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YouTube star Jeff Williams will teach you how to find gold

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Jeff Williams never appears without his talking skeleton sidekick, Slim.
Photo: Mikayla Whitmore

Jeff Williams can find gold anywhere, as demonstrated in “GOLD IN HOME DEPOT SAND !!!,” a YouTube video where he shakes out 150 pounds of store-bought sand in his backyard. With 987,000 views, the tutorial is his second-most-popular clip to date, behind only “FREE ENERGY MOTOR !!!,” a video with 1.2 million hits that teaches viewers to build “a device that mainstream science says is impossible.” Also well-liked are “MONSTER GOLD NUGGET !!!,” “METAL DETECTING GOLD MINE !!!,” “WHERE TO FIND GOLD !!!,” and the less-shouty “How to make fire with nothing.”

Williams will teach you to find gold in drain pipes and even on the streets of New York City. He’ll show you how to change a radiator, build a generator and fashion a rock crusher, metal detector or foundry furnace. If you prefer to start fires with something, he’ll show you how to light one with a rock. He’s compulsively curious and driven to share with his 44,000 AskJeffWilliams YouTube followers, or anyone, really.

“Let’s go over here, because I move too much when I talk,” Williams says when we meet on a recent Thursday at Desert Outfitters. “I’m very energetic.”

That kinda goes without saying. In his videos, Williams ricochets around the frame of the screen, extolling points of interest and beckoning his audience with dramatic gestures. But it wasn’t always this way. His earlier clips, beginning six years ago, are more straightforward, more focused on geology, and far less viewed. Say what you will of the all-caps and exclamation points he uses to title his movies, they attract views, as does his over-the-top acting and unchanging outfit: a prospector’s hat, an old-timey gun, a crossbody canteen and the fringe leather pullover he found while working at the Levi Strauss in Henderson.

“I learned early on that you don’t want to sound like a college professor,” Williams says, sitting beside Slim, his talking skeleton sidekick. “People don’t want that; they want entertainment. But they also want tidbits of information, little Easter eggs, as I call them.”

Jeff Williams (center) with, from left to right, Bobcat Tours owner Steve Lindley, Slim and Mario Amabile, who plays Nevada Jack in Williams’ videos.

The native Las Vegan and car mechanic (hence the automotive tutorials) has been collecting such eggs since his father introduced him to mining at age 10. He joined the Army, where he became a demolition expert, and learned what he knows today from Reno’s MacKay School of Mines—and from “old timers who passed knowledge on to me before they died.”

Chief among those elders was Larry Kennedy, a fellow Levi Strauss worker. “He showed me the old-school methods you’re not going to read in any books,” Williams says. Most importantly, Kennedy taught him to sample, or test small amounts of earth to determine the broader landscape’s metal content.

“Sampling is key,” Williams says. “I don’t care if you’re a guy out there with a pick and a shovel, or a billion-dollar corporation. You’ve got to sample first to find out what’s in that ground.”

Williams becomes more serious as he drops into the science of finding gold. The hyperactive Internet persona fades and a focused professor emerges, if only for a moment.

There are two primary types of gold: placer gold, which is flaky and found by panning, and hard rock gold. The latter is more valuable, but nearly impossible to extract without expensive, high-tech tools. Research is key when it comes to knowing where to dig, he says, and it’s paramount to go where gold has already been found. It’s rare for a small-time prospector to find a new deposit.

“Gold is 19 times heavier than water—it’s very heavy,” Williams says. “That’s how you find it, is by knowing it’s weight. Understanding the geology is very important, contact zones, sheer zones, thrust zones, faulting. Is it hydrothermal in nature? Are you in a mesothermal area like California or an epithermal deposit in Nevada? You have to understand structures. You have to understand all this if you’re going to go out and start looking.”

Williams goes out every weekend, unless it’s too hot or too cold, in which case he stays home and researches. Locally he frequents Goodsprings, Pahrump, Vanderbilt in California near Stateline, Shadow Mountain, Gold Basin, Lost Basin and Eldorado Canyon. His biggest find was a 2.5-ounce nugget in Arizona, but he says it’s less about the money than satisfying his gold fever. “It’s not about having it; it’s about finding it,” he says. Occasionally he’ll send placer gold to be melted at a refinery, for which he’s paid 98 percent of the “spot price,” or market rate.

I sheepishly ask how much money he makes from prospecting, and he laughs.

“Can you make a living at this? If you know what you’re doing and you’re lucky, yes,” he says. “If you have a good capital reserve, if you happen to have a good claim that has good reserves in the ground, yeah, you can make money at it. How many people do that? Maybe one out of a million. Keep it as a hobby—I guarantee you’ll have much more fun. … If you find gold, that’s a cherry on top, but no, I would not quit my day job. I’ve seen too many guys try that and fail miserably.

“Just like in the days of the Old West, the 1880s,” he continues. “They said, ‘I’m going to strike it rich in California. What did they end up doing? Working for another guy with a mining claim or working for a mining company for $4 a day. All the good grounds are already claimed up; all the good minerals have already been extracted—the easy gold anyway—so in order for you to actually make money at it, you need to have a big company that has access to big claims and big equipment, or you happen to be a lucky one that you read about in these mining journals, a guy that stumbles upon this 63-ounce nugget with a metal detector. That does happen, but not very often.”

Williams partners with Steve Lindley, owner of Bobcat Tours and Desert Outfitters, a prospecting shop in central Las Vegas. Lindley picked up the hobby two years ago when he and his nephew bought a metal detector to seek out treasure in the desert. (He’s found coins, bullets, belt buckles and other artifacts.) What began as a hunt for used prospecting equipment ended with Lindley becoming owner of Gold Rush Prospecting in Boulder City, which he closed when he took over Desert Outfitters.

“I just want to expose another generation to gold prospecting,” Lindley says, estimating that there are a few hundred active hobbyist prospectors in Southern Nevada. “It’s another option like kayaking or dirt biking or fishing or hunting. We’re not looking for the mother lode. It’s another thing to do outdoors.”

Desert Outfitters offers mining and prospecting tours based out of Nelson, Nevada’s Techatticup mine. The four-to-eight-hour affairs, which cost $139-$239, typically include a mine tour, a panning lesson and sightseeing at the group’s 80-acre mining claim. For $375 to $2,595, Williams (and Slim) host multi-day ranch stays and hands-on mining tours in ghost town Osceola, Nevada.

“You’re not going to teach someone to pan in an hour or even a day,” Lindley says. “There’s a curve, and you develop your own technique. Jeff and I pan similar, but if you really watch it on video, it’s different.”

The tours teach basic techniques and lay the foundation for hopeful prospectors, including do’s and don’t’s.

Before filming, Williams and his crew check for carbon dioxide and monoxide, the threat of Hantavirus, shafts in the floor, pooled water, old explosives, rock falls and rattlesnakes, especially in the first 20 feet of a mine.

“If you’re going to get into this, don’t go running into a mine,” Williams warns. “You might see me do it, but we have a full crew and special equipment.”

In other words, don’t try this at home.

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