On the day prior to Mother’s Day I was able to get out and spend a few hours prospecting. I wanted to try some new settings on my detector, and I had a place in mind to do that.

It is not necessary to have a PhD in geology, but you need to know the basics, so that’s what I am going to try to dig into here—the understandable basics of these gigantic gold deposits.

At this point, stress raised my blood pressure and I was figuring out escape routes through the brush, but thought it best to continue the conversation.

The placer gold shows up in ground sluice areas, hydraulic pits, secondary channels and hillside diggings. It is coming down the hillsides from an ancient channel left high and dry millions of years ago.