How to Tell If a Rock Has Gold in It — Without Breaking It Open

👉 The Second Pan — for men who are done going home empty-handed: https://thesecondpan.com Everybody who has done this a while has the pile. Out behind the garage, in the bed of the truck, in a bucket by the back step. Rocks you carried out because they looked like something, and two years later you still haven't crushed a single one, because crushing is work and you don't know which of them are worth it. You can sort that pile without breaking one of them open, and you can do it in the field before you carry the next one home. This one covers what the outside of the rock is actually telling you: why rust-orange and red staining on quartz matters more than anything shiny, what those rough pitted hollows are and why they sit exactly where sulphides used to be, and why the line where clean quartz meets stained quartz is the first place to look and the last place most men check. Then the ten-dollar hand lens and how to use it on that line. Then the weight test, done at home with a kitchen scale and a bucket of water: weigh it dry, weigh it hanging in the water, and the two numbers give you the density. Quartz sits around 2.6. Anything meaningfully above that is telling you something heavy is in there. And last, the magnet, which won't find gold but will quietly throw out a third of your pile in about a minute. Now the honest part, and it matters more than anything above. None of this is proof. Gold in quartz is often invisible, locked in grains too small to see with any lens you can afford, and a plain-looking lump can carry more than a pretty one. These tests tell you which rocks are worth the hammer, not which rocks have gold. The only answer that counts comes from crushing a sample and panning it, and there's a video on