Hidden Idaho Treasure Series

Interested in Gold Prospecting Idaho?

So it’s a new year and you are bored with all of your current hobbies. Well if you are considering picking up a new hobby, you should consider gold prospecting. Idaho has a diverse landscape with many things to offer adventurous people.

Every year people flock to Idaho’s BLM ground or Idaho National forests to camp, rock hound, fish, boat, hunt, four-wheel, hike, take photos, bicycle, and swim. Why not pick up gold prospecting when you are on one of your outings with your family this year. Prospecting can be a very inexpensive hobby or a very expensive hobby depending on the equipment you use to prospect with.

The Required Equipment for Gold Prospecting!

Beginner prospectors need a couple of different sized pans, a few classifiers (we recommend a 1/2″ classifier and a 1/4″ classifier), and maybe a sluice box if you are willing to part with the cash.  Buy some vials and at least one sniffer bottle.  Now you can make your own sniffer bottle with a plastic straw and a plastic bottle purchased at your local craft store.

You will need some buckets.  Best way to pick up buckets is; call up your local paint contractor. They should have buckets for next to nothing as they will have tons of them left over from projects.  Your other option is to buy buckets from your local hardware store.  Make sure to pick up a rock hammer, a couple of shovels and a strong back.  Gold Prospecting is hard work.

We made due for several years with very few prospecting tools. Our Tools included a sluice box, some gold pans, classifiers, a sniffer bottle, some vials and a shovel or two.

Gold Pans

Gold pans should be 14″ and the green seems to show the gold and not mark up as bad as the black ones.

Classifiers

Classifiers can be made by purchasing some screen from your local D & B store, building a frame and securing the screen in the frame. Glass stores may have little pieces of 1/8″ screen they would give away for next to nothing. If you are looking for a few classifiers to purchase please see the ones we recommend at the left.

Sluice Boxes

Sluice Boxes come in every shape and sized you can imagine.  If you search Google for wood sluice box plans, there are many do-it-yourself plans to making a sluice box.  We believe that you can not go wrong with a metal sluice box made by Keene engineering, Jobe, or Royal.  The one that we recommend extends to 50″ which allows for great gold recovery.  Shorter backpack sluice boxes are not all that great for gold recovery.  They do not allow the gravels to be washed long enough to pull the gold out of them. The longer the sluice box the better.

Rock Hammer

Rock hammers can be purchased at your local prospecting store or you can find an Estwing E3-22P 22-Ounce Rock Pick
that can be used as a small pick on amazon.com.

Misc:

Sniffer bottles, vials and other misc. gold prospecting accessories can be found at your local prospecting stores, Amazon, or a multitude of other websites on the internet.

Where do I find Gold?

That is the magic question.  You can find gold in many places.  Most prominent places to find gold are along streams and rivers.  To be more precise, on the inside corners of streams and rivers.  As the spring runoff fills the streams and rivers every year the massive volume of water make them run more violently.  As rapids become more violent they pick up dirt, debris, mud, clay and of course gold.

As water picks up gold in a river or stream it will not stay moving long.  As a river turns the waters will move into an inside corner or an eddy.  The slower moving water will drop the gold in these locations. Other locations you will find gold is behind large trees that are below the high water mark.  Behind and under rocks that are located on an inside corner or at the end of an island in a stream or river.

Where Specifics

Now when we are talking about gold prospecting on an inside corner of a river or stream.  Please don’t make the same mistakes we did.  We spend countless hours prospecting in locations that had no gold to speak of.  We simply did not understand where on the inside corner to dig.  Rivers and streams will slowdowns all the way around an inside corner.  The location you will need to find is the one where the corner starts.  Where the water starts to slow down.

The Weight of Gold

Just to give you some reference.  We all know how heavy lead is?  The specific gravity of lead is 11 times heavier than water.  Black Sands that gold is found it is also 11 times heavier than the specific gravity of water. Platinum, on the other hand, has a specific gravity 21.5 times heavier than water.  (According to Wikipedia: Specific Gravity is the ratio of the density of a substance to the density of a reference substance.)

The specific gravity of gold is 19.32 times heavier than water.

The weight of gold is what makes it fall from suspension prior to just about any other material.  This is the reason to look in the first place gold could drop while you are gold prospecting.

Sluice Box Setup

When you set up your sluice box it should be set at a slope of 1″ per 1′.  When your sluice box is set up, make sure it is filled up with water flowing through it at least 2/3 full.  Also, test a little material and make sure the water is flowing fast enough to wash the gravels you are going to prospect.

Classify the material that you run through your sluice box to at least 1/4″. This allows the sluice box to capture more gold when you run it.  If rocks that are too large are put into the sluice box the water will great an eddy around them and wash gold out of the sluice box.

If you would like a lesson on gold panning watch this video on youtube.

Where do we go gold prospecting in Idaho?

You can find gold in just about every region of Idaho.  This gives gold prospectors a wide variety of places to go.  Captain E.D. Pierce leading a group of 10 prospectors found gold in what is now Pierce Idaho in 1860.  In 1862 George Grimes with a party of prospectors founded the Boise Basin mines.  From 1860 to 1865 people flooded into the Florence and Boise basins.  As more people claimed lands in the Two gold mining basins. Prospectors were having to travel greater distances to claim their own lands to mine.  With the influx of people moving all over the state, people found gold in almost every major stream and river in the state.

If you are looking for places to go gold prospecting today, you can try the Coeur d’Alene river, the snake river, the salmon river, the Boise River and most of their major tributaries.  One of these four rivers is within a short driving distance of just about every town or city in Idaho.  This leaves your options to find a place to go gold prospecting open.  We have prospected on the snake river, the salmon river, and the Boise River.  We have found gold on all three rivers.

Good luck gold prospecting and remember ☠ marks the spot!