Prospecting & Detecting
4 Keys to Successful Nugget Hunting
February 2012 by Chris Ralph
Lots of prospectors are trying out nugget detecting for the first time and finding out that it isn’t all that easy. In fact, in my opinion, metal detecting for nuggets is perhaps the most difficult form of prospecting that one can take on.
Detecting Alluvial Bench Deposits -- Pt II
Walking around the gulch and exploring the upper drainage, picking up different rocks and inspecting them with a good loop, and looking them up in a field guide of rocks and minerals of your region will help you understand how the gold got there.
The Value of Evidence
That prospecting effort you are about to spend your time on...is it worth your effort? If you are going to devote your time to it, you will need all the facts you can get.
Exceptions to the Rules: Re-Thinking Prospecting Rules of Thumb
Looking at the exceptions to the basic rules is sort of an advanced prospecting discussion, but the readers of ICMJs Prospecting and Mining Journal are plenty able to handle it.
More on Detecting Pocket Gold
What I hope to do here is to give you some information that will help you, the reader, pick out locations that will be better for you to detect and give you a possibility of finding gold.
Just One More Time
We chose this particular area because an old channel had run here at one point and had been heavily worked on top of a mountain hilltop. Erosion patterns cut deeply on each side, leaving the channel exposed. The erosion cut sharply, dropping into ravines far below.
Nice Specimen Gold Recovered in Northern California
Each specimen is carefully examined to determine if it would be beneficial or not to use an acid treatment to reveal more of the gold.
The Potholes—California’s Oldest Known Mining District
Every time we prospected here we found gold, sometimes some really coarse flakes, but no large nuggets (yet).
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