Most small-scale miners want to know how they can set up a system much more cheaply. The difficulty is in the balance of putting together a decent small-scale system at a reasonable cost.

At first, I tried to shift things around, but then a hand with a rock would appear, so I would stop trying to adjust my gear and grab the rock to keep things moving.

Fascinated by the sapphires—and the gold that occured with them—he was soon buying parcels of property and setting up his own commercial-scale gravel processing plants.

In last month’s issue we covered the initial discovery of gold, the subsequent gold rush that occurred around Nome, some of the geology of the area and past production. We’ll conclude the article in this issue with a further examination of the geology and deposit types, discuss the resources...