Sniping for Gold Nuggets—the Walk and the Talk

Author Sniping For Gold

Preface:

I was a stranger in a big city during the late 1970s, recently divorced, chained to a dull, monotonous job, and trapped in a lackluster, rewardless life. As fast as I collected my weekly pay, I squandered it in saloons, taverns, and strip clubs. I was spinning my wheels, going nowhere–and sick of it. Deep down I knew a radical change was called for.

Since childhood I’d dreamed of becoming a full-time gold prospector. The time and circumstances now seemed ripe to give it a shot. I knew I might never get a better opportunity, so, I resolved to pull up stakes and give it a go.

With the onset of winter and little more in assets than my old Datsun station wagon, a few dollars in cash, and my final paycheck, I quit my job as a welder in a Seattle shipyard. All ties to the mainstream had been severed. At last, free and unfettered, I prepared to hit the road for California’s goldfields.

The morning I was scheduled to leave town for California’s Gold Country, I woke up dizzy and red-eyed after a two-day-long celebratory drinking spree. My stomach was queasy and my head was throbbing like a smashed thumb; however, time was marching on. A new tenant was slated to take over my apartment the very next day; so, ready or not, my great adventure must begin immediately. Hangover be damned!

Contents:

• Sniper Talk
• Sniper Country
• California’s Auriferous Streams—the Terrain, Flora, and Fauna
• Bedrock–It’s Where the Gold Is
• Gold Accumulation in California Streambeds—the Process
• Basic Sniping Tools & Equipment
  

Sniper Talk

Sniping is a simple, age-old mining method used to home in on and recover concentrations of gold from natural caches on or near bedrock that are easy to access with simple hand tools.

Largely because sniping requires but a minimal investment in tools and equipment, it has been a favored mining method used worldwide by generations of independent gold prospectors and miners operating on limited budgets.

California’s gold bearing streams are the focus of this post; however, the principles of sniping for gold apply universally.

It was winter. It was wet, and it was cold when I arrived on the North Fork of the Yuba River to set up camp and begin my gold prospecting and mining apprenticeship. My objective was to learn to live independently in the bush solely on proceeds from the sale of gold that I would find. Those first few months on the river are chronicled in my post here on The Gold Scoop: A Greenhorn Gold Miner’s Love Affair With Downieville, Ca—1979

Following interminable months of cloudy skies, rain, ice, sleet, and snow, spring finally arrived on the historic Yuba River, where I was camped about a dozen miles below the quaint, gold-rush era village of Downieville, California.

One warm, sunny day when tourists and gold panners were beginning to show up, I was panning along the banks of the stream and finding a little gold here and there. Having had the North Fork all to myself all winter, I had come to feel like the King of the river.

I was loving the peace and solitude when suddenly, about as welcome as a hornet trapped in my boxers, here comes this chubby dude with a round, oversized head. Packed tightly into a black neoprene wetsuit, he glided through the water toward me, snorting and spouting spray from his snorkel–looking like a miniature whale.

Spotting me on the bank, he floated up to where I had my pan in the water, stood up, dripping, pulled off his snorkel and face mask, dropped the tools he was holding, wiped a string of snot from below his nose, struggled out of his gloves, smiled broadly, stuck out a meaty hand and announced with authority, “I’m Ed–but folks call me the Super Sniper.”

“Super Sniper? Whatcha mean?” I asked, warily.

It turned out to be my lucky day. Ed, as I was soon to learn, was and expert gold prospector and miner with a powerful zest for life. He was affable and an ardent talker and, to my benefit, a gifted teacher. From day one, Ed was willing, able, and eager to school me with all I could ever want to know about his most revered passion–sniping for gold.

I Become a Gold Sniping Student

Over the next couple few weeks, I followed along each day as Ed sniped in the river and up its feeder creeks. I learned that sniping, simply put, is a method/art used worldwide by gold miners to home in on and recover concentrations of gold from caches (usually small), both in wet and dry environments.

I also learned that sniping can produce results quickly, with relative ease, little equipment, and, importantly, with a minimum of expense. It is a craft often favored by lone miners operating on shoestring budgets. Techniques have evolved to use a host of tools, including gold pans, sluice boxes, underwater gear used with and without hookah air, dredges, highbankers, drywashers, metal detectors, and on a larger scale, heavy equipment.

Nights, around Ed’s campfire, I listened with mounting interest to his tales of sniping in streams rich in gold. He claimed that once, during a stretch of 17 consecutive days, he sniped over an ounce of gold per day–said it became so routine it almost got boring. So, on the 18th day, for a change of pace, he gave sniping a rest, grabbed his rod & reel, and marched off to go fishing, instead.

That day as he ambled along the rocky, gravel-strewn banks above the stream, frequently pausing to cast for fish, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of gold. He stopped and bent over to investigate. To his astonishment, three jumbo size gold nuggets gleamed back at him from a rusty crevice in the bedrock just a few feet above the river. He pried them loose and carried them back to camp along with a hefty string of trout.

Ed’s campmates were all either sluicers or dredgers, not a sniper in the bunch. Nights around the campfire he was grossly outnumbered. His jolly mining buddies would gang up on him. Between gulps of beer and with a feigned air of superiority, the raucous cadre regularly touted their mining methods and unleashed their disdain for snipers in general and Ed in particular.

That night back in camp, Ed shared his fish with his gold-miner friends. Of the gold, they got only a peek, a feel, and his telling of the tale, served with a very generous helping of crow–not a pinch of modesty. Ed was a peacock! The biggest nugget weighed approximately three ounces. Combined, all three exceeded five ounces. He showed me a newspaper article that told the tale, complete with photos of him proudly holding the nuggets he had caught while fishing.

After a week or so, Ed came to trust me enough to show me some of the best best nuggets he’d found over the years. Wow! What a jaw-dropping, awesome pile of gold. Many of his nuggets weighed over an ounce. That was all the convincing I needed. I decided to put aside my gold pan and sluice box and become a sniper like Ed–or at least give it my best shot.

Thanks to Ed, after a few weeks of his expert tutelage, I became well-schooled in the principles and techniques of sniping. Soon it was time to put them to practice. So I sold all the gold that I had mined from the river and bought a wetsuit, tools, books listing California’s gold-bearing streams and estimated production stats, and a set of pertinent Topo maps.

Ed marked the maps to highlight remote streams in the backcountry that had paid him well and in his opinion still carried plenty of gold. Then I packed my camping outfit, newly purchased sniping gear, and a two week’s supply of food into my jalopy, waved goodbye to the miners I had come to know on the river, beat it for the backcountry, made camp, jumped into the water–and did a quarter ounce the first day.

After I faded into the backcountry to snipe, I lost track of Ed. He was a retired Navy man and passed middle age back then; today, he’d have to be 100 years old or close to it. I don’t know the ending to his story–but it almost certainly has come to an end by now. I will always be grateful to him and remember him fondly for his sniping expertise, positive energy, loud, contagious laugh and sense of humor, eagerness to help others, and his steadfast enthusiasm for life.

With much work and time in the bush, I became a fair sniper–developed the requisite nose for gold and learned to spot gold catches in streambeds, remove overburden, if any, recover the gold, if any, and quickly move on to the next auspicious looking spot–of which there seemed to be no end.

Unlike Ed, I didn’t have a second source of income, so just to cover expenses and keep my dream alive, I sold my gold almost as soon as I found it–every last pennyweight. However, like Ed, one of my discoveries, a multi-ounce quartz/gold specimen, did appear in print. That story is told in my post: Does Metal Detecting Pay?

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Sniper Country

During the Great Depression Era (1929–1939), swarms of unemployed men, some with families, turned to gold-bearing streams such as those found in California’s Mother Lode districts to snipe for gold in order to survive. Most only made from pennies to a dollar or two a day, but, for many, it was enough to enable them to transcend the cruelest of those years.

One man and wife team of Depression-Era snipers was Jesse and Dorothy Coffey. Accompanied by their fiery little dog, they made a living sniping for gold while having the time and adventure of their lives. During four of the Depression’s leanest years, they camped and sniped alongside creeks and rivers in California’s Mother Lode districts.

Thankfully, they bequeathed to us an account of their adventures in the form of a biography as told to and written by George Hoeper. The work is titled: Bacon & Beans from a Gold Pan. It is a true, homespun rendering of their camping and mining adventures in 1930s California. I discovered the book in the 70s–enjoyed it so much, I’ve reread it on multiple occasions.

Over the course of my gold mining career, I stumpled upon other independent-minded miners who were camping in the backcountry—doing their best to scrape together enough gold to make a living. A small percentage did–most didn’t.

One hardened prospector I met made his living by strictly panning for gold. That’s extremely rare, and mighty tough to do, especially back then when gold was selling at a small fraction of what it does today in 2024. His odyssey stuck in my mind; recently I was moved to blog about him in a post I titled: He Made His Living With a Gold Pan.

We Americans have free and open access to vast areas of public, gold-bearing lands, lands that are open to mineral exploration, lands that can be claimed and worked—mostly in the Western United States and Alaska. Plenty of it is prime sniping country. We can file a claim if we wish, however, we are not required to file in order to snipe or prospect for minerals–including gold–on open (unclaimed) land while using hand tools.

It is every prospector’s, sniper’s, and miner’s responsibility to know the legal status of all properties he intends to prospect or work. The mineral rights of others must, by law, be respected. However, far too many prospectors and speculators have been overeager to plant claim posts into the ground, often on top of existing, valid claims. Seldom have they been so eager to remove them when they should have.

As a result, our backcountry hills are plastered silly with invalid claim posts and notices. Just spotting them in such abundance can be bewildering and downright discouraging–especially to the first-time prospector. Many greenhorns, so confronted, throw up their arms and slink back to their homes like whipped puppies.

They shouldn’t, because a significant percentage of those apparent mineral claims have either expired long ago or were never properly (legally) filed in the first place. It is wise, therefore, to research property/mineral status prior to heading into the field so as not to be bluffed away by invalid claims, infringe on valid ones, or violate private property rights.

In 2021 The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) launched its new online Mineral & Land Records System (MLRS) which replaced the LR2000 system. The MLRS provides an online, searchable database of public records pertaining to BLM land and mineral use authorizations, conveyances, mining claims, withdrawals, and classifications.

The service is multifaceted and free. To get the most out of it requires a careful reading and following of the instructions found in the website’s online tutorials. There are also multiple third-party text and video tutorials available online.

You can watch the MLRS Introduction Video Here. And you can access MLRS records and file your mining claims online at the BLM’s Mineral & Land Records System (MLRS) Here.

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Typical Mother Lode Country Canyon—Sniper’s Delight!

 

California’s Auriferous (Gold Bearing) Streams—the Terrain, Flora, and Fauna

There are many gold-bearing creeks and rivers in California’s Mother Lode country that are open to recreational mining and are easy to access. Miners can park their vehicles beside the stream, grab their gear, and within minutes be testing their luck on the banks and in the waters, where permitted.

Despite decades of heavy traffic, those popular, roadside streams still produce some gold every season and, on occasion, a hefty nugget or little pay streak bonanza that was missed by the old-timers is discovered. For many recreational miners, that’s enough to keep them happy and coming back year after year. However, for a realistic shot at a respectable payday, the odds and common sense favor isolated, auriferous streams in the backcountry.

There are still streams or sections of streams that have a history of gold production, but have seldom, if at all, been prospected or mined in recent times. They are usually difficult to access, and that’s largely why they don’t get much play. While the odds of finding gold in them in paying quantities are better than the easily accessed and heavily worked locations, the reality is, the chance of making a life-changing strike in any of them is still a long shot.

The best chance to find such a stream is at the bottom of remote, backcountry canyons—destinations that are not even considered an option to the average hiker or amateur gold prospector. The canyons are, in the main, isolated, steep, deep, narrow, usually not accessible over established trails and, to descend or ascend, not exactly a walk in the park.

Canyon ridgetops are most often blanketed with tall–nearly impenetrable manzanita thickets. Streambeds, up to a half-mile below, are only 30 or 40 feet wide in places, expanding to as much as a hundred or more in others. Among the trees sprouting from the streambanks or the canyon walls may be alder, cedar, cottonwood, dogwood, fir, madrone, maple, oak, sycamore, pine, and willow.

In spring, water lily stalks shoot up from gnarly, underwater root systems plugged into cracks in the bedrock of placid ponds and gentle eddies. They sprout giant, dark green elephant-ear leaves and drape them mere inches above the water.

Lush fern colonies choke the shaded, untrampled boggy places.

Blackberry thickets and poison oak bushes thrive and compete with an abundance of other plants, shrubs, bushes, and trees for the limited space along the winding banks of the streams.

Massive swarms of ladybugs arrive, cluster, and mate in huge, dynamic masses. On bushes teaming with aphid colonies (food for the next generation), they lay their tiny eggs.

Pesky, bloodsucking mosquitoes hatch by the millions and hunt and feast on warm-blooded critters—inlcuding gold miners!

Colossal squadrons of no-see-ums (gnats) buzz ears and faces and, attracted to moisture, crash into eyes sockets where they stick and squirm.

Deer come to sip warily from streams; hungry water snakes lurk in pools to ambush trout; rattlers and other snake species stalk prey on rocky sandbars and canyon walls; grey squirrels skitter about in trees; their cousins, the scruffy browns, scramble over rocky floors; blue jays screech and scold from treetops.

From December to May, California newts (salamanders) gather in abundance in clear, cold pools. They mate, deposit their slimy clusters of eggs, then return to their underground homes, dug into streambanks, gravel bars, and canyon walls, until next year’s call to action.

Giant, brown trout patrol deep pools beneath frothy waterfalls. They dart about like hungry sharks and feast on insects flushing through the current from upstream.

The scene is dynamic, vibrant, and teeming with life–yet, paradoxically, to the obtuse, it’s often dismissed with a shrug as being quiet and exceedingly dull.

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Bedrock-It’s Where The Gold Is

Because the richest concentrations of placer gold in streams are usually found lying on or near bedrock, it is essential for a sniper to, without a moment’s ambiguity, be able to identify bedrock.

Bedrock is the upper crust or solid foundation of rock that supports the earth’s surface. The vast majority of bedrock is covered and concealed under an unconsolidated layer of broken rock and soil (regolith)–the surface upon which most of us walk, work and live.

Exposed bedrock (outcrops) are commonly encountered on mountain tops, steep slopes, and in canyons cut by erosion. Bedrock can also be observed in stone quarries, on rocky coastlines, along stream banks, and on exposed stream bottoms or beneath their loads of sands and gravels (overburden).

In valleys, bedrock is rarely exposed as a surface we can see and walk on. It is most often covered by a layer of broken rock and soil extending from inches to hundreds of meters or more in-depth. When the material covers a mineral deposit of commercial value or potential value, it is referred to by miners and prospectors as overburden.

So, simplified: Bedrock, the surface upon which the highest concentrations of placer gold are commonly found, is the earth’s solid upper crust, often concealed beneath loose deposits of unconsolidated surface materials.

Typical Mother Lode Country gold-bearing stream, showing exposed bedrock along its banks

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Gold Accumulation in California Streambeds—the Process

In California’s Mother Lode country, the preponderance of gold in streams was acquired from ancient, dead and buried, auriferous river channels that were breached and plundered of vast quantities of gold by present-day drainage systems.

Today, the typical gold-bearing stream in California’s Mother Lode country flows through a canyon at some point, certainly in its higher elevations. Over eons, the erosion process has carved out an enormous volume of rock (countless cubic yards), resulting in the lowering of the stream’s channel and deepening and widening of its canyon to present day levels. The process continues and will not abate until the stream reaches base level.

* Base level is the elevation at which a stream empties into the sea or an inland body of standing water such as a lake and loses its ability to erode.

The average auriferous stream’s channel drops in elevation by approximately 30 feet per mile–that’s ideal for the capture and accumulation of gold along its craggy course.

Materials eroded from the canyon’s walls and streambed in geologically recent times, together with those robbed from ancient channels and those introduced upstream by merging ones, are distributed unevenly and irregularly upon the stream’s banks and throughout its bed.

Natural forces are pushing the prodigious, seemingly stagnant aggregate mass along an epic journey to the sea, a timeless, unfathomable journey to our eye, but a journey certain–nevertheless.

Periodic spurts of violent flooding are a major accelerating component of the erosion and aggregate purging process; floods are also critical to the classification and consolidation of heavy minerals, including gold, into layer or enrichment zones throughout the aggregate mass in the stream’s channel.

When a mineral, gold for example, is caught up and swept along in a current, its specific gravity (analogous to density) is a key factor influencing when and where it will eventually fall out and settle in the channel.

The specific gravity of gold, simplified, is the ratio of the density of gold to the density of water. Water has a specific gravity of one; therefore, if a substance has a specific gravity greater than one, it will sink in water.

Discounting the rare occurrence of platinum in paying quantities, gold has the highest specific gravity of any constituent of consequence to us that is found among the materials that constitute the aggregate load of streambeds.

Gold, having a specific gravity (if pure) of 19.3, is 19.3 times as heavy as an equal volume of water. For example, if a specified volume of water weighs eight pounds, the same volume of gold will weigh a stunning 154.4 pounds (19.3×8).

In contrast, the specific gravity of quartz is approximately 2.7. Therefore, sticking with our simple formula, if a specified container of water weighs eight pounds, the identical volume of quartz will weigh approximately 21.6 pounds (2.7×8).

It is easy then to understand why gold, because of its high density, will separate from lighter, lower-density materials that are stirred up and transported downstream during a flood, and when forces allow, gold will descend and settle on or near bedrock ahead of lighter materials. As a general rule, placer gold will be found in its highest concentrations in close proximity to bedrock.

Consider the near certainty that if size, shape, and stream conditions are equal between two objects being moved along in a current, the object with the highest density will settle out first. The foregone hypothesis suggests that at the bottom end of a long run of swift current, at the point where the stream channel widens, the current slows, and stream aggregate begins to drop from the flow, gold, with its extremely high-density advantage over almost all other materials in the stream, will drop out and settle first.

Conditions that slow the current and favor the deposition of gold include sudden widening of the streambed, the inside path of the stream around bends and turns, and the downstream side of boulders and other large, stationary objects, including bedrock anomalies.

Fractured, irregular bedrock and cracks and crevices trap gold, too, there to be safe from eviction–except in the most cataclysmic of events.

Also, consider that streams narrow and steepen in some stretches, water speeds accelerate and bedrock is kept swept clean or near clean of overburden in spots. Consequently, some prime gold catches, such as cracks and crevices, are completely exposed. Sniper’s delight!

All of the above-mentioned conditions, when observed, should be investigated as possible gold catches.

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Basic Sniping Tools & Equipment

Wetsuit and accouterments (optional but highly recommended): used to shield bare skin from abrasion and to keep body temperature from plunging while sniping in cold waters.

Shovel head: (no handle): used underwater for scooping overburden. You want a small shovel head so you can easily carry it with your other tools and use it underwater to scrape away the overburden covering cracks and crevices in bedrock. If you don’t have a little shovel laying around that can be beheaded, buy one or use anything that will do the job. You could just scrape and fan the gravel with your hands, but it’s a lot slower than with a good little scooper—and the faster you work, the more potential caches you uncover, and increase your chance of success.

Rock Hammer: used to hammer and break up compacted/cemented gravels

Gad bar: used on objects to pry them up, apart, or loose.

Crevice tool (scratcher): used to scrape, loosen and dislodge tightly packed gravel from bedrock crevices. It’s a simple implement, my favorite was about ¼ inch square and 18 or so inches long. Some snipers prefer a long screwdriver, use both, or make, modify, or repurpose other tools or objects for the job (It’s all about personal preference).

Suction gun (Sniping gun): used for sucking up and temporarily storing fine gold and small nuggets. Nowadays, there are a wide variety of commercial options available, including bulb and bottle snuffers. Again, it’s all about personal preference.

I modified an automotive grease gun for use as my suction tool. In my opinion, it was (maybe still is) superior to commercial models on the market today. It is almost indestructible and can be forced deep into narrow, hard to get to crevices without damage to the tool. It has excellent suction and plenty of expulsion power for jetting water into tight spots, such as tiny holes and narrow crevices, to force out the contents, so as to be accessible and retrieved. I may build a few suction guns to make availavle to gold snipers to see if there’s a demand. In the meantime, here’s what I found on Amazon:

Those are the basics. Depending on conditions, objectives, and personal preferences, the choice of tools among snipers vary greatly. For example, in addition to the bare essentials, some snipers carry an array of chisels and scratchers as well as a come-along and shop hammer. Some use hookah air systems in order to get to the deeper gold. One sniper I knew sometimes lugged a Porta Power into remote locations to get under and raise boulders. He also used it to force apart stubborn cracks, mostly in slate bedrock.

Many people today snipe with a metal detector. I did for years.

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