Placer Mining Opportunities

Prospecting, Hand Mining and Machine Digging

Table of Contents

• Placer Areas
• Money, Claims and Owner Information
• Prospecting and Hand Panning
• Working on Gravel Bars
• Using a Metal/Gold Detector
• Sniping Along the Bank
• Working Above Stream Level
• Exploring for Hidden High Benches
• Machine-Digging Opportunities
• Something Unusual - Moving A Creek

For any kind of placer mining other than hand panning, you have to work on a placer claim. Claims are only available in Placer Areas - the linked page has a little information about some of the Placer Areas and regions in BC.

Money, Claims and Owner Information

• Buy an existing claim, or
• Use the MTO System and a credit card to get a new claim

• pay for a claim over a number of years, like buying a car
• pay for an option to buy a claim for a certain price while you explore it
• pay for the claim with gold recovered from the claim - a royalty or joint venture - possibly with a limit on the number of years and/or the total amount of gold
• lease the right to mine part or all of a claim, paying the owner a royalty on gold recovered, plus maybe a little cash at the beginning, with the right to renew the claim each year if the claim was worked or a fee is paid

You might want to go where there are people working their claims - it can be sometimes be easier to deal with someone face to face. The Cariboo is sort of a good possibility - a lot of area worth working but a low proportion of claims with the owners around. The best area is probably Atlin in the far North West of BC. (By road, you have to come South from the Yukon.) It might be where there is the biggest concentration of people actually working claims.

Getting Claim Owner Contact Information

• Click the Gold Title Search button to get only a mailing address.
• Click the Gold Logon button, logon using your BCeID and password, get to the page with all the tabs, and click the Search for Mineral / Placer / Coal Titles link on the far left side of the page to get a mailing address and, maybe, phone numbers and/or email addresses, if the owner supplied them.

• You can use only a shovel and a gold pan.
• You can't pan in/on a claim, park, private property or First Nations land without permission.

It is a great opportunity - exploring for gold - the most interesting part of placer mining. Shoveling gravel into a sluice box is not as interesting as prospecting. You can explore for the rest of your life and keep seeing and learning new things.

Most prospecting is done in placer areas, where you can you can get a claim if you have a Free Miner Certificate.

Prospecting can have one or more goals...

• to find gold to sell
• to get a claim to keep and work
• to get a claim to explore and sell

If your goal is simply to find gold - not a place for a new placer claim - you can work anywhere in BC. It doesn't have to be in a placer area.

Using a gold pan isn't as fast as using a sluice box, but you can use a pan in places you can't use a sluice box - when you aren't on a claim or when you dig in or within 3 metres of of a creek.

A good plastic gold pan costs $20 and weighs almost nothing. A sluice box requires a pump, hose, gasoline, etc.

Working on Gravel Bars

Some people pay thousands of dollars for a metal/gold detector. In some cases, it can be worth it. In good ground with good equipment and skill, and a lot of digging, you can find a lot of gold nuggets.

You may be able to detect whether a crack in bedrock has any gold in it. A metal detector might be used to find buried channels or benches by finding black sand.

In some cases, a post-hole digger can be a good way to dig when using a metal detector.

Note that work with a metal detector cannot be used to push out the Good-To date on your claim.

Using a Metal Detector to Find Lost Nuggets

The best areas to work are covered with claims, so you need to get permission from the claim owner if you want to work with a metal detector on his or her claim.

Sniping Along the Bank
(But be careful in BC)

In BC, you generally need permission from the local mining office to snipe inside high-water lines of a creek.

If the ground can act like a sluice box, then sniping is cleaning out that sluice box.

Tools for sniping include scoops, brushes, and hooks and other things to collect sand and nuggets from cracks and other tight spaces.

Working Above Stream Level

Even if a sluice box is not near a stream, most of the same rules apply.

Forestry roads can provide new opportunities if they expose gravel from an ancient channel. You might find more of the channel or more deposits at that level. Colors (very tiny flakes of gold in the pan) mean that gold was moving in the stream at that level.

Exploring for Hidden High Benches

Using a sluice box on the side of a valley can be a challenge. You need to either use tubs and recirculate (most of) the water, or dig a pond for the output.

Machine-Digging Opportunities

There is an opportunity everywhere you would like to explore by digging a trench. You can profitably mine paydirt with an excavator that is too deep or not rich enough to mine by hand - on a bench, in an old channel or on a Fraser River bar.

Machine-Digging has disadvantages. It requires a permit (hand mining usually doesn't). The equipment costs a lot to buy or rent, and it costs to operate it - much more gold must be found just to pay expenses.

An opportunity for machine-mining must be rich enough and large enough to be profitable. Before mining begins, you may have to spend money to prepare the site and get the equipment setup out there.

Something Unusual - Moving A Creek