Hello everyone,

I recently started panning for gold as a hobby. I eventually plan to try prospecting somewheres where gold can actually be found (WI gold is... laughable), but I figure I can hone my panning skills on flour gold in the meantime. Being that there's not much of interest in my part of the state, mineral wise, and because I didn't pay much attention in my earth science class 20 years ago, I'm not very well equipped to identify anything that isn't yellow and shiny. Though I hope to change that.

Anyway, to my point - I received some paydirt from AZ for Christmas. Besides containing an amount of gold I could only dream of finding near home, it also contained a few other things of interest...

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Now, as I said, I'm far from competent in mineral identification. And, I don't imagine these are particularly valuable. But, I kinda like them, and would like to know what they are exactly. I think the first one looks like jade (based on no evidence, other than I'd call that color jade). Maybe the small greenish/yellow ones are peridot (although how these would get into paydirt concentrates, I'm not sure)? The last one seems like it might be quartz.

Any opinions? Thanks in advance for allowing me to join the community, and for your expertise.

Welcome to the CP forums!

Looks like some really cool extras in your panning dirt! Is really hard to tell what they are from the pictures but there are tests you can do to help identify them. Here is a link to the thread "Mineral Id'ing" that CP (Dan) started. Some great info in that thread so check it out when you get a chance.

I hope this info helps some!

I'm guessing its from Lynch Mining. #1 looks like turquoise to me. #2 definitely peridot. #3 dont know.

Thanks for the responses! I will definitely be referencing that thread quite a bit, so thanks for that.

Yes, the paydirt was from Lynch.

I thought peridot "grew" in clusters on larger rocks. Is it common to find it just mixed into the dirt like that? I'm just wondering if they "seeded" the paydirt or if they find that stuff just laying about in AZ.

I also considered that the larger stone could be turquoise, but it's a bit greener than the blue/green shown in the picture. Then again, AZ isn't known for it's jade from what I understand, so turquoise certainly makes more sense in that regard.

Either way, it's fun to figure this stuff out. Hopefully I'll have a bit more knowledge about minerals by the time I get somewhere where I can find them myself. I hear western WI has a decent amount of garnets

I sold dredge concentrates on ebay for fun back before the kid was born...

I guarenteed gold by panning some of it out till i saw gold. i would drain it and bag it all back up. Was not sold by weight, was sold by volume.

The only nugget ive ever "found" was from a bag of "unsearched" paydirt i sold to someone. They were thrilled and i was thrilled for them. It was only a few grams though, we dont have much big gold left in my state.

I never needed to seed any bags but im sure some sellers do.

the gems are definitely added. as far as where peridot naturally occurs, beyond me. But, I panned through the gizmos supremo dirt and also got turqoise and peridot