Monday, January 9th 2012

This was the 2nd time ever panning.  About a week before this I went down to Contrary Creek which is part of Lake Anna.  Contrary is known as a big attraction for gold prospectors in VA.  The problem with Contrary is, if your not a member of their club, then you can only pan about a 50 foot stretch of creek.  You have to join the club (which has a very limited number of spots) to be able to prospect further downstream...where all the gold is.  Another problem with Contrary is that it's so picked over and the whole creek has been worked to death.  So anyways, I drove about 2 hours down to Lake Anna and spent 4 hours on the creek to only find 1 flake of gold.  While I was down there, someone told me that the Potomac River is gold bearing as well, which is only 30 minutes from my house.  So this monday I went to a creek in Great Falls for about 3 hours and finished with this...

35 small flakes of gold.  I was ecstatic because it was such a great improvement on my first prospecting trip and it was so much closer to my house.  The only down side was that it was freezing cold and I couldn't feel my hands for a couple of hours.  

It took about an hour to find a good spot that was producing gold.  Once I found a nice spot I was getting a consistent couple of pieces in each pan.  This is a picture of the best pan I had all day.

Now I know this probably isn't much to a lot of you experienced prospectors out there but for my 2nd time I think this is pretty good.


Total Pieces: 35


Jason