A man went to Home Depot on the hunt for gold. Not just hoping to stumble across a nugget or two, this YouTuber purchased 64 sandbags from the store to sift through the sand to try his luck and strike it big.
Inspired from finding a little bit of gold in Home Depot sand before, this online content creator set out to find as much gold as possible this time.
YouTuber Led a Full-Scale Gold Hunt
Full time prospector, Pauly Larouche, struck gold once before at Home Depot and decided to take his discovery a step further.
This time round, Larouche purchased 64 bags of Home Depot sandbags to filter through the sand and find even more gold than before. He chose the number 64 because that is approximately the amount of sand needed to fill an entire yard.
This Is the Work of a Professional Prospector
Finding gold in a Home Depot sandbag doesn’t happen every day. But it does happen to someone whose entire life is built around searching for gold.
Larouche, known as “Pioneer Pauly,” is a YouTuber who quit his job to hunt for gold. The Canadian creator wanted to pursue his vocation as a round-the-clock gold hunter. While traveling around the world for precious metals, Larouche has amassed over 760,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel.
A Previous Stroke of Good Luck
Larouche’s Home Depot gold rush wasn’t undertaken on a whim. The prospector had actually struck gold before at the store.
Filtering through one bag of black sand, he found a considerable number of golden specks that were buried in the sand. Unfortunately, the sum of the near microscopic gold flakes was not enough to weigh, therefore he didn’t make any profit off of the venture.
How Did Larouche Extract the Gold From the Sand?
To separate the gold from the black sand, Larouche teamed up with his friend, Andy, and ran the gargantuan amounts of sand through a mini wash plant (a much smaller tool than the industrial wash plant pictured here).
By running the sand through a sprinkler, where the heavier particles would fall into a sluice rather than run off with the water, this is how the crew would find the gold.
Finding Gold Was a Case of Trial and Error
It was no easy feat working the mini wash plant, but it would have been a lot easier than what Larouche did last time, which was only sluicing the sand.
The trick of putting the 64 bags of black sand through the wash plant was deciding how fast to run it and how intense the wash would be, at risk of losing small amounts of gold that are easy to overlook.
Larouche Held Out Hope for a Hefty Amount
Larouche set out with a certain weight of gold in mind for the venture to have been worth the time, effort, and expenditure.
He said he felt he was in on a “really good chance” of salvaging enough gold to buy a steak dinner and a small vacation. With five ounces amounting to $11,607 and a gram valued at around $74.63, he was feeling confident.
At Times, the Work Was Grueling
On top of transporting 64 bags of sand, shoveling them into the wash plant, moving the wet sand out of the way of the wash plant, and then sluicing the heavy material, it took longer than expected.
Larouche was exhausted from “standing in the same position” for hours on end. While he expected to be finished within an hour and a half, by that point, he was only halfway through the job.
There Were Some Other Surprises in the Sandbags
While Larouche was on the hunt strictly for gold, he was in for a little bit more than what he originally set out for.
He found gold but also quartz, which suggested that this Home Depot black sand was gathered near a river. What he didn’t expect was to come into a couple of garnets, which are red jewels often seen on luxury jewelry.
Larouche Profited More From Enjoyment Than Money
After sifting out all the gold from both the wash plant and then the sluice box, Larouche admitted that the “amount itself isn’t impressive.”
However, he did say that he found the experience of prospecting for hold through Home Depot sandbags “thrilling.” Not so much from the looking for gold itself, but Larouche found more enjoyment from wondering which other innocuous places have the potential for gold-hunting.
Did Larouche Break Even?
Considering how much it cost to buy 64 bags of black sand, hire a truck to transport the sand to his friend’s house, and buy the buckets to store the sand, there needed to be a considerable amount of gold to break even.
The expenditure of the venture was $1,211.98 without factoring in gas and time spent. Having only harvested 0.258 grams, Larouche and Andy earned $25 from the experience.
It’s for the Love of the Sport
So, maybe a steak dinner and a small vacation are off the table for Pioneer Pauly. However, for Larouche, his mining for gold comes from a passion for the chase.
“More times than not, you’re gonna go out there, and you’re not gonna find anything. It’s just the adventure. Going out there and challenging myself is why I like to keep doing it,” Larouche told Men’s Journal.
