It’s not easy to figure out what is best without testing, and so a certain level of confusion has developed about how small the ore ought to be crushed.

I got a signal but knew it was small. Still, I was very happy to find something. I continued and got another signal. Yes! A bigger nugget! Then I got another signal.

…early last fall, I found my first gold-rich patch along a few crevices in the same river and found five grams of gold nuggets in one outing.

What also helped keep Coulterville alive was the fact that the town itself happened to be sitting on top of one of the richest veins in the Mother Lode. The ledge itself was three hundred feet wide.

Within this area, about two million ounces of gold and fifty million ounces of silver have been mined. Faults, dikes, veins and fissures that carry the ore form a concentric radial pattern—like spokes on a wagon wheel—around the caldera core.