Gold Fever: Part II - The Arrow River

In the spring of 1862, Jack Tewa, a sheep shearer, found a chunk of gold in the Arrow River just outside of present-day Arrowtown. By the fall of the same year over 1,500 miners had set up shop along the river to lay claim to one of the richest strikes of alluvial gold in history. Here, I followed in their footsteps and tried my luck.

This also happens to be the same area as another Lord of the Rings filming location. This is where the Ringwraiths were swept away while trying to cross the Ford of Bruinen in Fellowship of the Ring.

At first I only found a speck or two but I knew I had the scent. I decided to hike downstream for a while and then I found it. A huge pool that was clearly the remains of a historical dredging operation. Just upriver of this pool was a little island in the middle of the river with a lone shrub growing on it. Little more then a sandbar, I knew that this was a fresh deposit of sediment untouched by other tourists. I waded across the river and started digging into the loose gravel.

When I met the other prospector over at Twelve Mile Delta, one of the things I learned from our conversation was that you won't find black sand at Twelve Mile like you do in most other rivers. Black sand contains iron and is much heavier then most other sediment that you find in a river. In most cases if you don't find black sand you won't find any gold. After a short time, I had dug a cross-section out of the sandbar and could see the layers of sediment. Layers of black sand were clearly visible. I focused on these areas and started to find more specks here and there. Clearly, my luck has improved:

Here is a rough estimate of what I found while panning near Arrowtown.

Time passes very quickly when you are panning for gold. There are some crazy panning competitions where people can go through a pan in under thirty seconds. However, when you are first developing your technique it can take up to half an hour to sift through a single pan. Even after all that work you can come up empty, which is discouraging. But once you start finding two or three specks of gold after each attempt, you start to lose all sense of time as you work from pan to pan. After spending three or four hours down on the river it started to get dark and we wanted to make it to Kawarau Gorge in time to watch some bungee jumping!