Prospecting & Detecting
A Golden Summer
November 2014 by Ray Mills
His take of gold was pretty close to what mine was—about a quarter of an ounce. We had just gleaned about half an ounce of gold in just twenty minutes.
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.
Following Clues to a Lost Gold Deposit—The Northern Extension of the Cedarberg
Last month, in “Following Clues to a Hidden Gold Deposit,” I ended the article with the direction that we were on the hunt! We were getting prepared and ready to roll with our detectors, then snow came, and lots of it. We had already found the seam diggings mine on the mountainside in wild, rough brush and trees. It had been well hidden.
Prepping For A New Season of Gold Hunting
This article will hopefully provide a few constructive hints on how to use your downtime during the cold winter and the wet spring to best prepare for the upcoming nugget-hunting season.
Summertime Gold Panning
I have smaller pans for cleaning black sand concentrates, big pans for taking large samples, pans with corners for pouring out materials, and pans with lots of special riffles. This variation is why I have so many pans—they each have their specialty.
Iowa Hill District
For the last two years we’ve held a hands-on prospectors training session in the Iowa Hill district of California’s Mother Lode country as a part of our Gold Prospecting and Mining Summit event. Because of this, I thought it might be good to take a look at the history, geology and opportunities that the Iowa Hill district still offers to the individual prospector.
A Good Start
We split up in order to cover a larger area and found good color almost everywhere. The bedrock was shallow on both sides of the river, but the inside bend was where we concentrated our prospecting.
The Essence of Gold Prospecting
When doing your initial armchair research and selecting potential areas to explore, consider all the indicators, both natural and man-made.
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