I remember watching a gold-prospecting show on TV where they sifted gold out of bags of sand mined in California and sold them at home improvement stores. With all the ground being moved and excavated in Las Vegas, has anyone ever thought about running all that dirt through a large trommel to look for gold? And are there any places near Las Vegas to prospect for gold?
Very small amounts of fine placer gold (the stuff you pan for, though it's more like dust than pebbles) have been found in a few alluvial deposits around southern Nevada over the past 100-odd years. These include Eldorado Canyon around the ghost town of Nelson near the Colorado River; Gold Butte, 75 miles north on I-15, then another 40 or so miles into the hills from there; around Bunkerville and the Muddy River in the same general vicinity; and downstream from the Newberry Mountains around Searchlight, roughly 60 miles south of the city.
We wouldn’t call these easy or simple recreational panning opportunities, except perhaps after heavy rainfall when deposits might be washed down from the mountains and there’s enough water to run the sand, mud, and gravel over the edge of the pan, leaving "color" in the bottom.
Another possibility might be to contact gold-claim owners for permission to work their claims using dry-panning methods. Most owners would probably make a deal for a percentage of the find.
You could also buy the so-called Rockefeller Mine, located near Cottonwood Cove on the Colorado River southeast of Las Vegas. Up until it was shut down during World War II, it was mined for gold, silver, copper, lithium, cobalt, platinum and other precious metals. Last we heard, it was up for sale for $5 million, plus a 10% royalty on the gross production.
As for sifting local dirt through a trommel, to our knowledge, no gold has ever been found in the Las Vegas Valley.
Also, we're by no means gold-mining experts, but in our peregrinations around Nevada, which produces upwards of 6% of all the gold mined in the world (and nearly 80% of the gold mined in the U.S.), we've absorbed enough information about gold mining to know that almost all the gold taken from the ground in this state is microscopic in nature, meaning particles the size of a micron (a millionth of a meter).
No metal detector can detect micron-sized gold particles, though a standard fire assay will easily identify them. Once you've found it, you can process the gold using cyanide solutions in either a vat-leach or heap-leach configuration. Barrick, the big company mining gold along the Carlin Trend in northeastern Nevada, captures roughly one ounce of gold per every two to 91 tons of paydirt, depending on the location.
 |
Jackie
Dec-18-2018
|
