Prospecting & Detecting
Ancestral Yuba River Placer Gold Deposits
November 2020 by David Lawler
The small-scale miner has reasonable opportunity to exploit some of these small, rich placer gold deposits.
The Hunch
The mysteries of this spot were only just starting to develop. There is nothing but very bland granite-type rocks here, meaning no bold, favorable indicators.
Return to Chicken, Alaska
![](http://www.icmj.com/userfiles/images/201501/10-toc-chicken.jpg)
Following the Clues
It took me awhile before I finally got a nice mellow signal. My nugget turned out to weigh in about two dwt (pennyweight). Over the next few hours, we all picked up a few more nuggets apiece.
Scams, Scammers and Schemes
Gold mining has received many black eyes from many scams, scammers and schemes throughout the years. Unscrupulous scammers have swindled naive people for millions of dollars in the past and will, no doubt, continue into the future.
Goal Setting and Rock Tossing
Day three was a copy of day two. I started real low in the long wash to see if I could prove how far down the gold had made it.
Prospecting for Gold at Green Valley
In October, five of us decided to take an exploration trip into an area called Green Valley. This was perhaps ten miles upstream from where we had gone in September and the difficulty was access. One would think that based on the name it was an easily accessible area not far from a nearby town. This couldn’t be more wrong.
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