Gold in The White Mountains
Go to the White Mountains, young man. To the Wild Ammonoosuc River near Bath NH and stake your claim to a modern gold rush bonanza!
Gold Fever. Piles of heavy gold bars and shining yellow gold nuggets free for the taking. Find golden treasure and it’s yours to keep! But a word of warning: once bitten by the gold bug there may be no turning back….
Gold Prospecting in NH
One afternoon last week, with nearly 100% humidity and the temperatures in the 90’s F, I had some free time and decided it was a golden opportunity to do an article on the little known New Hampshire argonauts, seekers of auric wealth - and maybe even get in a bit of snorkeling in a nearby mountain river. So I headed to one of the best mountain rivers there is for both gold prospecting and swimming - the Wild Ammonoosuc River in Bath NH.
Scenic Route 112 winds its way along the edge of the Wild Ammonoosuc. Here and there at strategic pulloffs I could see a truck or two parked, with various mining tools and implements laying about. Paydirt. Here be gold miners. Ammonoosuc gold miners.
I chose a likely place to park my vehicle and then wandered down to the rivers edge, where I came upon a duo of gold prospectors working their gold claim on the riverbank, and doing pretty well too.
The name of the game here is placer gold. Over the eons untold tons of rocks and minerals have been washing down from the surrounding mountains as they erode, passing through the local streams en route to the ocean. The lighter material moves on – the granite and mica and other such stuff, but the heavy gold tends to stay behind and accumulate in the bed of rivers and streams as alluvial deposits known as “placer gold deposits” or “placers”.
Placer Gold
Taking advantage of the fact that golds heavy and tends to accumulate in the river were Robert Reynolds (Red) of Barnet Vermont and his fellow prospector for the day, Dave Johnson. Red and Dave had just finished digging 3-foot holes in the gravel of the river bed.
These holes are dug in strategic locations calculated to unearth as much of the golden metal as possible. By reading the river, it’s twists and turns, the placement of large boulders and exposed bedrock, an experienced placer gold prospector can identify those areas within the river system that are most likely to produce gold for the enterprising miner with a sense of adventure.
The gold bearing gravel they dug was screened through a large mesh to remove extraneous material and then put into 5-gallon buckets. Once the buckets were filled with muck, sand, small gravel, and hopefully - gold nuggets and flakes of gold - the real fun began.
Using a Gold Sluice
Dave was using a traditional gold prospecting sluice box to aid in removing his gold from all the other stuff in the bucket. A gold prospectors sluice is little more than a box with a few horizontal “riffles” placed along it’s length.
As you can see in the picture, the sluice is placed in the stream so that a swift current of water runs it’s length. The gold-bearing material is scooped from the bucket and placed at the head of the sluice, and the force of water carries off the lighter material - leaving the heavy yellow metal behind.
In effect, the river system itself has been acting as a giant gold sluice for thousands of years. The man made sluice is then further concentrating the gold bearing material.
Red explained, “Gold is nineteen times heavier than water. When you put your diggings in the sluice, that gold immediately falls to the bottom and gets caught in the sluices’ riffles. The heavy yellow gold is not going anywhere”.
The lighter material is carried away and exits the gold sluice at the other end, allowed to continue once again on it’s merry way toward the ocean.
Dave’s sluice is of modern metal manufacture, and also has a fibrous carpeting that lines it’s bottom, which helps to capture even the finest of gold, or, as fine gold is commonly known, specks or gold dust. In ancient times, wool was often used to catch the finer gold, which may be the origin of the legend of the golden fleece,
After processing his bucket load of mud, sand, and gravel through the sluice, what mostly remained was black sand (high in iron content) and tiny red garnets, trapped on the downstream side of the riffles. Like the metallic gold, these substances are substantially heavier (or have a higher specific gravity) than most of the other material that passed through the sluice.
Now “clean up” began. The actual panning for gold ...
Using a Gold Pan
In all, perhaps two cupfuls of auriferous material remained of the original 5-gallon bucketful of material that was sent through the gold prospectors sluice. The current of water running through his sluice had done much of the work for Dave in processing and concentrating his gold-bearing material. Now all he had to do was pan out the gold itself from the remaining garnet and black sands concentrate.
The sluice was carefully upended and dumped into a plastic gold pan about the size of a large dinner plate. The carpeting was also removed and shaken into a gold pan.
A gold pan is actually nothing more than a bowl with edges that slope at perhaps a 30-degree angle. In olden times, gold pans were usually made of metal or even wood or tightly woven fibers. Modern plastic gold pans are the norm today, and many gold prospectors swear by them as being superior to the metal gold pans of yesteryear.
In due course the gold pan containing the gold bearing concentrates was immersed into the cold water of the river and skillfully rotated to bring it’s auriferous contents to a gentile swirling motion. The remaining lighter material swirled off the edge of the gold pan, until there remained only a handful of black sands and garnets - and small gold flakes and specks of gold along the pans upper edge!
The Gold Trommel
Just as there are many ways to find gold, there are many ways to extract gold too. To concentrate his bucket of gold-bearing material, Red Reynolds was using what is called a “reverse helix trommel”. Basically, a trommel used in mining placer gold consists of a hollow cylinder within a box. Around the inside surface of the cylinder, much like that on a screw, is a raised spiral riffle. A small battery the size of that found on a motorcycle provides the power to rotate this cylinder and to pump water up into it.
The trommel is placed so that one end is slightly lower than the other. The gold bearing material to be concentrated is scooped into the higher end of the turning cylinder as water washes over it. This causes the lighter stuff to be washed out the opposite end. The heavier gold, black sands, and garnet tend to stay on the spiral riffles and are eventually brought up and out of the turning cylinder, landing into the gold collection box. The gold bearing concentrates in the trommel collection box are then panned out during clean up.
The gold trommel would be of excellent use where a fast current of water to work the traditional sluice cannot be found. You could set up a trommel in a very small brook or even a puddle, or use the trommel with a bucket of water that is recycled.
Panning for Gemstones
As Red pointed out, “Gold is not the only thing you may find while gold prospecting in NH. It pays to keep your eye open for other things - platinum, silver, copper, and even diamonds have been found in a gold pan”.
Indeed, during my own placer gold panning forays I found a small platinum nugget (you can make it out as the silvery looking piece in this picture showing some of my larger flakes and nuggets of placer gold).
Stories circulate about large NH diamonds panned from local streams. Beautiful pink tourmaline, garnet, topaz - even wedding and engagement rings have been found.
Metallic minerals, gemstones, copper and silver coins, and anything that has a higher specific gravity than most of the surrounding material can be sluiced, panned, or trommeled. While panning for gold I have found my share of copper pennies an occasional nickel, lead fishing sinkers, even an iron nail from the caulked boot of a river driver from logging operations of years past. NH treasures come in many shapes and forms and do not have to be auriferous to be valueable.
My NH Gold Pictures
Shown here are some of the larger gold specimens I have panned from streams north of the notches in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Several of these gold flakes and gold nuggets I didn’t even have to use a gold pan for - I was able to spot them in the surrounding gravel and just pick them up! That takes the term “Golden Thumb” to a whole new level.
By far, specks are most common size gold nugget found in NH. For every golden flake or nugget you can pick up with your fingers, you will probably find 100 or more tiny pieces of gold dust. Small but certainly worth keeping.
If you look closely near the base of the copper coin in the picture, you can also see a fine platinum nugget. It is rare to find platinum while panning for gold in NH, but as you can see platinum in NH does exist.
NH Gold Prospecting
Where do I prospect for gold in New Hampshire? That golden nugget of information is a closely guarded secret. But in NH gold is where you find it. And you can find the precious metal just about anywhere if you know how to search for it. Auric treasures abound!
Nearly all of New Hamsphires streams have at least a few specks of gold dust. Much of the precious metal found in NH was carried down from somewhere in Canada during the era of Wisconsin Glaciation, known as the ice age, more than 12,000 years ago. Gold prospecting in Wisconsin glacier deposits has been made easier by the action of streams that have been sorting the material into rich alluvial deposits for thousands of years.
Not all of the gold in NH is of glacial origin. For a time in the 1800’s, there was a mini New Hampshire gold rush as rich veins of ore were found in the local bedrock. Both Lisbon NH and Bath NH were host to a number of hard rock gold mines. Gold prospecting in NH was big business.
The hard rock gold mining didn't pan out as had been hoped - the richest ores were soon exhausted - but the existance of native gold viens explains why the Wild Ammonoosuc River contains more placer gold than most streams in the White Mountains. Many of the nuggets panned out in Lisbon and Bath are native NH gold. Perhaps there remain rich veins of gold ore as yet undiscovered.
You Can Find NH Gold Too
Although of value for jewelry, coinage, gold teeth, and as a standard for monetary exchange, the search for auriferous or gold-bearing placer deposits is taken on as a relaxing pastime by recreational miners. You may not strike it rich, but with a little effort you can certainly find some of your very own yellow metal.
So on the next warm day you are in the Lisbon NH or Bath NH area, check out the gold diggings on the Wild Ammonoosuc River. Placer gold miners are a generally friendly sort and are often very helpful in showing new prospectors the basics in finding gold. You may catch gold fever yourself and become a modern day NH gold prospector, panning placer gold in the White Mountains of New Hampshire!