Where Is Gold Found in Arizona?

by Prospector Jess

Good evening everybody! So for this episode we’re going to take a detour, a little bit of a difference from what we’ve done before. So let’s take a look at where gold is in Arizona.

I’m going to be talking a bit about the locations for gold in Arizona. I have a product called “Government Gold Maps.” You can look it up at https://SourdoughMiner.com/ggm/ and take a look at that to see if you’re interested. The idea is that I’m going to go through and show you a map that I’ve generated, and give you an idea of where gold is located in Arizona, and the general geologic trends that lead to gold being found. So that’s what tonight’s episode’s about. A little bit of a detour from our thunder storms and floods of the last week. We’re going to go off on a tangent right now and just look periodically at different places that have gold and where you can start looking for it.

So the idea we have is every single state has some possibility of having gold. The reality is though, that that gold may or may not be easy to find. In general, if it’s not easy to find, what you’re going to be able to locate, almost every state has some flour gold in the sands that are buried there, because it tends to float up. Remember we talked about that in the last few nights. So the idea is, if there’s any gold to be found, it’s going to be flour in the cases of glacial till, or in the case of Florida and sands, but primarily the states that have the most gold and the most interesting prospects for you to investigate, will likely have gold buried in deposits that are nearby, some kind of a lode gold source. And that means either placer gold or lode is your target.

And the reason for that is, they’re big enough that they have financial value. The only other kind of gold, there’s a third kind that has a lot of value, and it’s called micro gold. And I’ll talk a little bit about that, but that primarily would deal with Nevada, which we aren’t covering tonight. Micro-fine or micro gold, micro-crystalline in form is embedded in the rocks interstitially, they call it, inside the crystal structures, and so there’s a significant enough amount to be found, but it’s not something you’ll detect with a metal detector, and you most likely won’t see it with the naked eye. You’ll have to use a microscope, hence the micro, or even may have to use some other kinds of detectors in the way of spectrum analyzers and such, scientific things like gizmos. Anyway, for tonight we’re going to look at gold in Arizona, and I’m going to spend a few minutes just talking about this picture that I have in front of us.

We have a map here of Arizona. Let’s flip to that right now. As I’ve said before, you can find out how to make these maps at the GGM source, government gold maps, so go look it up. But for right now, let’s just take a look at what we’ve got on the screen. When I look at this map, I can show you in Arizona this border and purple and inside of here are a series of markers, these markers correspond to places that were found and registered with the USGS geological survey, that record goes back to before the turn of the century. So some of this stuff is quite historic, and that is significant in its own right, because when you talk about sampling, it takes time. What you’re looking at here is the cheater’s way of approaching sampling in advance.

And that is, I can look at any one of these zones, and predict for you where you’d likely find a significant gold, even if it’s not marked by some site that’s registered a sample. Remember, gold is a commodity that’s quite valuable, and frankly, you should be very careful who you release information about location and quality to, because there is such a thing as claim jumping and other shenanigans that go on legal issues, that you can avoid by simply maintaining your claim somewhat private. Make sure you’re legally okay to prospect, but you don’t have to legally reveal what you’re finding until it’s time, and that would typically be associated with a prospect that has the potential to become a a patented claim. That’s a whole other can of worms. Legal issues galore, and it’s a moratorium right now, so just stand forewarned that that one you want to be careful about, but the fact is that you want to control this information.

Now, most prospectors do that, unless they have some significant find that they’re trying to patent. Hence they go to USGS and reveal some of their information. I say some again, worldwide, same thing. A lot of private issues worldwide, even more so than US. So not every prospect that’s been found is revealed in these maps, but a significant number of them are, and you can see trends. The trends are what I’m going to point out tonight. Let’s take a look at this area in Arizona, North of Phoenix, Northwest you can see this huge area that’s quite darkened by the sheer number and volume of prospects. If the prospect has an X on it, that essentially means that this thing is no longer, basically it was an occurrence of some sort. It’s not a significant thing, but the commodity found was gold.

So this the Mckinsey mine, you know, and so what happens on these things as you want to kind of watch for which ones have the upturn picks because that tends to mean that that’s an active gold mine, but even the downturn picks are interesting because they reveal a is in this case, lots of little mines in a cluster that would significantly improve your odds of finding some golden the area. Why is that? Because what you’re looking for in these things are two things we talked about earlier. Placer gold and lode gold. If you find a lot of placer gold, you might find lode gold nearby, especially if you find coarse placer gold, but in this case, if you find lode gold, you can intern infer that there’s placer nearby. You can also infer that there may be other lode sources, other lode intrusions that are near that area, or other minerals that might be associated with gold, such as Chalcopyrite. Lot of people think fool’s gold has no gold. It can, if it has copper in it, it can have a significant amount and it can be well worth a mining. So you’ll find that kind of stuff in Arizona. so let’s take a look at one of these things. Let’s zoom in a little bit around the northern Phoenix area just for grins. Going to do the zoom kind of quickly here and see if we can’t get it to behave for us. Sometimes it gets a little glitchy. Okay.

So there’s Wickenburg, Congress, these are all famous gold mining areas, from Winton, and then down south here you’ll see a school, here’s, here’s Palo Verde and Peoria and all that good stuff. And then Scottsdale, you know, downtown feedings. So Phoenix has grown since I was a kid. We actually went out it just a diversion for a moment and there is a really neat place. One such mining area is Globe. That’s an interesting place in its own right, but out here by Apache junction, this used to be wide open desert and up in here is is the superstition mountains and there is the superstition or a legend of the “Lost Dutchman Goldmine.” It’s worth investigating just for the history of it. I wouldn’t get lost in the desert. People have died doing so looking for it, but it might be of interest.

Now, take a look close here. You see this? We’re, we’re about to zoom in on this superstition area. I’m sorry I diverted from these other mines, but it just happened to catch this guy right here, which is the superstition mine. Okay. Gold. There we go. Silver and copper. So probably some Chalcopyrite and some gold probably coming in as a side effect, although it looks like it has a significant amount of gold. The way this works is commodity one is the primary ore primary material being pulled out. Secondary would silver and copper. If we pull in here and we say, okay, show me the data record for this guy, it’ll pull up a record for me in a second here, and we can investigate more details about that. The type of deposit as a vein. So this one’s a lode gold vein. It’s a current prospect, it’s inactive mine and that is significant.

There’s all kinds of information in here, in new trending faults in the Superstition mountains or mine areas. So I went there when I was not a kid this time I was actually there hiking, as an adult just about the time I graduated from college as an engineering student. I believe at this time I had not quite entered engineering. I was actually a geology or geochemistry major. And so I was quite interested in these mountains from a geologic point of view. And, I think you’d find the same thing. All of these places require you to prepare for one thing, water, lots of heat, hydrate. Well, and make sure you carry enough salt because when you sweat a lot in the desert, it can be a real problem now. so that’s. So, that’s one aspect. let’s see if we get back to google it or if there we go. So button up there, back to google earth. So now we got this picture we have generated and we’re zooming around Arizona. Let’s zoom back out and we will go over to the area. I was talking about it by Congress, right up in here.

So there’s Wickenburg and congress. And let’s see if we find any other mines like that. There’s one its a little hard to see right there. The Myers mine. It’s an active. And there we go. Chalco-pyrite and Sphalerite?. The mine produces gold as the primary, plus silver, copper, lead, and some zinc. All of these minerals go together. And this is one of the points I’ll bring out when we start talking about rocks and gold. And that is, there’s a connection, what they call a basic mapping feature that allows you to identify the rock types that go as a cluster, they chemically are allied together. And so you’ll typically find them as you have in this case, grouped together. So anytime you find, say zinc or lead, you start snooping around for silver and then you start snooping around for gold if you find silver, see that pattern. So this is the kind of thing we want to pay attention to. So that’s a bit about what I have to say about Arizona.

I wanted to show you just this overall trend that’s of importance. And that is this, this concept, the North East corner heading toward Utah and so forth is really pretty low in gold. And that’s not unusual that there’ll be gaps. This whole area in here is what we horst and grabbing. It’s a fancy word, which simply means there’s faults that allow the various levels of earth to to drop and rise in alternate form has to do with the shape of the earth and the compression that’s taking place when the, when the Pacific plate surges underneath the North American continent. Big Deal, Huh? So what happens is that causes this stuff to kind of get crushed. It has to kind of geometrically fit around a sphere and it doesn’t. So it starts popping when, when the other, when those pops occur and the faults happen, they’re big and they’re deep.

And so what can happen is at that point you can get hydrothermal vents shooting up through these fissures, these faults and intruding minerals that were precipitated out from the magma down deep. The magma that cane contains minerals like nickel, cobalt, gold, silver lead, you name it. And so that’s a little bit of the insight into what’s going on here in the corner of Arizona all the way down toward Tucson and in right down to the border. In fact, in New Mexico, there’s some great gold down there. So just be aware. Now what happens, interestingly enough, is in the corner of New Mexico, we talked about this in the. You can find it. One of my other videos, there’s a corner in New Mexico that has a fair amount of gold and then and then the northern areas pretty sparse. And so what happens is it’s the same picture.

You have just seen this, this kind of faulting arrangement kind of goes across here and you can typically see it in a satellite map because you’ll see these mountain ranges. And then desert playas, big flat sandy, you know, flat areas that are, that are pretty barren. But by the way, because they’re barren, they have flash floods and we talking about floods all week and those flash floods can deposit some really good gold. Gold right down there on the Playa. And so great metal detecting country. the other thing that they lead to is there’s a lot of desert sands that have fair amount of gold in them if you know where to dig. And so what happens is it’s dry, there’s no water, but it is sandy material and can be shoveled and run through special electrostatic air vibration machines called dry washers and you can separate out gold using that mechanism.

And that’s a great way to find gold. So that’s it for tonight. Prospector Jess;

I just wanted to point that out to you and make sure you had that you were able to find this “Government Gold Maps – GGM” product and make use of it yourself to make your own maps. The beauty of this isn’t that you have this great big map of the state, it’s that you can make your own map of your own canyon. You can go right down. Let me go back to this thing. so go back to. There we go. So, we were zooming in on the area around Phoenix. So let’s go into Phoenix for grins. Just for giggles here. Come on, come on, zoom. Zoom faster, faster. So zooming in on Phoenix, let’s say we look at the closest mine. I just happened to come by here and I wanted to know more specifics about where it is. Okay, here’s a couple up here,

like it looks like right in the middle of that housing tract, how has that. And so the idea is we can zoom right in and get the most minute detail. Now, one thing I will give you as a warning, like everything government related, take this with a grain of salt because the information comes from somebody who’s a little reluctant to give you the exact coordinates so that they give approximate ones too. A lot of this material came from things like “five paces from the old oak tree,” whereas the oak tree now? I have no idea. Okay. So, and that’s the way they were marked. If you go into the county seat and look up these claims and find that we’re going to have a whole discussion that later if you’re interested, let me know. but the idea is if you’re looking to do claim research, sometimes you pick, a lot of times you have to go to the county seat and dig up old, really cool looking handwritten documents while they’re prone to error.

And so an error could easily be that the “Bryan lode” here, this one that has some copper, silver, aluminum, calcium, gold, iron and Silica. Okay. A is sitting right underneath the golf community. It looks like northern Phoenix. Who would’ve thought. So that’s the beauty of using these maps systems. And then you can pull up your own maps. Now I bring that point up earlier about using caution about them because I’ve actually done some research with several of the maps I’ve pulled up from my own sites and it’s a little awkward trying to find exactly where the copper and gold ore was pulled from because there should be a shaft. Be careful. There may be a shaft, I don’t think there would be one here, but in some of these desert places there can be shaft. So you saw that recently. There was news about somebody who fell in one. So just be careful, be safe.

Gold Prospector Jess over and out. Have fun. We’ll catch you next time.

Whoops. I’m showing https://Sourdoughminer/20-20/ . That was what we were talking about yesterday, water and gold.

So the mapping one is at https://sourdoughminer/ggm / thats the one.

Catch you then. Good night.