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View ProfilesPublished July 26, 2023 at 10:00 a.m.
Ezra, my 11-year-old son, and I clung to a thin rope as we scrambled down a steep, rocky hillside into a narrow river canyon. Using the rope, shovels and our muddy boots to slow our descent through the slippery pine needles, I thought, Prospecting for gold is more dangerous than I expected.
That's not always the case. On that beastly hot July morning a week before the floods, our guide was Joseph Maranville, an avid gold prospector from southern Vermont. The 53-year-old Rutland native agreed to show us how to pan for gold, provided I wouldn't reveal one of his favorite panning spots or even name the river that we'd work for several hours.
I found Maranville through a Facebook group I joined several years ago called Green Mountain Prospectors of Vermont. Created in 2015, the group has since grown to more than 1,900 members. It's a surprisingly high number, given that panning for gold sounds so quaintly antiquated, like holding séances or practicing phrenology.
But as I discovered, gold prospecting is very much alive and well in Vermont. And while no one is getting rich, or even earning a comfortable living doing it, there's still gold in them thar hills for enthusiasts, such as Maranville, who put in the time and effort to find it.
"Once you see that gold," he said, "you get a touch of gold fever."
Before we left his basement for the river, Maranville let Ezra hold a small vial of gold dust that he'd accumulated. The container was only a quarter full but had surprising heft.
"What do you think that's worth?" Maranville asked.
"A hundred dollars?" Ezra guessed with a shrug.
Maranville checked his phone for the latest market price of gold. "As of a minute ago, $1,918.10," he reported.
That's an impressive haul, but definitely not what we could expect to bring home that day. Amassing that much bling requires a huge investment of time, patience and physical labor, as well as gaining a working knowledge of hydrology and local geology. In short, the hobby isn't for those who want to spend a lazy afternoon chilling by a river on a hot summer day.
Maranville is unfazed by the cost-benefit analysis of prospecting in New England. He first caught the gold bug in 2012 and soon thereafter bought a product called the Bazooka Gold Trap, which promised to speed the process of separating, or "classifying," sand and silt from the glittery stuff. When the product, which is no longer manufactured, didn't deliver to his satisfaction, Maranville built an improved version in his basement, then demonstrated it to a local geologist, who suggested he register its design.
In March 2022, Maranville secured a patent on his Green Mountain Gold Trap, which he described as a "fluid bed classifier." Essentially, it's a narrow water chute about the size of a skateboard that, once positioned in a river or stream, uses the natural water flow to separate out and trap gold from any material you shovel into it.
"It's not a sluice," Maranville emphasized several times, referring to a device that's prohibited in Vermont without a permit. He has since sold his Green Mountain Gold Traps, which start at $285, in 25 states and five countries. Most of his customers live in Colorado or California, both of which are known to have far more gold than Vermont. In fact, Maranville's largest gold nugget, or "picker" — so named because you can pick it up with your fingers — came not from Vermont but Alaska. Shaped like a teardrop, it's got a quartz crystal in the center; Maranville wears it around his neck on a chain.
Though most people associate gold prospecting with California's 1848 gold rush or the Klondike strike of 1896 in the Yukon Territory, Vermont had its own, smaller version in the 19th century. According to a Vermont roadside historic marker in Plymouth, gold nuggets were first discovered in Newfane and Somerset in 1826, then in Plymouth's Buffalo Brook in 1851. By 1855, gold fever was raging, with a gold mill and crusher operating at Plymouth Five Corners. By the 1880s, seven companies were digging and processing gold. Alas, Vermont's gold rush wasn't lucrative for many people, and by the early years of the 20th century the "fever" had broken, as had many people's fortunes.
Today, all the prospecting done in the state is by hobbyists such as Dale Ballard, president of the Green Mountain Prospectors of Vermont. Now in his sixties, retired and living in Claremont, N.H., Ballard has been panning for gold in New England for more than 30 years. Decades ago, after reading about places to pan in Vermont, he gave it try in Plymouth's Broad Brook.
"I didn't know what I was doing, and the first couple of times I didn't find anything," Ballard recalled. But after refining his techniques, he had more success.
"When I found my first piece of gold, I absolutely knew that it was gold," he said. "It would just sit there in the pan and you'd say, 'Oh, my gosh! It's not moving! That's gold!' I was hooked."
For our own panning lesson, Maranville took us to the bottom of a canyon at a bend in the river, where we dropped our packs and shovels and got to work. Prospectors learn to read a river, he explained, and try to figure out where the gold will "drop out and sink."
"Gold is lazy," he said. Because it's more than 19 times heavier than water — denser, in fact, than most other metals on Earth — it takes the shortest and easiest route down a river, clinging to the inside bends of channels and sinking to the bottom. As a heavy metal, it's typically the last thing to move around in your pan.
Rather than merely sifting through pans of river-bottom sand, Maranville will dig behind, in front of and underneath boulders, which act as natural riffles that separate out the precious metal. If he's feeling particularly ambitious or finds a very productive spot, Maranville will even prospect underwater, using a dive mask and a hose attached to a handmade, battery-operated pump, which can feed him air for up to two hours.
Maranville started our lesson by digging some test holes along the riverbank near the bedrock, then dumping a shovelful of material into a riffled pan. He then demonstrated how to swish it around in water and sweep the sand back toward his body. He picked out the large rocks, then the pebbles, and swished and swept some more, enabling the sand and silt to separate by weight and color.
It took Maranville about half a dozen sweeps, or 10 minutes, to get down to the finest black silt at the bottom. Then, donning a pair of reading glasses, he pointed to a minuscule speck that sparkled in the sun.
"In the gold prospecting world, we call that fly poop, nanodust or pixie dust," Maranville said. All told, we counted 23 such nearly invisible specks in the pan.
"So, not worth saving?" I asked, assuming that golden bug turds would get tossed back into the river like catch-and-release trout.
"Oh, no, we'll keep it. I'm not letting any of it go," he said. "Gold is gold."
Next, Ezra gave it a try, and his panning technique was slower and more methodical. But Maranville was a good teacher and Ezra caught on quickly. It's natural to worry about whether you're washing away valuable minerals.
Inevitably, you make mistakes. Early in his own panning days, Maranville remembers coming home all excited with an 18-inch pan brimming with shiny gold flakes.
"I didn't know what I was doing, and I thought, Boy, I struck it rich!" he recalled. "Well, not a bit of it was gold. It was all pyrite," also known as fool's gold.
In all, it took Ezra 40 minutes to sift down to seven tiny gold specks. Maranville pulled out his "snuffer bottle," suctioned them up, then squeezed them, and the first batch of gold he'd found, into a vial for Ezra to take home.
Our cliffside rappelling notwithstanding, panning for gold is a family-friendly activity. Aside from Vermont's prohibition on sluices, dredges and other mechanical devices that can damage riverbeds and disrupt wildlife, and bans in wildlife refuges, the state generally allows gold prospecting, as long as people respect private property rights, refill any holes they dig and haul out their trash. The Vermont State Parks website even features a photo of people panning for gold in Camp Plymouth State Park in Ludlow.
And southern Vermont isn't the only place to look. Gold has been found in at least 10 of the state's 14 counties; according to Ballard, both the Little and Mad rivers are good prospecting spots. Along Route 100, he added, "pretty much every stream will have some gold in it. And it goes all the way down the state."
A week after we panned that southern Vermont canyon, Maranville sent me a video of the spot flooded under 18 feet of raging brown rapids. If there's even a glimmer of silver lining to all that devastation, it will be in the gold that the floodwaters wash loose. The West Coast's epic winter precipitation earlier this year unleashed a new California gold rush.
Yet many Green Mountain gold prospectors never profit off their finds. Ballard and Maranville both said they haven't sold any of the gold they spent countless hours finding.
"I always say, gold is the bonus," Maranville added. "Being out in nature is what I love."
The original print version of this article was headlined "All That Glitters | Seeing what pans out with a Green Mountain gold prospector"
Tags: Outdoors & Recreation, gold prospecting, gold, Green Mountain Prospectors of Vermont, Green Mountain Gold Trap, Joseph Maranville
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