Is this gold? Fool’s gold tests you can do at the creek

The three pretenders

Three minerals account for nearly every “I found gold!” that wasn’t:

Pyrite — iron sulphide, the original fool’s gold. Brassy to pale yellow, often in cubes or with visible crystal faces, hard (6–6.5 on Mohs’ scale) and brittle. Tarnishes dull or brown. Common in every gold district because it forms in the same veins.
Mica — flat, flaky sheets that flash gold or silver in the sun, then vanish when you tilt them. Feather-light: it floats, flips and washes out of the pan with the sand. Everywhere in the Canadian Shield and the Rockies.
Chalcopyrite — copper iron sulphide, deeper yellow than pyrite, often with a green-blue tarnish, softer (3.5–4). Rarer in a pan but the most convincing at a glance.

Gold itself: rich yellow, the same colour from every angle, soft (2.5–3), heavy, and above all malleable — it dents and bends rather than breaking.

Five tests, in order

The shade test. Cup your hand over the pan. Pyrite and mica need direct light to glitter; in shadow they go grey or dull. Gold stays exactly as yellow in shade as in sun. This alone sorts most cases.
The pan test. Gold is nearly four times denser than pyrite. Swirl the concentrate out into a fan: gold stays put at the back with the black sand; pyrite and mica move with the lighter sand and wash off the front. If it left the pan easily, it wasn’t gold.
The pin test. Press a flake with the point of a knife or a needle. Gold flattens and takes the dent — you can spread a flake wider with a pin. Pyrite resists, then shatters into brassy crumbs. Mica splits into thinner sheets.
The streak. Drag the grain across the unglazed back of a ceramic tile. Gold leaves a golden-yellow streak. Pyrite leaves a greenish-black one; chalcopyrite greenish-black too. Mica leaves nothing useful. A big picker is worth the tile; a speck isn’t.
The loupe. Under 10×, pyrite shows flat crystal faces and sharp edges; gold is rounded, hammered-looking, often with tiny dents and a waxy lustre. Mica is a transparent-edged sheet.

Tests to skip

Biting a nugget is a movie thing; it tests your dentistry. Nitric acid does dissolve pyrite and leave gold, but it needs gloves, glasses and ventilation, and it adds nothing the pin and pan tests don’t already tell you. Specific-gravity measurement with a scale and a glass of water works on pieces of a gram or more and is a nice weekend project, not a creek-side test.

When it really is gold

Placer gold in Canada is rarely pure. Klondike gold runs around 75–85 per cent gold with the balance mostly silver; Fraser and Cariboo gold is often higher; very fine flour gold can be higher still because silver leaches from small grains. That matters when you value a find: spot price is for pure metal, and a buyer or refiner pays for assayed content less a margin. The LocalKarat value tool defaults to a typical placer purity and lets you adjust.

It also matters legally. In New Brunswick, gold panned recreationally cannot be sold, traded or kept for personal gain without a claim and a mining lease; in Alberta a royalty applies past one troy ounce sold in a year. Everywhere, a nugget from someone else’s claim is theirs. The first question after “is it gold?” is “whose ground was it on?”.

General information for recreational prospectors — not legal advice. Rules change and vary by site; check the official sources listed under this article and the LocalKarat “Can I pan here?” wizard before you go.

Sources

Updated 2026-09.

Panning-area, claims, and regulation information on LocalKarat is general information for recreational prospectors — it is not legal advice. Mining, land-access, and environmental rules change and vary site by site. Verify current rules with the official sources linked on each page, get permission from private landowners and claim holders, and respect First Nations rights, settlement lands, and treaty areas.

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