Prospecting & Detecting
Buying a Mining Claim: Questions to Ask
March 2013 by Chris Ralph

Tips and Tricks: How to Make Your Own Gold Bars Without Burning the Place Down
You find yourself with a bucketful of concentrates that you have accumulated over the season and consider the logical next step: to reduce the bucket of cons to a gold bar. Where do you begin?
Metallic Trash—Scourge of the Prospector

Clues for Detecting Ancient River Channels and Flats
The gold in this area can get quite large. Most of the pieces are about half a pennyweight on average.
Rediscovering Placerville, California

Detectors: Past, Present and Future

Residual Placers: An Often Overlooked Gold Source
Because the forces of erosion and gravity tend to carry lighter materials like quartz away more easily, the heavy minerals like gold or silver will tend to be concentrated in the general area around the vein outcrop. These concentrations are what make residual placers so attractive.
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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