The Fraser River is a great place to work broken and fractured bedrock.

On smooth bedrock, gold can travel quite far, even miles, accumulating in low spots and any change in height (natural steps). Extracting some good quantities of gold from smooth rock is quite easy. You follow the ups and downs of the rock as it travels along the river channel and take full advantage of the low locations that occur naturally along its length.

My favorite type of bedrock to work is broken or fractured bedrock. Broken, irregular bedrock will trap and hold gold of all sizes. The disadvantage, is that it is a little harder to work than smooth bedrock.

Many prospectors will spend hours digging in these cracks with long flattened wires, bent spoons, dentist tools, rock hammer and a host of other pick type tools.

A very simple technique is to use a bedrock suction pump called a “Gold Recovery Pump” with a thin tube nozzle and a stainless pick probe built onto the other end. The angled probe end is used to loosen the compacted gold and suck it up with the hand suction pump. The Gold Recovery Pump has a 3” suction chamber and will work wet or dry, however you hit a deep crack with some rich stubborn gold at the bottom, simply take a large plastic milk container full of water and fill the crack to approximately 1” above the stuck gold. Then use the pump to work the crack in a vertical motion. Use this step motion (up and down) to loosen the gold and suck it up as you step along. The water in the crack extends the reach of the Bedrock Suction Wand and creates a much higher “withdrawal rate” of the stuck gold. With this method you can recover a lot of inaccessible gold in just a few minutes.

The largest nuggets will be in the first bedrock crack in the most upstream spot. Cracks that are angled slightly backwards will tend to accumulate the most flake gold. When you have a choice, hit broken or fractured bedrock at the lowest water level. Cracks nearest the rivers center will always have the heaviest, largest accumulation of gold. Old bedrock will be the most broken as well as the weakest.

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