Employ standard placer gold panning methods to extract small gold nuggets and gold dust from the pulverized rock.
Gold flakes in quartz rock.
3 use a sledgehammer to break the rock into smaller pieces.
Hard rock mining also known as lode mining is obviously the best method for finding gold specimens since you are mining the true source of the gold by following veins of high grade ore into the mountain.
Finding gold in quartz rock.
In some cases you may be able to see small masses of gold within quartz but much of it is invisible to the naked eye.
Pan break up and re pan finer and finer fractions.
Normally even good rich gold ore has no gold metal which is visible to the naked eye.
The photo at left shows small particles of metallic gold in quartz taken from the mountains of canada.
It nestles in the veins lines or cracks in quartz and will appear as small particles or scales.
When gold is still encased in quartz rock it is called a gold specimen.
This chunk of vein quartz from mariposa is typical of gold quartz material from the mother lode district of california.
In most gold ore the gold is present in tiny specs either within minerals like pyrite or spread out free among the quartz.
These are a real treat for gold prospectors and collectors as well and are often valued at a premium due to their beauty and rarity.
You can extract gold from quartz rock that contains veins of gold.