Hey everyone! Today I'm at Tawas Point State Park
It's December, and it's over 40 degrees, so I think it's mandatory to come outside
and do something on a day like this, so I decided to hit the beach!
So the first thing I noticed here is that there's black sand on the beach
I have the gold pan in the car, so I'll have to check out some of that when I
come back
But first I'm looking for rocks
Picked up a little tiny coral fossil. Don't know exactly what kind that is
Kinda nifty though!
(waves crashing)
Look at the layers in the sand here. You can see a little bit of red in there,
so there's garnet in the sand
Really pretty
I guess December's not too late to get in the water and have some fun
Somebody out there kiteboarding
(waves crashing)
There are rocks here
But they appear to be very small rocks, there's some up on the dry part of the
beach, but just in the water here there's rocks out just a little ways, then it's
pure sand. The rocks have a very orange look to them
I'll get a better scoop
Not sure if that's chert or what it is
(waves crashing)
It looks like those brownish-tan colored rocks are chert
A lot of them are kind of shiny on the beach
(waves lapping)
I've made it to the end of the point
It's pretty sandy the whole way
I can see Tawas off in the distance there
Well here's where they keep the rocks!
(waves lapping)
So I'm just around the other side of the point here, and the rocks are still tiny,
but there's a few more of them up on the beach. Still a lot of that kind of
polished chert. I wonder if it gets polished by just the sand blowing
over it, or if it's rolling around in the water that does it
This is a pretty spot here
One of the reasons that I make these videos is to kind of catalogue Michigan
beaches, for people who want to go find their own rocks, so you can kind of see
what to expect. I would not call this a great beach to look for rocks, but if you
want to go for a walk, it's a beautiful spot for that!
Littered with goose tracks out here
They're kind of everywhere
The lighthouse was built in 1873
It's been replaced by a more modern light out at the end of the point
I'm back where I started, I walked both sides of the point
and I'm back here at the black sand. So my plan is to scoop the sand into
the bucket, and it's kind of rough to pan here, but back over that way there's
a little protected area, so I'll go pan it over there
I was curious how deep this went, because it seemed to be layered, and it is
See the little stripes down for the first two or three inches there
Right next to the parking lot, and there's this little pond here
and this is what I'm going to pan in
(splashing)
I don't think I see anything in that one
I feel like my whole season's riding on this pan
I've got one little microscopic speck of gold in there
I think I'll pan a couple more, and if I find some more I'll bring it home and
play with it on my miller table
There's another little speck of gold there
Kind of exciting, because this is the first time I've found it on Lake Huron
I've found it on Lake Superior quite a few times
This is the first time I've really looked very hard on Lake Huron
I'm back home now, and I have some black sand with me
and there's a reddish tint to this, not sure if it shows up on your monitor,
but here it looks slightly reddish, so I think that means there's garnets in
there. So I'm going to process this here and see if I can find any more gold
I don't have my hopes up too high, because I panned like whole pans of the beach and
only found one little speck of gold. This method's probably a little bit more
thorough, but it's also a lot slower, so I doubt that I'll find anything, but it's
fun to play with it. So the first thing I'm going to do is
take the magnetite out of the black sand, and I'm going to use this little gizmo
I got the plans for this on another YouTube channel, I'll put a link in the
description for that, so you can see how to make this, and the other thing that
I'm going to show you in a minute. So what this is, it's a - there's a magnet at the
end of this, so when I push this in, the magnet goes down to the end here,
and then I can swish it around in the black sand
and you can see a bunch of magnetite that sticks to it
So the idea here is to remove the magnetite so you don't have to worry
about sorting through that. Magnetite isn't gold, gold won't stick to the
magnet, so this just cuts down on material a little bit
So I already went through this and kind of did this, then I threw it back in so I
could show you, but I was surprised at how little magnetite this has, and I'll show
you the difference between this and stuff I got in Lake Superior in just a minute
I'm getting some, but not a lot. So this really isn't doing that much good
So what you do is this - now there could be gold stuck in between the magnetite
here, so you do this in a multi-step process
One more time here
So I could keep doing this for a while, but you get the idea
So now that it's in here, that's going to be mostly magnetite, but there'll be some
other stuff also. So I'm going to go through again, and move it over here
and then that isn't sticking, so that part wasn't actually magnetite. So that might
have some gold in it, it goes back in over here. And then I do it again
I do this, I don't know, a few times. Doesn't take too long
So, that's not sticking- woops, a little bit stuck- but that didn't stick, so
that goes back in here
I'll do it one more time
OK, so if I wanted to be really thorough I'd do that maybe a couple more times
But this stuff probably doesn't contain any gold, and now I don't have to sort
through that, but you can see I took very little out of there. Almost nothing really
So I'm just gonna sit this over to the side here, and let's do it with some
Lake Superior sand
So first, there's more blonde sand mixed in with this, must've been a thinner layer
or whatever, but I don't know if you can tell, but this stuff's more coarse looking
and I don't think that it's just the blonde sand being in there, it just looks
different
So let me show you the difference of magnetite in here
See how much more there is? Now there's some other stuff in there also, but
lots of magnetite
So I might be taking out, maybe a quarter of the volume here, which is more
significant
and then I'll just do it again
OK, maybe it's not quite a quarter, but it's more than the other one
So, I've removed some magnetite that I don't have to sort through looking for gold
but this isn't about this stuff, put that right back in there
I'm going to continue working on this, I just wanted to show you that I dried
this out, this is actually a couple of days after I was on the beach, I dried it out
so that I could show you dry, I kind of like doing it that way better, but you
can also do it wet, so here's some wet stuff
So you just put it right in the water
and I forgot to put water in this one, but the same thing happens. You put it there,
and if there's water in this one like there should've been - hold on, I'll get
some water
So, on here, over there, take the magnet off and it falls off. So you want - you
don't want wet sand, but sand that's actually submerged in water
and then you can go back again and do the same process, so wet or dry,
either under water wet or completely dry, not in between
Okay, so let's take the processed stuff, I think I'll use this, and we'll go to a
thing called a miller table!
This is my miller table, I built this from plans that I saw on YouTube, same place
that had the little magnet syringe thing, like I said I'll link that in the
description, so if you want to build one of these you can. So there's a little
pump down in here, a submersible pump, it pumps water up here, comes out up here,
and there's a small opening underneath that little board there that lets the water
run underneath in a fine sheet. So the idea is that whole surface should be
covered with a fine sheet of water. I think of this as like an automatic
panner, it kind of does the panning for you
Right here there's a hole in the table, underneath here there is a vial screwed
on, so if I find any gold I just sweep it into that hole and it goes right into the
vial
I said I'd use dry sand, I shouldn't have said that, because look what happens
when you do that, sometimes it floats off down the table, so - see that?
If there was any gold in there it'd be gone
So it's better to put it on wet
So the idea here is, well this green mat, this is a - I guess you'd call it a craft
mat or something, it's for using like with an x-acto knife, it's kind of a cutting
board, it's got like a grid on the other side so you can, I don't know, cut things
out on it I guess. But it's a little bit tacky I guess, a little rubbery maybe,
and the stuff kind of wants to stick to it you'll notice the blonde sand goes off
first, there's not very much blonde sand in here, but I can see a little bit down
in there, in that bottom edge. So it's the lightest and it flies off
first. Then the black sand goes, and if there's any gold, that should be the last
thing to want to slide down the mat. This is all adjustable so you can make
this flow a little bit faster. That gets it done quicker, but you might lose
gold that way, so you kind of have to find a balance between not taking
forever and not losing your gold
So I brought home some black sand from the UP that's just loaded with gold, and
other times you bring home a bucket and there's - you don't find any gold when you
get home. You might find a little bit on the beach, just because you're processing
a whole big pan at a time, but there's hardly any in it, and if I don't find any
at home I end up giving up on it and throwing the sand out
When I say "find lots of gold", that means like lots of little pieces of gold
So this is called flour gold, it means it's like the size of a grain of flour,
it's basically microscopic, so you can have a lot of little pieces and it doesn't
amount to much of anything. But it's still fun to play with!
I'm kind of glad I don't live in a place where there's a lot of gold, because I
think I could get obsessed with this
I bet there's a lot of people that spend a lot more money in equipment than they
actually get gold
I know I have, just buying gold pans and building this, and then I've gotten, like
you know, (laughs) probably no money's worth of gold
but I've had a lot of fun doing it, so
as long as you're doing for the enjoyment of doing it and not kidding yourself and
thinking you're going to get rich or something, it's a fun little hobby
and I don't see anything in that, the gold stands out pretty well, especially against
the green you can see it really well
One thing about gold, sometimes you'll see something that sort of glints
and it'll be kind of sparkly, and you'll think you have something, but if you
look at it from a different angle it doesn't look like anything
So gold will shine no matter which angle you look at it
I don't know if shine's the word for it, but it shows up
no matter what angle you look at it, and it shows up in the shadows too, so
if you're in bright sunlight, there'll be more stuff glinting, but if you get in the
shade, the gold will continue to glint, or look bright, or whatever you want to
call it
Alright, I'm going to turn off the camera and if I find anything I'll let you know
Alright, I have some news. I probably spent a couple hours putting little
tablespoons at a time, or part of a tablespoon at a time on this thing
and not finding anything, so I went out and got my gold pan, and did some indoor
gold panning here, so I kind of concentrated some sand down to a
little more than that, so I put some on here
And I have gold, hoping that it shows up, if I get close enough maybe - right here
and there's another little tiny piece right there
So there's gold in this, just not very much. But it's still fun, so I think
that's four pieces, I found two on the beach and two here, I'm going to
spend a little more time and see if I can find a few more
Well gold mining wasn't at all what I imagined, never once today did I break
anything, swear or yell, "shut 'er down! shut 'er down!"
(Laughs) We'll see you next time.