Panning for gold

While, the Central Otago gold rush was nearly 200 years ago, the dream of making a fortune still lives on.

Aspiring young prospectors, like Brooklyn, my five year old grandson, are after that elusive gold nugget, so we decided to give it a go, and went gold panning.

Brooklyn, with Mandy, panning for gold.

We contacted Mandy, from the Gold n Gumboot shop in Arrowtown and arranged to meet her for a half day of gold panning tuition on the Arrow River.

Brooklyn’s excitement had been hard to contain, having packed his back pack 48 hours in advance.

We meet Mandy at the Gold n Gumboot shop in Buckingham Street, Arrowtown. We walked the short distance to the river pulling two sluices, spades, buckets and pans on a small trolley.

Mandy had spent a couple of hours on the river the night before, preparing the river for our panning and sluicing experience and for other would be goldminers also wanting to have the chance to find their nuggets later in the week.

Mandy explained to Brooklyn the difference between schist, quartz and iron, all rocks found in the river. Iron is the heaviest of these rocks, but gold is even heavier. Finding iron is often a good precursor to finding gold as they are both heavy and sit under the lighter gravel.

Mandy showed Brooklyn what iron, schist and quartz rocks look like.

Mandy filled Brooklyn’s pan with gravel from the river. First we removed the large rocks, then sluiced the gravel in the water, all the time reducing the amount of gravel in the plan. Then Brooklyn used a magnet to remove the heavy iron, again lessening the debris. Being so heavy, gold and iron are found at the bottom of the river bed, and also sink to the bottom of your gold pan.

Brooklyn removing the iron from the pan with a magnet.

Brookyln’s delight in finding the clusters of iron sand.

Finally, with only a little fine gravel left in the pan, Mandy held it up to the light which caught a small particle of gold. Brooklyn’s face lit up like the sun.

Brooklyn with his vile containing gold.

We also learnt about sluicing. Mandy dug deep into the river bed, filling buckets of gravel. She then tipped them into the top of the sluice, where the lighter rocks and gravel washed away, and heavier gold sank into the mesh.