I've Been Prospecting This Alberta Spot for Years. The Riverdance Jig Changed Everything.

I've Been Prospecting This Alberta Spot for Years. The Riverdance Jig Changed Everything.

I have a spot I've been going back to for years. It's no secret location, plenty of people know it, but it's mine in the way that any familiar river becomes yours after enough mornings standing in it.

For years I've been pulling flour gold out of that ground. Good consistent color with a pan or a sluice box. Nothing that made me jump up and down but enough to keep me coming back. That's just what that spot gave up. I thought I knew exactly what it was worth.

A couple of weekends ago I brought the Riverdance jig out there for the first time.

Honestly I didn't know what to expect. I'd been testing it and believed in it enough to become Canada's only retailer but every spot is different. I just got to work feeding my concentrate into it and let it run.

Here's the moment that got me.

I looked down at the collection pail at the bottom, the filtered material that comes out the other end, and my first thought was that there was barely anything in there. Way less material than I was used to seeing.

Then I looked closer at what was actually in that small amount of material.

More gold than I had ever pulled from that spot before. Not a little more. Triple what a good panning day there would give me. That flour gold I thought I had been recovering all these years? The jig was showing me how much I had actually been leaving behind.

I've been prospecting that ground for years thinking I had a decent handle on what it was giving up. Turns out I was only getting part of the story.

The Riverdance jig is also genuinely easy to run. Light enough to move around without any hassle, simple setup, nothing complicated about it. You feed your concentrate in and let the machine do what it was built to do.

If you have a spot you've been working for a while and you think you know what it's worth, I'd encourage you to think about what might still be sitting in that ground. Most people running a pan or even a sluice are leaving fine gold behind without ever knowing it.

I was. And I've been doing this for years.

The Riverdance jig is available exclusively in Canada through Pioneer Prospecting. If you want to know more about whether it's the right fit for your setup, reach out anytime. I'm happy to talk prospecting.

Shop Riverdance Gold Mining Jigs here.

Related reading: our full Riverdance field results.