Virginia is for gold prospectors

By Steven Kurutz

New York Times News Service

One of the first working gold mines in Virginia opened in 1806, near Fredericksburg, among hundreds that sprang up along a thin gold belt that stretches from the Northeast as far south as Alabama.

Considering that mining companies swarmed Virginia - the rush preceded the one in California by decades - and stayed for more than 100 years, you might assume that all the gold to get here has long been gotten.

But on a warm Saturday recently, Jack Wyatt stood along a creek in Dillwyn, an hour west of Richmond, on a site that was once the Booker mine, and swore it wasn't tapped out. "I tell you, there are nuggets here," said Wyatt, a sociable man in his 40s who has a bushy mustache and a voice as rough as 30-grit sandpaper. "This here is one of our best claims. I found several pieces as big as my thumbnail, and a guy found a nugget that was three-quarters of an ounce not long ago."

Along the creek, every 100 yards or so, someone was hunched over, panning for gold. "Course," Wyatt added slyly, "us being gold people, we're not going to tell you exactly where."

Wyatt, who also goes by the name Jack Gold, is the president of the Central Virginia Gold Prospectors, a nonprofit group of amateur miners formed about a decade ago. The club leases roughly 1,700 acres from a local landowner, and several of its members are from Virginia, like Wyatt, who lives two hours south in Dry Fork. But its seven "claims" - or sites, in the slang-filled parlance of prospecting - draw people from throughout the Northeast.

"We enjoy the hunt," said Gail Fletcher, who lives near Altoona, Pa., and who has twice driven to Dillwyn with her husband, George, to spend the weekend prospecting. "It's a way to unwind and relax."

The ranks of amateur prospectors like the Fletchers have swelled in the past two years, in step with the skyrocketing price of gold, which hit a record of more than $1,000 an ounce earlier this year. Lloyd Nanney, who owns Thermal City Gold Mine in Union Mills, N.C., where people pay $5 a day to prospect on the Second Broad River, said attendance was up 40 percent as of this spring, even before the busy summer season. On the West Coast, where gold is more abundant, a modern gold rush is taking place, with more mining claims being filed and more people turning to prospecting full time.

The Central Virginia club members are motivated less by hopes of striking it rich (although the possibility never strays from their minds) than by being outdoors among like-minded friends.

"There's a saying," said Jim Pennington, a self-described rock hound from Carrollton. " 'Gold is where you find it.' For me, being out in nature is the gold."

That's a good attitude, given that Pennington has found, in total, about $40 worth of gold since he began prospecting two years ago - barely enough to cover his gasoline to Dillwyn. Not that it matters; few weekend prospectors sell the gold they find.

Pennington was one of 50 or so club members, men mostly, some with their sons, who gathered in a field beside Teresa's, a restaurant on U.S. 15 in Dillwyn, for the club's monthly meeting. People sat atop folding chairs or the plastic buckets used to haul material from the creek. The look was studied forty-niner: beards, suspenders, wide-brim hats. A truck trailer bore the image of a scruffy-looking prospector leading a mule.

Club members lined up to pay their yearly $100 land fee, which grants them access to the claims as well as the right to camp on the properties. Wyatt raffled off bags of concentrate - dirt containing flake gold that's used to practice panning at home.

People began to fidget. They wanted to hit the claims.

The most popular claim, the old Booker mine, lies a few miles south of Dillwyn in a pine forest bisected by a lazy stream, Tongue Quarter Creek. Not long after the meeting ended, the dirt road that cuts through the property became dotted with vehicles as prospectors fanned out along the creek. A pink-faced man wearing a green canvas hat scanned the banks with a metal detector. A couple from Williamsport, Pa., who had recently taken up prospecting searched for a good spot.

It was a bright spring day and the forest was coming alive under the afternoon sun. At one point, a truck barreled down the hill, crossed the creek, then continued on. A few minutes later the truck returned, and its driver - a tall guy with a Vandyke beard - got out and lumbered over to the creek with a green plastic pan.

Pete Foster, from Shenandoah, bent down, filled the pan with water and swirled the muddy mix. "See, by rocking the pan back and forth, the water is taking out that sediment," he said.

He was classifying: straining off larger rocks so that all the material in the pan is about the same size. By swirling the pan, he would then wash the lighter material over the rim, leaving only the heaviest, including any gold.

Foster finished and lowered his face to the pan. Flecks glimmered in the sunlight. "Gold is yellow, not shiny," he said, dismissing the material as iron pyrite. Finally, his eyes hit upon a few tiny but unmistakably yellow specks. Using a plastic bottle with a nozzle, he suctioned them up.

Standing beside his truck, Foster said, "In prospecting, the more material you move, the more you work, the more you get."

Some prospectors spend thousands of dollars for a dredge, a gasoline-operated machine that sucks up material like a vacuum. Foster hasn't progressed to that level. Instead, he uses two time-tested and inexpensive pieces of equipment: a pan and a sluice. The latter is a boxlike contraption with corrugated ridges (riffles) that prospectors place in the stream and feed material into. Any gold will - theoretically - lodge behind the riffles or in carpeting placed on the bottom.

In search of a good spot to set up a sluice, Foster climbed into his truck and drove a half-mile upstream. The water was cloudy there, and tailing piles, mounds of sediment left years ago by mining companies, jutted from the forest floor like tumors.

Foster, wearing hip waders, carrying a shovel and bucket, his sluice box in a canvas bag draped around his shoulder, trudged through the forest. He passed a man prospecting at an S curve on the creek and set up a hundred yards away.

Soon Wyatt strolled by. In addition to being president, Wyatt is the club's enthusiast, buoying any flagging spirits with tales of past gold finds.

Retired because of health problems, he began prospecting in the 1980s when he worked as an equipment operator in an area that contained gold. He gave it up during what he called a "wild period" of partying, but rediscovered the hobby six years ago. He likes being outdoors and by the creek, but mostly, he said as he made his way upstream, "I like to help people get started in it."

Most mining done by hobbyists is placer mining - that is, searching for gold that has broken free from an underground deposit and washed into a water source. It's an inexact science, and seemingly every prospector has a theory on to how to read the landscape.

When Foster passed the man at the S curve, he suggested panning on the outer bank, in the belief that the water current would force the gold there. Now Wyatt came upon the man, who was busy following Foster's advice.

"Now, why are you prospecting there?" Wyatt said.

"I thought the current would push the gold to the far bank," the man said.

"Let me give you a little tip," Wyatt said. "Prospect on the inside of the curve. That's where the water is flowing slower. Gold being heavier than water, it's going to drop there."

Farther along the creek, Wyatt met a bearded man and a young boy who were running a sluice. The man, Mike Moore, and his 12-year-old son, Joseph, visited Thermal City while on a camping trip to North Carolina last summer and, in Moore's words, "had gotten hooked" on prospecting.

"To me, it's the beauty of the gold and the heritage involved with it," said Moore, a postal worker from Roanoke.

He has since become a devoted viewer of "Gold Fever," a prospecting program on the Outdoor Channel, and wants to take Joseph to California to prospect.

What does Moore do with the gold he finds? "I just put it in a bottle and look at it."

Given the price of gold, would he ever sell it?

"The wife wants to sell it and get a big-screen TV," Moore said. "We'll see."