Karangahake Gorge

We stayed at a nice reasonably priced place called “Riverside Accommodation” which is just across the road from where you want to prospect. It’s also great for mountain biking with a couple of bridges and a tunnel and there’s historical gold mining sites. There’s also a café across the road that we brought food from and heated for dinner.
O.K. so what about the gold ! I only got a very small amount of flour gold which I got with a under flow sluce box and to make it go through quicker, I sived it down to a coarse sand. I’ am so impatient !
I used a Minelab GPX 5000 ( no discrimination ) and as there was so much iron junk, which I was even picking up rust flacks , I did a lot of pot holes in the large boulders and gravel behind the boulders.
There was black sand under the bridge that goes into the tunnel.

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You can see the remains of the ancient stamper battery as you drive through the gorge - it’s very impressive. As is the gorge - and it’s scary looking down into that thing from a bus!

Small flour gold in one pan snifting a panfull off some bedrock overburden on the bank of the Waitawheta last weekend. Lots of black sand, Stopped at that. All the windows walks were closed unfortunately.