On the Kiwi gold trail
Can an absolute beginner find gold? I tried out a bunch of NZ's public fossicking areas. Here's what happened.
Gold (GOLD!): it’s everywhere. It’s on our fingers, round our necks, in our phones, in our mouths, on all of Prince’s greatest hits compilations, on all of Spandau Ballet’s greatest hits compilations, fields of it on Sting’s greatest hits compilations, heck, even Australia has some amongst all that orange dust. But, did you know New Zealand does too?
Of course you did. You’re not stupid. It’s one of the primary reasons Europeans flocked here and colonised the place. Do you think New Zealand could attract so many settlers on the promise of just cheap land, beaches from paradise, gobsmacking mountain ranges and a bunch of iconic, flightless birds? No, it needed some rich stuff in the mix.
The first recorded gold discovery was by Charles Ring in 1852, who found a small amount in Coromandel’s Driving Creek. Nearly a decade later, Thomas Gabriel Read claimed a large government reward after finding ‘payable quantities’ in what would become known as ‘Gabriels Gully’. The rush was on; both in terms of men racing to make a claim and the actual headrush you feel after finding a piece of paydirt. More on that later.
The craze eventually dissipated and most people turned to other professions to make their coin. Of course, this being New Zealand, renegades and outliers remain. One old-timer I met recently, living in a cabin at a campsite, told how he made his entire living in his youth from panning in the bush on the West Coast. “You can be ten metres off the track and nobody knows you’re there,” he told me. “I did quite well, made a lot, but blew it all on drink and drugs!”
A lifestyle where one ‘disappears’ into the bush, only to emerge days later with a hoard of valuable metal sounds ultra appealing to someone of my wild disposition. If anything, I'm already there - sans valuable metal. I should give this gold thing a crack, I reasoned.
Fortunately, Aotearoa has a bunch of areas set aside for hobby fossickers to come and mine away all the precious gold, leaving none for anyone else to find. Located up and down the South Island, there are rules on the tools you can use and mining is restricted to the ‘active stream bed’, but otherwise it really is finders keepers.
From Tasman District, through the West Coast, to Central Otago, I would follow in the sepia people's footsteps and learn about the ancient art of 'pay dirt' extraction. Would I find gold? Enough to make me rich? Here’s how it went:
New Creek Fossicking area
The first fossicker’s paradise I visited was New Creek, in the Glenhope Scenic Reserve. The trip was massively successful.
Partway between the Nelson Lake Rotoiti and the old railway station at Kawatiri is a turn off that leads into the hills which tower above the other lake, Rotoroa. Some way in, the council-maintained road ends and motorists are at the mercy of the logging route that later becomes a 4WD track through conservation land. Being a Taurus, I come possessed with the stubborn might of a bull, so managed to force my tiny Toyota Aqua to just two kilometres from the gold and galloped the rest on foot.
I followed the rough, but visible, track downstream, between the trees, for about 200 metres and chose a spot on a bend. Standing on the rocky stream bed, I puzzled: “how do you actually find gold?”. I presumed that it involved digging, so I began moving a few of the rocks on the surface. The rocks beneath were smaller, like gravel, so I began to scrape those away. There was bound to be a shiny nugget in there, right?
For about 30 minutes I sifted away at the increasingly smaller gravel, my fingernails taking a pummeling. The hole had long filled with water from the creek, which had mixed with mud and grit, turning it the colour of a delicious cup of tea. No gold, however. I should probably buy a trowel, I thought. And a gold pan.
“Just five more minutes,” I promised myself. As it turned out, I only needed two. As I sifted through the thousandth handful of tiny rocks, my eyes spotted a small yellow flake. Less than 1mm across, it really was tiny. It didn’t shine. I took a fingernail to it and tried to cut it in two: nothing, it stayed intact.
Looking for somewhere to store my find, I ripped my phone from its snug case and wiped my paydirt onto the inside back. Phone squeezed back into place, I gripped the package and ran back to my car.
I’d done it! No gear, no idea, but I’d tasted of gold. It was definitely time to order a pan.
Unlocking Pro-Gold achievement
Fortunately, the Minelab Pro-Gold starter kit was on sale for just $99 delivered - from an Auckland photography shop, of all places - so I snapped one up. It had been recommended to me by a young Aussie living at the campsite. He seemed to spend every day pottering about shirtless, wearing just a towel as a sarong, but he said he had “prospector mates”, so I listened.
My pans arrived and I excitedly unboxed them. The kit comes with 10” (25.4cm) and 15” (38.1cm) pans, a sieve that strains out large rocks (called a classifier in gold-speak), a magnet, a magnifying glass (so you can gaze at your gold finds!), vacuum suction bottle for collecting your finds, a pipette for transfering your finds, two vials for storage, an instruction booklet (waterproof - nice touch!) and a storage bag that can be used a rudimentary backpack for carrying your gold gear. Someone call the gold, I was coming for it!
Return to New Creek
I thought I was smart, returning to New Creek with my shiny, unscathed panning gear. I’d found gold there with just my bare hands, so with a plastic magnifying glass and squishy lab pipette, I was certain to walk away minted.
I hiked up from the Lake Rotoroa DOC campsite, which takes a lot longer than you think looking at the map - mainly because it’s incredibly steep. Once up in the forest, feeling clever and perhaps impatient, I threw a left early and travelled through the trees to the upper reaches of the creek. My plan was: get all the gold before it washes downstream to the other prospectors! However, it doesn’t really work like that.
The instructions with my Super Pro-Gold Kit recommends digging material from as near to the middle of the creek bed as possible, so I did. Then, I panned it. I sloshed my part-water, part-material mixture from side to side, gradually letting the top layer fall out over the rim. Two lead shots I had placed in the pan - to ensure I panned right - sank to the bottom and remained there. The material thinned out, but I saw no gold. I repeated the process over and over. I was there all day and I saw nothing that looked like gold. In the end, I decided that the tiny flecks of yellow sand left at the end must be gold, so I hoovered those up into my vial. LOL!
Louis Creek
The next day, I trotted back up the same seriously steep hill. The views over the lake are incredible, so at least there was that, along with the promise of some yellow sand at the end of the rainbow.
Louis Creek is situated south of New Creek, on the same eastern side of the Muntz Range. To reach it from Rotoroa, I jumped onto a mountain bike track that starts on the forest road and headed down through the beech until I heard and saw water running.
After several hours crouched in the sunless, dark confines of the creek, I clambered back up to the road, carrying a lot of yellow sand. Lots! I could have sold it to a child for their sandpit project, if I was that kind of exploitative git.
Slab Hut Creek
“Do you have a sluice? Get a sluice!” Those were the words of my new friend Waka1 who I greeted while he busily constructed his canvas house-tent at Slab Hut Creek DOC camp, near the old gold town of Reefton. That advice came within the first minute of our chat. Within three minutes, he’d given me several pieces of metal with which I could build a rudimentary sluice, plus two crowbars. When I asked if he wanted something for it all, he shrugged his generosity off, saying “nah, this is the way the world should work!”
He did allow me to make him a coffee. As the pair of us sat on one of the campground’s pub garden benches, I mined him for tips.
I needed to know how to refine my pan in the latter stages and spot any gold. “I’ll show you,” he said. We finished our coffee and trundled down to the water’s edge where I’d left my gear. Clasping my pan, Waka demonstrated how to make the water gently lap at the smaller material, flushing away the lighter stuff. There was no gold that time, but he left me educated.
“You need to dig down to and into the clay below the riverbed. That’s where the gold sits,” was his other invaluable piece of wisdom. That’s where my new crowbars would come in: use them to prise away any large rocks and dig beneath where they lay for material.
I left Slab Hut goldless, but enriched with helpful information and advice. If I couldn’t find gold at my next stop, Goldsborough, then it would surely be curtains for my new hobby and any interest you might have in this article.
Goldsborough/Waimea
I found gold! The buzz is real. My pals Sam, Nick and their young kids met me at this DOC camp on the site of an actual old gold town north of Hokitika. We made our way to a spot just after a bend in the river and I immediately excavated a large hole. The first load I panned contained gold!
The reason for the blue colour of my pans became instantly apparent: gold is vividly unmissable against that blue. It’s a striking, shineless, creamy off-yellow. It’s magical to look at, amplified by the fact you extracted it yourself.
I worked through panload after panload and found gold in almost every sample. If gold fever is a thing, I was on life-support. My friends left and I carried on into the afternoon, losing track of all time and perception, like the time I lost more than six hours surfing in Cornwall - I swear they were just 30 minutes! “Just one more pan!” I’d say to myself, knees suffocating from my extended crouch on the riverbed. “Two goldless in a row and we go!”
That night, I joined Nick in his man-garage and sifted through all my riches, moving them to a vial. The flecks were smaller than I recalled, but definitely weren’t yellow sand!
Five Mile Creek
Queenstown’s Five Mile Creek fossicking area, found exactly five kilometres from the town’s limits, hasn’t got a reputation for putting up gold. One fossicking forum I read stated “someone I know did spend a fair bit of time there - and got 2 specks!” Funny, since I made my biggest discovery there.
I parked my car in a tiny parking spot beside the road and a bridge, grabbed my gold-finding gear and scrambled down the steep, slidey mud bank to the creek. Crystal clear water ran over the rocks and down beneath the bridge, headed for Lake Wakatipu. I trudged slowly downstream, balancing on some large rocks to descend the steeper parts, as far as the bridge. I perused the landscape, looking for a place to mine. This was becoming a regular part of my gold hunts: a few moments standing by the stream, stroking my beard and pretending to knowledgeably survey the waterway, to maximise my chances.
I noticed an untouched section of streambed, with a mid-sized boulder, submerged in the ground. One minute and a good go with Waka’s crowbar later and it was lying next to the creek. I began to dig, chucking material into my pan as I went. For the first hour, I found several small flecks, but nothing worth writing an article about.
However, almost exactly on the hour mark I made the discovery that permanently afflicted me with so-called ‘gold fever’. I started refining the remnants in my pan and immediately uncovered a decent sized chip. That attractive, non-glistening, off-yellow hunk of metal that can resemble nothing else on Earth sat staring at me. “I don’t believe it!” I muttered, before muttering it again and again, my brain believing what I was seeing.
Eventually, I worked up the courage to suck it into my sniffer bottle and continue. Believing this was just the beginning of my enrichment, I stayed for another hour, yet found nothing even close to the size of that tiny nugget.
Twelve Mile Creek
Pumped from my huge find, I woke the next day at Moke Lake DOC camp ready to go find more. However, I immediately got distracted by the ridge running up the mountains from the campsite and ended up on a three-hour mission following that, before deciding to drop off the side of the mountains and scramble down the steep sides back to camp. After lunch, I spent what was left of the day at Twelve Mile Creek.
Approximately 11 kilometres from Queenstown’s limits, sits Twelve Mile Delta, which features a campsite and a creek of the same name. I clambered down through the bush to part of the creek and began to move rocks and pan the material. I found gold, but only a few small flecks.
The mountain adventure was definitely the day’s highlight.
Arrow River
One of the largest gold-bearing rivers in the world, so I was bound to find rich stuff, right?
No, the Arrow River gave me no gold. Ah well. It’s been fun.
After the rush has gone, all that glitters ain’t gold.
I've been a miner, for a heart of gold.
But I swear in the days still left, we'll walk in fields of gold.
Always believe in your soul. Gold (GOLD!).
Mash-up poem lyrics by Gary Kemp, Neil Young, Prince, Sting and Paul McCartney.
‘Waka the Ocker’ - an Australian who’s jumped waka to New Zealand?