Striking gold in Virginia

DILLWYN, Va. — There’s gold in them there hills around Washington.

It’s not much, in some cases barely visible to the naked eye, but it’s enough to make dozens of prospectors spend their weekends panning for gold around abandoned mines.

The payback for spending hours sluicing through sand and mud in a creek is “the pleasure of finding it,” said Zane Nance, a member of the Central Virginia Gold Prospectors (CVGP), a club of amateur gold prospectors.

The 70-year-old retired National Park Service maintenance worker wears a watch inlaid with gold nuggets he has found during 20 years of prospecting. Like most of the club members, he estimates all the gold he has discovered is worth no more than a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.

Most of it came from “Booker’s Mine,” an abandoned gold mine on the Tongue Quarter Creek in Virginia’s Buckingham County. The 200-member CVGP leases 255 acres of the surrounding land from a mining company.

Other prospecting clubs are located in Maryland and Northern Virginia, where members try to find the precious metal along the Eastern Gold-Pyrite Belt.

The band of volcanic rock runs near the earth’s surface between Central Maryland and Central Virginia, roughly along U.S. Highway 15. Traces of gold break free from white quartz through erosion and wash into streams and rivers.

During an outing last weekend, a dozen members of the CVGP struck gold within minutes of arriving at Tongue Quarter Creek.

“I got one little piece,” said Jim Strong, a sheriff’s office dispatcher, as he looked down at his water sluice.

The water sluice is a pan with “riffles,” or ridges, that stick up from the center.

By placing the sluice in shallow water and shoveling dirt from the creek bottom into it, the rushing water washes away the loose dirt and leaves the heavier gold at the bottom next to the riffles.

“Already,” answers Ben Warner, the club’s environmentalist, who ensures club members obey environmental laws.

“If you look real close, right next to the riffle, you can see the yellow shining right here,” Mr. Strong says as he bends over the water sluice in his thigh-high rubber boots.

The flake of yellow metal was so small an untrained eye would miss it, but it was a gold find.

“This is better than antidepressants,” said Mr. Warner as he sat beside the creek among the pine trees.

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