Gold prospecting can be a difficult endeavor, even for seasoned professionals. You’ll need all the help you can get when you’re just starting out.
While gold can be buried anywhere, knowing the best places to look for it can significantly increase your chances of hitting a big score. These are the best locations to dredge for gold.
Rivers and Streams
The best place gold prospectors can look for gold is in the bends of rivers and streams. When the currents pick up gold particles, chunks, and flakes, they carry them downstream to where they’re embedded into the bank.
The mouths of rivers can also be an excellent place to look. As the water slows down, the gold settles and leaves deposits. Gold dredges allow prospectors to find and recover significant quantities of the precious metal, even in areas that have already been mined. However, you must ensure your sluice dumps sediment downstream to keep your work area clean.
Lakes and Ponds
While prospectors most often look in rivers and streams for gold, it can also be found buried at the bottom of lakes and ponds. However, you may need specialized equipment capable of dealing with deep sediment. To reach deeper areas where gold is more likely to be found, you’ll need a boat fashioned with a boom or arm to lower the dredge.
Finding gold in lakes and ponds is much more complicated than doing so in rivers. Because materials usually settle to the bottom of lakes and ponds, gold will be buried deeper than in more turbulent waters. You should also understand what different soil can mean for your dredging to keep your equipment in good working condition.
Beaches
While difficult, it is possible to find gold in beach sand. In some areas, black sand can wash up and mix with the existing material, creating a rich environment for prospecting. However, you’ll need to ensure dredging is allowed in your chosen area since it can be incredibly destructive to the local ecosystem.
Beaches near volcanoes and other types of geological activity are the best places to look for gold. Just remember that beach gold is a fine material, so it will be difficult to ascertain if you’ve made a discovery. You’ll likely have to put the sand through a centrifuge to separate the gold particles.
Find Your Next Big Score
Dredging for gold requires a lot of time and effort. You’ll need to be patient if you want to find anything significant. Knowing a few of the best locations to dredge for gold will improve your chances of striking it rich.
