oldmancoyote1

Your pictures are mostly table top. Give us close ups. thanks

Gold is where you find it, ... but usually not where you look : ) You can't find gold without looking. Crush a sample and pan it.

Over the years there was a halo of odd coins around my front door from pulling the keys out of my pocket. I let my niece collect them. She got $7 for Christmas money that way. The same thing will apply as beach goers pull their keys out of their pockets to unlock their car doors and trunk doors. It might be virgin ground as there is no "adventure" detecting parking lots.

If I had to guess, they ran water in through the small pipe and out the other and dumped sand in from the top. The turning brush agitated the slurry mixture allowing the gold to drop to the bottom. The larger pipe carried the spoil out. That's pretty rubegoldberg, but it's the only thing that occurs to me.

A guessing game? Gee. I didn't know that.

Looks like it was massive pyrite in a framework of quartz veinlets. It's possible the massive pyrite came first and the quartz framework was added as part of the process that oxidized the pyrite. It's definitely an unusual rock in my experience.

Awesome. Was the beach facing the open ocean or toward the mainland? If open ocean, north, south, or east? I'm trying to get info on wave climate here. That is, was high surf necessary to yield such a hall, or was lower surf enough to separate the finds from the owners? Thanks.

Looks like the mineral is muscovite mica and the rock name is sericite. It's sometimes found in the alteration halo around ore deposits.

Without a better focused image, it's hard to tell. From what I see, it appears black. The arsenopyrite that I am familiar with is usually a lighter grey color, but wikipedia shows some black specimens. It could be a tellurium gold mineral called Calaverite. If so, it's dangerous. Heating it will emit poisonous fumes. Calaverite In general when submitting photos for mineral id, sharp focus is very important, and scratching it with a knife can leave useful clues .

It looks to be manufactured. The pebble finish appears to be on an applied film of some sort.

Thanks Delinorter. Good hunting. I took the week end off and detected the local park. Found a gold ring. First gold I found with my detector.

Thanks LipCa I'm mostly panning with some Angus McKirk sluicing. I'll try your working from bedrock towards gravels and cobbles. Walking up the creek for a couple of miles looking for more favorable situations rather than just prospecting every gravel and cobble bar as I go seems like a good idea. Thanks again

Thanks for the reply. Here is the deal. The creek is quite small, about 12 feet across at most points. I have dug down about 2 feet at four locations where the bed rock is exposed close by, and I have sluiced or panned the entire hole. At 73 this is very hard work. After two feel I am exhausted. I don't have many of those holes in me. My experience here and the experience of a friend is that the gold only starts about 2 feet down. The creek was mined in the 1800's, again extensively mined with a huddle bug about the beginning of the last century, and judging by the ages of the beer cans, several times after to some degree. I am worried that most of the gold is gone and all that remains is on the bedrock. I guess I am looking for some encouragement. Sampling and panning the length of the creek to find mineable surface material is daunting when I worry that the creek is pretty much exhausted. It takes an 7 foot wide hole through the cobbles etc. to expose the bedrock at 2 feet. Only a hole that wide will remain free of sliding sand. If I can find a place where the upper layer pays at least a little, I can see putting in the work to reach bedrock where I would expect most of the gold to lie. I dread spending a summer exploring the length of the creek and finding nothing. Am I naive to think I might find a surface exposure with mineable gold? Geology I understand, but practical mining has very little to do with geology.

Around here in the Klamaths bedrock is at lest 2 feel down and often much deeper. Digging through several feet of boulders and cobbles is serious hard work. Then there is sand sliding in from the sides making progress very slow. To beat that, I need to set the sides of the hole far apart or I get a hole with a hand-sized bottom continually filled with sand from the sides. That is a lot of work. Historically the creek was a huge gold producer. I see little or no gold in the upper material. Have I just not found the right spot, or is sluicing here hopeless? Should I spend more time prospecting for productive material near the surface, or give it up?

I'm a bit skeptical of it being a meteorite, but it is hard to tell from photos. Iron meteorites have a rusty coating and of course respond to a magnet with a loud clank! Stoney meteorites are usually coated with a black crust. Inside they are often granular, a bit like granite, or composed of dark green olivine. It's an odd shape for a meteorite lacking aerodynamic qualities. Looks a bit like a petrified pregnant rock troll. : )