. . . in them thar youtubes . . . for a teeny fraction of those generating content on that platform. A few years ago, I was suck[er]ed into a feed of snipers / snorklers / scubaristas who would plunge into rivers after the Labor Day weekend and retrieve Go-Pros, phones and jewellery from the murky bottom. The feed-back loop of para-social whoops and hollers from the comments led to these Sn/Sn/Sc people posting every week or every day as they rose up trove from the depths. It seemed too good to be credible. I came to believe that I'd seen the same alga-covered GoPro the previous month; and so I stopped watching dripping stopped-watches. I think I must have para-plunged into these inland waters from following beach-combers [a thing I do]; some of whom use metal detectors to scan the sand at low tide. The jaded palettes of folks-like-me need the content providers to be "exciting" or at least sufficiently different.
On the principle of why keep a dog and bark yourself, I have gravitated towards actual gold-panners rather than recycling para-Go[Pro]ld hunters. There's a group of Canadian YTers who are extracting gold from the Fraser River of British Columbia in a way that is mildly entertaining and rings true to my not-too-fiesty crap-detector. DanHurdOfDanHurdProspecting is an older guy with a flaming orange beard who is working several claims with a shovel, a gold-pan and a wet bottom and sharing his finds with something North of 1 million subscribers. Pioneer Pauly otoh is a younger sniper; he shrugs into a wet-suit and plunges into torrents with sharp eyes and a snuffer bottle. Gold is super heavy [19x denser than water; 7x denser than granite!], so sinks to the bottom and gets caught in crevices. In quickly flowing water, Pauly can fan off the 'over-burden' with one hand and this sand and gravel is swept downstream to reveal the good stuff. Two Toes How To snipe.
TODAY is the 79th day of the year and, following my tribs to Tin [50Sn] Day it seems appropriate to talk up Gold 79Au today. Melts 1064°C, 1948°F, Boils 2836°C, 5137°F. It is chemically inert. So you can purify the stuff chemically.
Inventory: license; gold pan; sifter = classifier; high-banker; water; back-hoe; shovel; pick, crevicing tool; trowel (cat-food scoop will do); pry-bar; snuffer-bottle; metal detector [optional]; wet-suit; crusher; shaker-table; dry socks; hat; sunscreen; no-see-um repellent; milligram scales.
Prospector's jargon by size: nugget > nuggy > picker > flake > speck > flour.
Gold panning is another way to sort heavy material and wash away the lighter stuff. Because gold is the densest material in any shovelful even flour can be concentrated in a gold pan in sufficient quantities to make it worth the work. A nugget much smaller than your pinky finger nail could easily weigh a gram and that's $60 at current prices. The 'picker' [big enough to pick up with your fingers] shown [R] is the reward for processing maybe 10kg of dirt. It's the cash-value for a day where Dan and Pauly get to hang out together which is the fun pay-off. Gold can be found all over the world:
- Ireland
- Broighter, Co Derry
- Tyndrum, Scotland
- Senegal
- Bank of England
- Yukon
- Brazil
- Serra Pelada 450 tonnes extracted more pics
- New Zealand
- Kenya
- Wales - mining old smart phones How To
The price of Gold goes Up and Down; it is now worth $60/g = $1850/oz
- Feb 2001 ~$450/oz century low
- Aug 2021 ~$2200/oz recent high
- 10 Mar 2023 $1,834 . . . 19 Mar 2023 $2,001 ! Ya shd a bought a week ago
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