features, volcanic activity, geothermal activity, and glaciation during the last ice age. one thing that I discovered was the main glacier that covered part of the Klondike did not come from the north as one would think but the southwest. This could explain some of the big nuggets Freddy Dodge find near Carmacks, just a guess here.
With all this info and more I started doing a little comparative geography / Geology with Washington State and the Klondike so I can find areas to prospect in Washington. Logically youy would think that since Washington is close to a subduction area (the Juan Defuca plate under the North American Plate) it would have features conducive for ore genisis and therefore placer gold, but does it? Yes and no, there is probably ore genisis going on now and some in the past but there is a problem. The problem is large volcanos that we have. Our Cascade volcanos throw out a lot of ash that can bury older previously exposed gold deposits, now those deposits are under cement like material requiring more years of weathering to break out that gold. This is not to say there is no gold to befound in Washington, there is. I plan to look for areas that undergo cycles of freeze / thaw to fracture and weather the rock, areas of mountain runoff. I may not find the motherlode or hit it big but I will find something, even if it is relaxaton.
Enough of me rattling on. God Bless!
