Beginner Prospector here, only panned a few times, finally visited Middleton creek over the past few days.
Tried panning downstream from the road maybe 300-400m in few different spots for a few hours each day
Got a few specks of gold, and I really mean barely larger than specks, but that represents my first found Tassie gold. I’ve panned a little Victorian and Queenstown(NZ) gold before.
I was digging some holes at the side of the creek flow as deep as I could go, probably 1m deep, it’s incredibly sandy and wondering if anyone has ever managed to hit bedrock or at least a hard clay bottom and at what depth?
From what I understand it was massively dug up and even hydraulic sluiced by the old timers, did they cause all the overburden? or is that just normal for some creeks?
By the way, yes I have my prospectors license, yes I filled in the holes I dug, though there were many in that creek not filled in…
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Hi Adrian,
Thanks for posting, Middletons is an interesting creek and yes, has been well dug over in both historical and modern times.
The best gold was thought to be on a “black false bottom” which can still be seen today in small patches.
It is black to coffee brown cemented sand and gravel and may represent an ancient soil horizon.
White quartz rich cemented gravels and yellow iron cemented gravels also contain gold.
The true bottom is yellow clay and is decomposed limestone. There are sinkholes to the easy and north of Middletons.
Glad to hear you filled in your holes!
Good luck with your future explorations
Cheers
AG
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Thanks for posting your knowledge AG!
It’s a cracker of a spot was happy to just be there really this time of year. Lovely green rainforest, very quiet. Low on the bugs. Still enough flow to setup a small sluice if you wanted
Dug up plenty of interesting large quartz rocks with what you could see would have likely contained veins of something for sure at one point (now empty) probably just old tailings from past mining. Plenty of black sand also, too much.
I took a run down about a kilometre further downstream on the creek and saw plenty of old mining relics. Really does have a lot of little feeders all over the place.
i’d like to spend longer there and will be back, it’s on the other side of Tasmania to me and quite the drive.
I took a look at ‘None Such creek’ while I was in the area, and it really is ‘no creek’ in summer so gave panning that one a miss on this trip.
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