Cleaning gold dredging concentrates

My brother and I have been gold mining since the mid-1990s. Originally we would dredge all day and then cleanup and pan the dredge concentrates directly in the field. We found out that we were missing some of the gold by just panning in the field, so we started to save the dredging concentrates for further reclamation at the cleanup shack back home. We would still pan out in the field and remove any pickers and large flakes, but now instead of panning directly into the river, we save the concentrates. After running the secondary concentrates thru the gold wheel here is what we found:

As you can see, it really pays off to take your gold dredging concentrates home for final gold removal! We missed a lot of gold in the field!

Here’s a video describing our gold concentrates methods:

North GA Waterfall 2″ Gold Dredging

A few years back my brother and I found this little waterfall that we decided to dredge out using our 2″ dredge. We did pretty good and found stringy gold like it was near the source. Now, we decided to go back and see if over the years the flood waters have replenished the gold. So we set up the 2″ dredge. This time we added a 2nd sluice box. During a different outing we had two grains of gold that we sucked up to see if we were losing anything and yep, sure enough we were. We only recovered one of the two grains. In fact, the 2nd sluice box ended up being the only place where we found gold this time around. What a night mare; It only goes to say that testing configurations can really pay off. To see how much gold we found the 2nd time around, watch the video below.