Oroville Spillway Gold May Lie Untouched for Ages

Remember the recent Oroville, Ca spillway disaster? There are gold miners and prospectors up in the area who thirst to dig around it. They dream of the gold that may have been washed down from hillsides and upstream. But dream is all they can do. The work is intense up there to stabilize the spillway, and the property is restricted, anyway.

I dream about gold too. I often look at the mountains near my Arizona home and believe there must be gold in those hills. There is gold there, but the kind I can get at my be sparse. For 100 years, prospectors roamed the hills trying to find it. I have respect for them, because they had sharp eyes. To date my panning has produced nada where I live. The closest place I can go to pan and get anything is 45 miles. But looking at the beautiful geography gets me thinking of sugar plums and chestnuts, again.

The diversion pool is where these California prospectors want to dig. Though they claim that 95% of the time quartz is just quartz, I find that finding a snowy white piece sets alarms off in my head. My rule of thumb is to wave those discoveries with a metal detector. I have found that if the detector goes off and reads aluminum, steel, nickel or whatever, I take it home. I one time found a quartz piece that did that and cut it open with a tile saw. There was a thin vein of gold in it that just about set of my pacemaker.

According to one prospector, the California floods of the 1990's were a great time for panners. The locals are waiting for the waterways to dry out. They anticipate the later 2017 summer to be a wonderful time for those who know how to look for color.

In the meantime, I will dream about Arizona gold and hope for my first local panning find. That will be the day.

Photo

Oroville Dam on the Feather River in Oroville, California as seen from the air, looking east. The dam itself is on the right side of the photo, the concrete overflow spillway is in the center, and the emergency spillway is the vegetated slope on the left of the photo. Credit: Wikipedia: California Department of Water Resources - http://www.water.ca.gov/swp/facilities/Oroville/LakeDam.cfm

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