Eureka!

Our dear friends Marcel and Jessa once again invited us to join them on another adventure.  We went to prospect for gold, just like the '49ers in California! There are no active mines here at the moment but there is a small amount of gold being prospected in the rivers and streams around Switzerland. 

We drove to a site in the Lucerne canton called Doppleschwand where we met our guide, Damian.  


 Damian (left), 2 other prospectors, Jessa, Marcel and me

Equipped with wading boots, shovels and gold mining pans, we walked to the stream and learned how to placer mine.  This is a technique where you fill your pan with a shovel full of sand and rocks and then swirl the pan, first extracting the rocks.  You keep dipping the pan with water, shake and swirl over and over, extracting pebbles until you have just a fine layer of sand at the bottom of the pan.  Then very carefully you look for tiny (and I mean TINY) specks of gold that are heavier than the sand and tend to stick to the bottom.  Fortunately, the pans were black (easier to see the gold specks) and plastic (lighter than the steel pans than what the '49ers used).  The pans also had ridges on the side which helped spread and layer the sand.  21st century technology!


 
Shoveling the rocks and sand

 Damian showing me how to dip and swirl

For me, this whole process took about 20 minutes and we repeated it many times before lunch.  Damian provided us with a small bottle to collect our gold specks and a plastic syringe to suck up the speck and put it in the bottle.

 The small container for our loot and the plastic syringe

Miles hard at work

Lunchtime! Damian set up a fire and grate.  Marcel provided the sausages, I the extras.  Yum!

Delicious meal!

After lunch, we put aside our pans and set up a sluice which is a special long, narrow box that water passes through when put in a creek or stream.  The sluices separate and recover gold from the shoveled sand/rocks by the use of running water.   Gold is caught or trapped by riffles which are obstructions which slow the movement of gold in the sluice so it can be trapped in rubber matting in the bottom of the sluice.

 Damian explaining how the sluice works

I thought, "Great!  The sluice will do all the work!", but no, someone had to shovel rocks and sand and pour it into the sluice.  This was quite hard because the river  was full of big rocks and it was hard to get down to the sand.  Miles and Marcel did most of the shoveling while Jessa and I bent and cleared the big rocks from the sluice. (Miles' back somehow survived this torture!)

After an hour of this, Damian helped extract the gold specks from the sluice and added it to my bottle.

Eureka! I'm rich!

I certainly have a new respect for those gold miners of the past.  This is tedious and hard work, but also very relaxing once you get into the rhythm of swirl and pour, swirl and pour. 

A few pix of the beautiful scenery along the way back to Zurich.  We never get tired of the views.




I can't say we made a fortune in gold, but it was a thoroughly wonderful day! 







Comments

  1. Miri and LarryAugust 25, 2017 at 8:23 AM

    WOW, you have become gold mining mavens! Very ambitious work. Kol Ha'Kavod. Love the bounty.

    ReplyDelete

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