usually the moment of will have larger gold deeper from stream or water running and causing stratification in loose media.

One rule to remember about river digging is;

If the material is easy to dig it has already been dug before, find another spot.

That ain't to bad. Save all your black sands! By that I mean when you think you have found all in your pan do not toss what's left. You might be surprised when you run it through a cube or wheel.

I think what you mentioned is very good.  

 

If it's soft digging, it could be a recent patch of flood gold.  You with eyes on the area are in the best position to decide if it is or not.  You could pan the area to see how long this streak runs.  The next step would be to see how much material is in the streak, and that's running buckets of material.

 

Someone mentioned the gold cube.  I want to talk about my experiences sampling with the gold cube.  I dug 10 five gallon buckets (a quarter ton) classified to 8 mesh, for my gold cube and it took an entire day.  I actually ran it the following day. 

 

My experiences in classifying to get 8 mesh for the gold cube is it's a lot of work.  In my local area in Central AZ, when I classify, each step lower I go, I need to get two buckets of the larger material to make one.  So to get one bucket of 8 mesh, I need to dig 8 buckets of material and classify it.  So if I classify to a half inch in a five gallon bucket, I need 8 buckets of dug material which gets me 4 buckets of 1/2 inch classified material.  I take these four buckets and classify through a quarter inch classifier and I get two buckets of a quarter inch.  I take these two buckets of quarter inch through an 8 mesh classifier, and get to an eighth inch to run through the cube.

 

If you took 40 five gallon buckets, which is a little more than a ton of material, classified it to 8 mesh material, now you get a good idea of how many ounces per ton, or more likely grams per ton your paystreak is worth.

 

 

 

Interesting what you said about the cube. Btw I do not have one , I have a wheel but I only use it as a final clean up tool. A lot of these tools are promoted as a way to get out of panning , sorry but if you really want to find gold you got to pan. Are you using a drywasher ?

This is a pro trick I am going to share. Do you have a metal Detector?

What you do is get in the river with your metal detector in the water, slowly walk across the river until you get a hit, and then see if it is a trail or just one spot. Normally you will find the golds path by finding the black sands trails, it should be a line that runs up and down the river. If you stay on that trail of black sands the gold is with it.

Omg !!!! I'm in southern New Mexico , if only there was a river here. Nothing but heat , dust storms . Scorpions, black widows , and flies. And more heat !!!!!

Thanks for the feedback. I ran 20 five gallon buckets of unclassified material (only picking out the 2 inch plus rocks after washing them). This was done using a gas powered highbanker. The roughly half ton of material yielded almost 1 quart of cons. Finish panning the cons yielded over 700 colors - all fines. Total weight was just under 2 grains. This was surface gravels and rocks and I didn't make it deeper than 2 feet down. Seems to be like flood gold.

I saved all my cons for if I ever get a finishing tool.

That is why they call it prospecting .Gold is were you find it .I was on a spot that was giving me 3 grams a day out of 4 5 gallon buckets .Today it dies .Just got enough to see got enough to see.Will change directions tomorrow.That is what you never know.

As far as black sand and a metal detector, whenever I've tried that I find dirt with a lot of black sand, and not gold. A ran a five gallon bucket of metal detector found black sand scraped from a gold bearing creek and really only got a lot of black sand and very little gold. I think that trick may be localized and does not work in relatively waterless, flash flood prone Central AZ where I work.

5 buckets of unclassified material is about an eighth of a ton, so the material you got yielded about a gram of gold per ton. This is between $30 - $35 spot, depending on the purity. If this is a consistent one gram per ton on creek that has water, you can start looking at large machinery to process this. This would have to be a large, consistent streak to get equipment to be mined.

If the streak is dry, loose and easily accessible, you may be able to run the material through a large drywasher like the Keene 151. My break even point is 1.5 grams per ton of material I can run through a large Dry Washer. That would pay for not only gas to the dig site, but gas for the Keene Dry Washer. That may give me enough money to get a bag of Doritos and a Coke at the store on the way home. To put food on the table, I'd need large equipment. A streak at 1.5 grams per ton can be mined by large equipment.

Just keep in mind large equipment needs to have the proper permits through the land management agency whether BLM, USFS, etc. The GPAA does not allow on their leased claims.

The answer you come up with for this claim will probably be not worth it, but if you start thinking like this for every time out, you'll find one worth going after.