It’s the fun element that counts for some gold hunters

Richard Chin, Tribune News Service

In the classic 1948 Humphrey Bogart movie, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” an old gold prospector opines that the precious metal is valuable because an ounce represents the sweat and heartbreak of thousands of men who have searched for it. “An ounce of gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labour that went into the findin’ and the gettin’ of it,” declares the old miner.

The men who are searching and finding gold right here, right now, in the Mississippi River, are a testament to that insight. They spend hours standing in murky water, stooping and squatting over buckets and pans, shovelling and sifting with hand tools and human muscle, processing hundreds of pounds of rocks, gravel, sand and mud.

The result: Tiny, but heavy specks with that unmistakable yellow gleam. “One of the best kept secrets about the Mississippi is that it’s full of gold. Real King Tut coating, Spanish sunken treasure, gold,” declares a gold hunter from Columbia Heights named Lucas Lundgren. “The question is how much.”

The answer is definitely some. But, alas, not a lot. Lundgren, who calls himself the Glacial Gold Hunter, is a 40-year-old geologist who has spent the last year and a half trekking around Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa prospecting and panning for gold in lakes, rivers and streams.

“I’ve found gold in all of them,” he said. He’s documented his quest in 120 enthusiastic but quirky YouTube videos in a channel with about 24,000 subscribers. They range from "Gold in Regular MN Dirt" to "Lake Superior Beach Gold." In one video, Lundgren shows himself toiling away to pan through 40 5-gallon buckets of Mississippi River dirt to see how much gold can be found in a cubic yard of soil from the river bottom. It was an experiment, he said, to see if gold mining would be profitable in Minnesota. After lots of hand shovelling and sifting, he excitedly reports that little bits of gold are showing up in his pan.

“Holy crap, that’s a big chunk of gold! That’s a giant speck from the Mississippi,” he said. “It looks like the night sky. There’s a lot of gold in there,” he said of the tiny flecks winking in the sunlight hitting his pan. He puts on his geologist hat to explain that the gold he’s finding is the result of glacial movements from the last ice age that scraped up gold deposits in Canada and deposited them here. It then collects in places where water is flowing or has flowed. “That is a beautful little pile of gold,” he said after hours of work processing “40 buckets of Mississippi River paydirt.” But the final tally is basically a tiny pinch of shiny dust so fine that you need a plastic suction bottle to pick it up. It weighed a grand total of 0.048 grammes, about the weight of a drop of water.

Gold is currently worth more than $4,000 an ounce. But Lundgren calculated that the gold he found searching through a cubic yard of material from the Mississippi was worth only $6.19. His answer on whether you can run a profitable gold mine on the Mississippi in Minnesota: “Absolutely not. But it sure is a lot of fun to go out and get these little specks.” In another video that Lundgren took of himself in the Mississippi, a passerby can be heard off camera asking, “Are you panning for gold?”

“Yeah,” he replies. “You find gold?” “Yeah.” “Like gold rings?” “No. Little pieces. I’ll show you.” After showing off the tiny bits of precious metal in his pan, he comments, “She wasn’t nearly as impressed as I thought she’d be. Then she quickly went away.”

Despite the slim odds of hitting it rich, Lundgren isn’t the only person who has gold fever around here. A Facebook group called Gold Prospectors of Minnesota and Wisconsin has about 7,500 members. Group administrator Steven Shoemaker said he first tried gold prospecting in Alaska when he was stationed there after joining the Army in 1974. He returned to the Twin Cities and gold prospecting after retiring from a 40-year-career in the Army that included stints as a Blackhawk helicopter pilot stationed in Iraq. The 70-year-old once hunted for gold along the entire length of the Mississippi in Minnesota, panning every 50 miles or so on the river, starting from just outside Itasca State Park down to the Iowa border.

Recreational gold hunters are only allowed to use handheld, non-motorised, non-mechanical tools in Minnesota. In other words, the same sort of shovels and pans that humans have used for hundreds of years to find gold.

But Shoemaker has also tried underwater dredging and sluice boxes in gold hunting trips in other states, including Arizona and the gold rush town of Chicken, Alaska. In gold hot spots like that, he’s found the sort of nugget-sized pieces that are only dreamed of in Minnesota. Despite those bigger strikes, Shoemaker said his travel and other costs still make it a losing proposition. “You come home with less money than you pay to go up,” he said of his gold hunting trips.

Besides, he doesn’t intend to sell what he finds. “I’ll die with every piece that I’ll ever find,” he said. “I’m not worried about the price. It’s show and tell gold.”

“I put it on the shelf and look at it,” Lundgren said of the little vial of gold that for him represents a year and a half of searching. A similar sentiment was expressed by many of the dozen or so guys (most prospectors are guys) who showed up recently at a gathering of gold panners on the Mississippi at a little park in Elk River . Panning for gold isn’t allowed in state or national parks, but it’s OK in other public lands. “We’re not going to find big nuggets here,” said Kevin Keck, a 62-year-old Minneapolis resident who describes gold panning as his retirement hobby.

“It’s all flour gold,” he said referring to the powder-like gold particles prospectors typically pan out of the Mississippi River. Larger particles, big enough to feel with a finger, are called “feelers.” Something about the size of a grain of sand, big enough to pick up with your fingers but not worthy of being described as a nugget, are called “pickers.” It’s a truism, according to Shoemaker, that in past gold rushes, the people who reliably made the most money were the ones selling supplies to the prospectors. That’s sort of true today, except instead of selling shovels, wheel barrows and denim jeans, the real money may be in supplying information and entertainment to actual and armchair gold hunters via social media content.

For example, one of Lundgren’s YouTube videos titled, "Panning 100 Pans in Minneapolis: Mississippi River Gold!" has gotten 1.9 million views. That earned him more than $6,000, far more than the value of all the gold he’s found.