When it comes to gold prospecting, you don’t hear much about people finding gold in lakes. Most hobby prospecting revolves around finding gold in rivers and streams, which also is where most of the gold has been found by hobby prospectors in the past. But does this somehow rule out the possibility of finding gold in lakes, or should you give it a try?
Gold can be found in lakes but requires patience and timing to be collected. The waves entering the shoreline will constantly remove the lighter materials as they retreat, while the gold stays mostly in place. Lake placers are often temporary and constantly change together with varying wave conditions.
While many of the things you need to consider when looking for gold in lakes are the same as when working a river, there are some important differences.
These have mainly to do with the type of equipment needed to capture the really tiny gold, and the temporary nature of lake gold deposits that calls for timing on the part of the prospector.
Read on to learn more!
Table of Contents
How Does Gold End Up In Lakes?
Well, in short, you could say that there are two ways in which gold makes its way into lakes. Either it was transported by a river that flows into the lake, or it was deposited by glaciers that covered vast parts of the U.S many thousands of years ago.
Rivers
When a river flows through gold-bearing ground it will slowly erode the riverbanks so that all the gravels, sands, and gold present fall into the river. Since gold is so heavy, most of it will deposit at various places where the river current slows down. Some such locations include along inside bends and behind large boulders or other obstructions.
While most of the coarser gold, which is the heaviest, will get trapped and deposited before the river reaches a lake, the fine gold will be able to run the entire length of the river much more easily. Its smaller size means that it doesn’t weigh as much, and therefore is carried away much more easily by the current.
Further reading:
Glaciers
Even though glaciers have had a quite large impact on where gold is found today, most prospectors don’t pay much attention to how glaciers have transported and affected gold deposits. As a matter of fact, glaciers once covered over 30 % of the total US landmass, and transported loads of rock and mineral!
Glacial placer deposits are quite different from alluvial deposits that form in rivers. They are much more scattered, and tracing the gold back to the original source like you would do in a river is much harder.
In simple terms, once the glaciers retreated several thousands of years ago, they would just drop all the rock at the spot, leaving patches of gold here and there. And as you might suspect, some of these locations were later turned into lakes.
To provide an example, most of the gold found today in the upper midwest and the Great Lakes were the result of glaciers transporting rocks and gold from north down south.
How to Find Gold In Lakes
In contrast to the typical river placer type of deposit, lake placers are constantly on the move. In extreme cases, a beach in the right location could be shimmering with gold one day, only to turn barren the next day.
So, how does this happen? Well, the gold concentrations in most lakes are quite low, meaning that it would be futile to recover gold directly from the lake bed. This is where wave action concentrates the gold on the beaches, and makes the gold concentration high enough to be worthwhile for most prospectors.
As the waves wash the shore-line, they winnow away the lighter sand and leave the heavier materials, including gold, as streaks on the shore.
In some cases, especially after low water levels coupled with stormy weather and high waves, you can spot streaks of heavy black sands on the beach. It’s in these shallow streaks that most of the gold can be found.
The best conditions for collecting lake gold typically arise after stormy weather in combination with low water levels.
Step by step: Mini Guide
Here are some step by step instructions on how to find gold to clarify the content of the article:
- Wait for the right conditions: Most prospectors wait for stormy weather to have produced waves that concentrate the gold in the form of streaks on the beach. It’s preferable that the water levels are low.
- Collect the paystreaks: The paystreaks formed by wave action are generally very shallow, and collecting them typically involves just scraping off the surface layer. Be quick to head out before they disappear!
- Process the sand: Use equipment specially designed to collect fine gold, like the ones mentioned at the end of this article!
Aways look up local rules and regulations for to your local area before collecting and processing beach sand!
Differences Between Lake and River Gold
Here are the two biggest differences between lake and river gold.
Shape and size
Although gold deposits in rivers and lakes originate from the same kinds of sources, they vary quite a lot with regards to their size and shape.
The gold found in rivers tends to be coarser than that found in lakes. This simply has to do with that bigger pieces of gold are heavier, and tend to get hung up in the various cavities and low pressure areas in a river before it flows out into a lake. Smaller gold, on the other hand, is picked up much more easily by the current, and more often makes it through the entire stretch of the river ending in a lake.
Another difference is that lake gold tends to have a more curled up shape as it’s constantly rolling along the sand bottom.
River Placers Don’t Replenish
As we mentioned earlier, the amount of gold that can be recovered from beaches varies quite a lot depending on the prevailing conditions. This also means that a prospector can visit the same site countless times and collect new gold every time if the conditions are right.
This is somewhat different from other types of placers. For instance, river placers will take many years to be replensished if the conditions are right, and dry desert placers are likely to take tens of thousands of years to once again produce gold.
Best Tools For Mining Lake Gold
As I have mentioned already, much of the gold found in lakes is really small and requires tools and methods that are finely tuned to capture even the tiniest specks. This means that you want to opt for equipment that specializes in fine gold and gold dust recovery.
Gold Cube
The perhaps best tool I’ve used for getting out that really tiny gold, is the gold cube. It’s a relatively expensive piece of equipment, but it really manages to capture a lot of the gold that would get missed using other more common methods.
Sluice Box for Fine Gold
Although the fine gold recovery rate of a sluice box might not be as high as that of a gold cube, it certainly is possible to extract some really fine gold with a properly set up sluice box.
Here are some of the things that are critical and should be kept in mind when setting up a sluice box for fine lake gold:
- Pick the Right Mattings: Use mattings that are specially made for fine gold recovery. There are different models available, and combining different types could be a good idea.
- Add Miner’s Moss: Miner’s moss is really effective for fine gold. Add it to the end of the sluice to see how much gold escaped the mattings!
- Be gentle with the water flow: The water flow should be monitored carefully. If it’s too strong you risk flushing out all those small gold particles!
- Disperse the sand evenly in the sluice: Gently feed the sluice so that all the sand gets soaked properly. Otherwise, you risk having the gold float right through the sluice!
For a list of suitable sluice boxes, be sure to check out my article on the best sluice box for fine gold
I also recommend that you take a closer look at my article on how to set up a sluice if you’re interested in learning more about the process.
Conclusion
Even if lakes are not overwhelmingly popular among prospectors, some of them do contain gold. Depending on the current and historical geology of the area, the gold has come either from rocks and gravels that were laid down by glaciers or from rivers that flowed into the lake. As a result, most lake gold is rather small, sometimes no bigger than the grains of sand themselves.
The amount of gold found by the shoreline varies with the size and force of the waves. In general, higher and more powerful waves will bring new gold to the shores, which is why many prospectors do a lot of their mining after stormy weather.
It’s recommended to use fine gold recovery tools that are specially designed to capture fine gold. The gold cube is a personal favorite of mine, but there are several other options on the market.
Happy prospecting!