Gold Prospecting for Dummies

Placer gold sample

Gold fever: it seizes its victims by their wallets and almost never lets go. It can be so powerful that places like Sutter's Mill and the Yukon Territory are forever linked in popular lore with the yellow stuff; so popular that one NFL football team¹ owes its name to the precious metal. And yes, whenever the price of gold rises, people start searching the internet for how to get rich quick. And yes, freelancing bozos such as eHow.com's Tom Lutzenberger stand at the ready to underinform, misinform, and just plain bullshit whoever find their content via an ill-considered click on a search result. Under-information (mixed with a plenty of misinformation) can be found at the center of a mother lode site post that Tom and eHow titled "Gold Nuggets Found in Arizona."² The title itself doesn't make much sense, but Lutzenberger's text is even less useful.

For the most part, Lutzenberger doesn't say a whole lot that's demonstrably wrong in his post, which he basically copy-reword-pasted from a few hobbyist sites. Oh, sure, saying that you can "spelunk for gold" anywhere, much less in Arizona is, shall we say, "stupid." But conflating caves with underground mining as Tom does here:

"In terms of traditional gold-hunting --- going into caves and mining for gold in Arizona --- there are few options. Most of the old mining locations have been stripped from previous activities. Additionally, much of the land is on public government zones where you need prior permission to mine..." That's actually worse than stupid; it's just plain wrong: "going into caves" is not "traditional gold-hunting" by any stretch of the imagination (we suspect he reworded an original that said "going into mines" or "going into mine shafts"). But what can you expect of an idiot who thinks gold nuggets wander around in streams and you can find them by panning?  "...where moving water can be found, Arizona creeks and rivers also have the potential for gold nugget discoveries. The work usually involves sifting through the river silt and dirt, which can be a bit of a production to find small nuggets moved by water..."

Placer gold deposits (those found in stream sediments) rarely yield anything larger than flakes and dust-sized particles such as those shown in the accompanying image. Nuggets are a lot more likely to be found in the soil immediately above or adjacent to weathered gold-bearing veins, because the metal is so dense that even a small nugget is surprisingly heavy.

Lutzenberger waxes ecstatic about a handful of sites about the state where one of the references he savages in his eHowian manner mentions previous finds, but he missed actual information compiled by professionals – in this case, the Arizona Geological Survey³, which also links to a pretty much canonical listing of gold-mining sites scattered across the state. That's a lot more than the dozen or so Tom managed to transcribe, the dumbass.

There's a good chance Lutzenberger mis-answered the "question" in the first place: someone probably wanted a list. Regardless: for his obvious unfamiliarity with gold and gold mining combined with his willingness to pretend that he knows jack (must be due to that PolySci degree of yours), we hereby dub Lutzenberger our Dumbass of the Day. Is this the third time? or the fourth?

¹  The San Francisco 49ers, of course...
² The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was    ehow.com/list_7467514_gold-nuggets-found-arizona.html
³  Our staff geologist worked at the AGS for a time...

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