The minerals and signs that travel with gold, and the ones that only look like it.
The dark, heavy sand left in a pan after the light material is washed away — mostly magnetite, with other heavy minerals like ilmenite, garnet and sometimes hematite. It settles where gold settles, so it marks the layer worth panning carefully.
No. It means the stream sorts by weight at that spot, which is necessary but not sufficient. Plenty of streams are full of black sand and empty of gold. Black sand tells you where to look, not what you will find.
Pyrite, an iron sulphide. It is brassy, forms cubes and angular grains, is brittle, and looks dull when shaded. Gold is soft, bends rather than breaks, and shines the same in shade as in sun.
Mica is a thin, flat flake that flashes and disappears as the pan tilts, and it floats or drifts easily. Gold keeps its colour at every angle and stays put at the bottom of the pan. Press mica with a pin: it breaks; gold dents.
A constant warm yellow that does not sparkle or change with the angle, sitting at the very top of the black sand fan. Even the smallest speck looks the same colour from any direction.
Often. Much gold occurs in quartz veins, so a stream full of white quartz pebbles is draining vein-bearing rock. Look for quartz with rusty stains or small cavities where sulphides have weathered out.
Quartz stained brown or red by iron oxides left when pyrite and other sulphides weathered away. Gold in veins is often associated with those sulphides, so rusty, honeycombed quartz is a classic indicator.
Garnets are heavy and sit with black sand, so they show that the spot concentrates heavies. They are not tied to gold directly, but a pan with garnet and black sand is a pan from a working trap.
That it has travelled far. Fresh gold near a source is rough, angular and sometimes still attached to quartz; the further it moves, the more it is hammered flat and rounded.
That the source is close — perhaps in this catchment, perhaps upstream within a short distance. Angular gold is the best reason to walk upstream and examine the tributaries.
Iron-stained outcrops, called gossans when strong, mark zones where sulphide minerals have weathered. Gold mineralisation often sits with sulphides, so gossans in a catchment are worth noting.
A line of gold-bearing gravel — a buried channel or a pay streak you can follow. Old miners spoke of following the lead; today it means the same: find the streak, then track it up and down the bed.
They indicate that someone thought so and dug — tailings piles, hand-stacked stones, water races and shafts. They are the strongest sign available that gold occurred there and are usually worth sampling around.
A lot of black sand means strong concentration of heavies at that spot; a little means weak sorting. Gold may accompany either, but where there is a lot of black sand the stream has done most of the concentration work for you.
A magnetic iron oxide and the main part of black sand. It is useful because a magnet removes it from concentrate quickly, and its presence shows the stream sorts by weight.
A non-magnetic iron oxide, red-brown to steel-grey, that sits with the heavies. It stays behind when the magnet has taken the magnetite and can be confused with dark gold; a scratch on white ceramic leaves a red-brown streak.
In some regions, yes: platinum group metals, tin, tungsten minerals and even small gems settle with gold. They are silvery or dark rather than yellow; note them, because they can indicate the type of source rock.
Gold too fine to pick up as individual flakes. Flour gold is common far from sources and in slow, sandy reaches. It is recoverable with careful panning but easy to lose.
Green staining can mean copper minerals, which occur in some mineralised zones that also carry gold. It is a general sign of mineralisation, not of gold specifically.
Press it with a needle: gold dents and stays whole, pyrite crumbles, mica splits. Move it in the pan: gold stays, mica drifts. Look at it in shade: gold keeps its colour, pyrite goes dull.
Yes, at the base of the gravel and on bedrock, often as a dark band. When digging a bar, watch for that band; it is the layer to pan first and most carefully.
Dragging a mineral across unglazed white ceramic and reading the colour of the powder it leaves. Gold leaves a golden-yellow streak, pyrite a greenish-black one, hematite a red-brown one.
Traces of gold exist in many sediments, but "traces" means nothing you can see or recover. A stream is a prospect only when a source concentrates enough gold to show in a pan.
Rarely, in ground where the rock has no magnetite. The sorting still happens, but the marker layer is less obvious; the heavies may be garnet, hematite or simply the coarsest gravel on bedrock.
Gold in the pan. Every other sign says "maybe". A few colours from a test pan at a good trap is worth more than any amount of promising quartz.
GOLDONGO scores entire stream networks for the trap geometry this guide describes — slope breaks, inside bends, junctions and bedrock. Pick your region and see where it stands.
This guide is general education, not advice for a specific place. A score, a map or a sentence here is not a licence to dig: the rules for prospecting, land access and protected areas differ from place to place — learn the ones that apply where you are before you go.