Here is how I would approach this, grind as fine as possible, pan as much gold from the quartz sands as possible, dry the remaining sand (quartz, iron, gold) and put in casserole dish on hot plate incinerate to red hot, (on hot plate using propane torch from above), cool and cover with HCL boil, lower heat some add some water to dilute a little and let settle, decant acid to jar leaving sand and gold in pan(we will call this jar base metals chloride possible iron), now add some more HCl to cover sand mix, add a few drops of nitric acid while heating (not boiling), solution may turn yellow with gold going into solution, after heating for a while I may add few more drops of nitric, as this progresses more gold will go into solution and the solution concentrates (heat and gold is using up most all nitric acid at first), once this solution concentrates (I have two choices add more acid or decant this one), I would let settle and decant this solution to clean jar, and add new HCL to cover powders again to do another leach (using same process) the colors of solution and stannous chloride test tell me how the process is proceeding (? am I still leaching gold).
The last leach I would rinse sands with a little water, adding this rinse to my gold solution.
I may then add house-hold ammonia with just warming decant this solution to new jar put HCL in this liquid (get pH neutral with this ammonium chloride solution), this would precipitate any silver, (save ammonium chloride solution to make into crystals by evaporation (this is used to precipitate PGM).
Rinse the quarts in dilute HCL (just in case).
Now the first jar of HCL (only wash) test with stannous chloride, (this solution can be reused if you do other recovery with like electronic materials) or just treated for wasted if proven barren.
The jar of gold chloride yellow solution, we need to be sure we have no free nitric acid, adding a piece of the free gold you panned with heat will denox solution, after denox return to clean jar add 3 times water and let sit a day, you may see white silver powder settle, we will decant clear yellow liquid to new very clean jar and use sodium metabisulfite to precipitate our gold as fine brown powder, stannous tests of solution tells us when we have all of the gold out of our solution, this precipitated gold powder is washed to Harold’s instructions, see the post getting pure gold (shining) for Harold’s post on this procedure.
Now you can take the panned gold and in-quarter it with some silver (depends on karat of your panned gold, if unsure will not hurt), (melt with three parts silver to one part gold get molten well and give a stir with carbon graphite rod, pour shot (slowly pour molten gold into stainless steel dish of cold water to make small gold pieces), and then part the gold and silver in nitric acid, dissolve silver in heated nitric acid, letting powder gold settle decant silver nitrate, cement silver from AgNO3 solution using a copper buss bar, brush off bar into solution (can test solution to see if complete, a few drops nitrate solution in black plastic spoon add drops HCL if white cloud silver still in solution). this cemented silver can be washed and dried and melted.
Dissolve this gold powder in aqua regia (instructions similar to above will work here also).
This was not written to be the whole of what you need, but it is one way I would treat this, do more study on each of the above written procedures, if this is new for you, as in writing this, I may have left something out, and also you will find more details by studying. You may also find another way to process your ore.
