Fortunately, there are products on the market that can address these problems and make a small-scale mining operation feasible.

I pulled out the nuggets I had worked on previously and looked at the size of the wire basket that the items to be cleaned are placed into. It looks much like a miniature french fry deep fryer.

The only thing that saved me was talking to a local miner who gave me a “heads up” that private individuals owned all the mineral rights in that section.

In this continuation of the Midwest gold series we are going to take a look at the states of Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas, look at possible locations within these states to find gold and talk about areas where gold has been found in the past.

The right ground balance setting for the conditions you are working is critical. If your detector isn’t set properly, you will lose depth of detection, sometimes to an extreme degree.

Once you have determined that the land is locatable, the next step in the claim research process is to determine if the land has already been claimed by a previous locator.