U.S. Capital's Pot Of Gold -- Prospectors Comb D.C. Area For Glitzy Nuggets

McLEAN, Va. - Just a few miles from downtown Washington, in a wooded ravine below lavish suburban mansions, John D'Agostino wades through an icy creek panning for gold.

``We're sitting on one of the world's greatest gold belts,'' insists D'Agostino, a government geologist and longtime gold prospector.

Standing in rubber boots in the middle of Bull Neck Run, which rushes through exclusive McLean into the Potomac River, D'Agostino bends down and sloshes sparkling water through a metal pan full of sand and pebbles shoveled from the muddy banks.

He squints at the silt through a magnifying glass, searching for tiny flakes of gold. ``You can hear a nugget before you see it - clunk, clunk, clunk,'' he whispers.

Nearby are the ruins of an abandoned gold mine, a few hundred yards from the Potomac, where prospector William Kirk extracted high-grade ore in the 1890s. The mine's 70-foot shaft was closed permanently after the last owners went bust in the late 1930s.

The old mine is one of several that once flourished in the Washington area. It lies at the foot of a 70-acre private estate not far from Great Falls, Va., where Union soldiers panned the gold-flecked streams during the Civil War.

But D'Agostino has a warning for business executives who are tempted to grab pans, shovels and wading boots for a quick solution to their cash-flow problems.

``I don't know of anyone who's making good money out of

prospecting,'' he says.

The gold flakes panned in local streams aren't worth more than a few pennies, he says. But a 1-ounce gold nugget, discovered occasionally by chance, will fetch $2,000 to $4,000 on the collectors' market, much more than the current world gold price of $350 to $400 an ounce.

D'Agostino says the Eastern gold belt ranges from 50 to 100 miles wide and extends about 800 miles from Maryland into northern Alabama. It generally lies in the gently rolling Piedmont east of the Appalachian Mountains.

If a prospector finds gold flakes in stream beds, he says, chances are that the soil contains significant gold deposits embedded in hard rock formations as deep as 200 feet under the surface.

A gold rush isn't likely to happen on the East Coast because most of the deposits run through private lands. Serious gold mining requires five years of exploratory drilling and a minimum initial investment of $5 million, D'Agostino says.

Nevertheless, an anonymous fraternity of hundreds of prospectors - most of them seniors - continues to roam the East Coast with picks, shovels and pans, hoping to strike it rich.

D'Agostino, 64, an expert on mineral resources at the U.S. Geological Survey, is the unofficial leader of several dozen prospectors in Washington's Maryland and Virginia suburbs. Under a ``gentleman's agreement,'' he says, their identities and favorite stakeouts are shrouded in secrecy.