Prospecting & Detecting
Back to Basics--Finding Gold With a Pan and a Sluice
April 2019 by Chris Ralph
Don’t hunker down and just keep digging in one spot where there is very little or no gold—if you don’t find it, you’ve got to get up and move on!
Attention to Detail - Part II
Ditches almost always started in the high country and contoured the mountainsides, making a long drop, usually many miles away, to the goldfields. There are ditches in Trinity County that originate at seven and eight thousand feet in the Trinity Alps that carried water almost thirty miles.
Take it to Bedrock
Picking the right spot to placer has to do with years of experience, and a little luck. The textbooks can tell you where it should be, but sometimes the rules just don’t seem to apply.
12-Year-Old Unearths Large Diamond
It is the eighth largest brown diamond to be found and certified by park staff.
Where Should I Start?
Digging in the right spots will produce excellent results, like this group of nuggets taken by the author while metal detecting during the last few months. The biggest nugget is over an ounce.
An Alaskan in the Lower 48
Our destination was some old hydraulic workings where the old miners had washed literally mountains of material away to expose gold in ancient river channels.
Prospector's Guide to Rock Breaking and Blasting
The holes were overloaded with explosives, but I didn’t know it. I was just a green mining engineer fresh out of school and told to watch as the experienced miners set the charge.
VLF Detector Operating Modes
It is important to note that discrimination is a type of electronic filtering. The signal is analyzed, and depending on the discrimination setting, identified as either a target to be dug or a target to be ignored.
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