Prospecting & Detecting
A Walk Through The Gold Indicators
April 2022 by Ray Mills
The question that most new people have is, “What do I detect?” Most people have a picture in their mind of what it takes to make what they are seeing a good place to detect. This is what I will try to sort out for you.
Hunting for Gold in the Quartzsite Area of Western Arizona
Winters are a great time to explore the hills in the area of the Middle Camp, Oro Fino and La Cholla placers on the southern flank of the Dome Rock Mountains.
Prospecting for Liberated Gold
Some will doubt its value given the ultra-fine particle size… Some will become encouraged about not having to incur significant time and expense to break rock.
It Pays to Know Your Bedrock
On our last trip, we brought ropes and went down the first waterfall forty vertical feet, only to be confronted by a second, sixty-foot-high, overhanging waterfall that emptied into a slot canyon.
Alaskan Gold Adventure
In Chicken I had my first experience with the famous Alaska blue clay, sometimes called the blue layer. The blue layer is where the best fine gold was to be found.
Finding Streams of Gold
Without knowing or even thinking about it, I had put together a map that showed me a pattern of the ancient Sacramento River channel. I also had a distinct picture of where the ancient channels of several other creeks and rivers were running.
Prospecting Underground: Use Caution
In underground placer work, the contact point of the bedrock tunnel and the gravel is a very weak point and always has to be timbered. The bedrock here is thin, fractured, and the gravels loose from many years of oxidizing.
Route Planning Using GPS
My intention was to end this discussion with waypoints and routes, then I found USGS maps of the Plainfield Quadrangle.
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