Hey everybody, this Prospector Jess from Hunting4Gold – Find us at https://Hunting4Gold.com
You can see that below. I’m here to present tonight where is gold in Tennessee? Had a lot of requests about Tennessee and finding gold and there’s good news and bad news here. You remember the belt of gold along the Appalachians? We talked about that earlier when we were talking about Georgia and North and South Carolina.
We’re going to be talking about Maryland in a bit, but basically Tennessee gets a little snippet of that on the eastern southeastern corner of Tennessee, so I’m going to zoom in on that right now and we’ll take a look. But this is pretty much what the rest of the state looks like. It’s kind of empty. Now, that doesn’t mean there isn’t any gold, but it means the primary gold sources there will be from, you know, a variety of ores, primarily produced from the processing of coal and things like that.
That’ll bring up some marginal material. Also. It’s going to be from a lot of the glacial till we talked about that the other day. And I’ll be getting into that as I head off into this region over here. You’re gonna find that there was a tremendous effect of glaciation as it moved down across those areas. It’s scrubbed a lot of the gold to the south and ground a lot of it to flower and it flushed it out, you know, Mississippi River, Delta, et Cetera. And so you’ve got, you’ve got a lot of effects going on here, but in the corner there is a pocket that I want to draw your attention to. And here we go again. Let me zoom in and I’ll show you what I mean. Let me attempt to zoom in again.
Okay. And
let’s drag this into position so we can see what we have here. Now remember we have this mountain band here that’s these looks like track treads or really these are hills and mountains. There’s somebody pointed out to me, those are mountains. There are 3000 feet tall. And I said in California, 3000 feet is the hill.
But you know, it’s, it’s all dependent upon where you are. And by the way, these are really rugged, but you know, and it’s not to knock them, I’m just saying that you know, they are ground down mountains. That’s part of how the gold got here. But notice there’s a tight pocket right over here that I want to draw your attention to have, you know, huge numbers of gold prospects here by Coker Creek. And so you’re going to find a, you know, a lot of these are old ones. That’s a downturn.
So it’s a closed mine. But you can see the primary commodity here was gold. So it’s very important to recognize when you see these patterns. This doesn’t mean necessarily that there’s no gold in the area, it just means that when they dug out gold, these were the areas they found enough to be sufficient to be worthy of digging.
They were also using in the times that a lot of these things came into being, they were using older techniques and older equipment. Let’s see if we can find out just how old. Let’s look at this prospect, the Middle Branch placer working, so as placer gold surface nuggets and that kind of stuff. And the records here show that, what we have is hydraulic placer mining, Tennessee past gold producer, irregular producer, so off and on, depending upon what the price of gold is usually what that means. The host rock is sand and gravel and the records were published in 1911.
So that would give you a hint that this is an older deposit, probably pre turn of the last century. So that’d be pre 1900. And therefore, you know, it would be of interest to you in that just because they didn’t find gold worthy of going after elsewhere doesn’t mean there isn’t gold there. And especially given today’s metal detecting techniques and some of the other, you know, placer recovery methods such as dredging and a high banking sluicing, etc. So you have a little bit better techniques. Although, you know, in many states, and I’m not quite sure what the legal issues are in Tennessee, but you know, a lot of the states, they’re pretty limited factors on how you can go back placer gold recovery because of water rights and water pollution and water fears and frankly just a lot of domineering politics. A common theme here.
So, what you’ve got here is an older find that could be worth going after. More likely, it’s going to give an idea that every time you see these long wrinkles in the Appalachian Mountains, there could be associated effects, you know, north or south of that as we’ve seen all along. just because I don’t show gold prospects over here doesn’t mean they aren’t there. They are. and I would turn them on except that I’d probably flip the wrong switch. It gets Kinda gnarly when you get a lot of collections of data and then you start flipping switches, live it, you know, it’s better to do that, (dead?) Cold,
Offline because it can mess up the plots and create havoc. So I don’t want to do that for you tonight, but this is, this is kind of what we’re looking at. You can see a Cleveland, Ohio over here.
Cleveland, Ohio, is that right now? No it’s Cleveland, Tennessee, Athens, Tennessee, different Cleveland. Okay. So Cleveland, Tennessee here, you know, there doesn’t appear to be any gold records of that area even though it is smack dab in the middle of this, this, you know, Ripley, part of the Appalachians.
So it’s kind of interesting to see how that goes. there are a lot of twisty-turney S shaped passages here, so that would tend to indicate that this is rather flat. whenever you see these snaking curves like this, that means the gradients are very, very low. And, the water course has, has managed to change course gradually over time and kind of level things out. That can be really good for gold. But in this case, it doesn’t appear to be partly because it probably doesn’t drain from anywhere where there was lode gold down in here. You see where it starts getting more rugged.
Now we’re starting to see some placer stuff over here. and if we zoom in we’ll probably see some diggings. We look closely. Let’s do, may not one of these things and see if we can spot a, a minor, some kind of, some kind of engineering works a little hard to tell here is under a lot of trees.
That’s one thing about this area is it’s quite rugged, not just in the sense that it’s rugged with slopes and things like that. It’s also just rugged because it’s just tremendous volumes of vegetation and that tends to obscure things from the distance. There’s one that’s not so obscure. See, we can zoom in and see it.
Not really, it’s in somebody’s yard and I wouldn’t want to bother them as definitely a case where you’re going to run into a conflict. And I wouldn’t try it if I were you. So hot water branch placer workings, gold and gold past producer. So, so that one’s probably old, like turn of the century before last.
But it is interesting that there are a number of these in this area around Coker Creek. And I vaguely recall there are a couple of, I don’t have the GPA, but there’s a couple of organizations that have clubs in this area and do prospecting on the weekends out in this region. So, it might be worthwhile connecting up with some of those guys and find out what’s going on.
But that’s it for Tennessee tonight. It’s kind of limited, but it is very concentrated. Here’s a real weird oddity. You see this one right here is right on the border.
Millsap adit now an adit is kind of an interesting type of mine.
Basically, instead of going vertically down in through mineshaft, they’re going horizontally through a mine shaft, typically underneath an overlying bed that has gold embedded in the roof. And so they shoot an adit underneath this hardened material, oftentimes Calichi like material or calcareous stuff, or it could be Basalt, we talked about capstones last night.
And so when they go underneath this, this, this area, they’re mining. Typically it was an old river bed that’s now covered and sealed off. And so they run an adit because they can. And that adit allows them access quickly into the material rather than drilling lots of holes and trying to go in and shoot off from that. They just go in from the side and move in. So now one of the things about adits is they can be kind of tricky to enter because if they’re not really stable, they can cave in very easily.
So be careful around any mines or mine shafts or adits because they really need to be looked at by somebody who knows what they’re doing. Somebody who has some mining engineering in their background.
Here’s the one I went to call your attention to. This is not, I repeat, not as far as I know, Tennessee and yet this mined belongs to the Tennessee collection. Go figure. I don’t know why it’s got led. Sulfur, iron, copper. We were talking about at all those sulfides last night. Silver, gold, zinc, nickel, cobalt. So it was quite a mixture here. Massive sulfide deposit. BC208. I don’t know what that means. Sedimentary, exhalitive, zinc and lead.
So primarily looks like they were going after the lead and as a byproduct they were pulling out a secondary level of gold and zinc and silver and then a tertiary deposit.
That’s the third. So this is a primary, secondary and tertiary one, two, three. Say it after me. Primary, secondary, tertiary.
So the tertiary material they were pulling out was nickel and cobalt. Now in today’s age with all these batteries were doing and things like that, cobalt, lithium, a lot of the rare earth elements, and some of the salts are becoming very interesting in our new economy. I’ll call it the green economy.
The reality is, it’s not green at all if he can’t mine it. So there’s a real hip-oxymoron going on here a Hypocrisy. It’s difficult to describe any rare earth based magnets, any batteries that are based on lithium and a mixture of cobalt and or iron and zinc and other lead, etc. You know, there’s all these technologies that depend on these, these metals as part of their core energy storage techniques.
And you can’t do those without mining. I’m sorry, but I haven’t seen anybody who just pulls into Walmart and draws up, you know, a whole bunch of lead acid batteries that weren’t mined. It just doesn’t happen or goes in and out of the, goes out and drives their Prius without, or Tesla, Tesla without a, without a battery, you know, that was mined and oh, by the way, batteries that are mined. Here’s another fun part.
Fun Fact. You go out and drive your Tesla and you leave it in the parking lot in these minus, you know, -30, to -40 degree temperatures. We’ve got right now. I won’t give you 10 minutes, maybe 30 minutes before you won’t be able to start that car. You won’t be able to drive it anywhere. Not until it defrosts that’s the nature of batteries. You know, engines that run off of fossil fuels have the ability to be cranked at low temperatures.
Batteries do not. Batteries lose their energy response rates as a function of temperature. Very sensitive to it. And, and basically, you know, a lot of people have been stranded in this cold weather. And I’m not to say I told you so, but you know, it’s something that everybody needs to be aware of.
These things are not ready for what people think they are to replace gasoline or diesel engines. It’s just not there. So that’s another little fun fact from Prospector Jess, hate to break it to you. Now that doesn’t mean they can’t be economical, derive in, in average in warm weather. Absolutely. But you know, they take mining and they’re going to take those conditions. And if you’re planning to be able to go to work and the cold, you better think twice about just going all battery, even if you’ve got a windmill farm in your backyard.
So that’s it for tonight. Tennessee…
Prospector Jess over and out, I just started bringing up some of those little fun facts. but as you can see, there isn’t much other than this corner here. and it’s part of that same thing going by Atlanta and on up through Virginia. We talked about that. We’ll be going into Maryland next and, catch you next time. Prospector, Jess. over and out for tonight. Good prospecting.
P.S. Oh, what else? I just wanted to mention the GDU is still available, so check it out at https://SourdoughMiner.com/GDU/ Still got that linke going and it’s great.
People are responding, so get to it before it’s too late.
