Prospecting & Detecting
Detecting Old Pocket Diggings
February 2013 by Ray Mills
Looking around, I could tell that this was an old hand-digging. As I walked around the perimeter of the digging I could see shovel and pick marks scratched on the clean, hard clay and bedrock.
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.
Moving The Big Rocks
The anticipation of finding out if the system of snatch blocks, shackles, chokers, anchor points, and the strap binding the massive slab of rock in the bottom of the river would even budge an inch was weighing on me.
Arizona Prospector Rescued from Mine Shaft
“I heard him hollering down in the hole as soon as I got there,” he said. “I was just glad to see him alive.”
Lost Sally's Gold
She said a few thoughts did cross her mind at the time; she thought maybe she should have looked more thoroughly for that hand-drawn map to the claim that we had given her the previous year.
Ganes Creek Hits 10 Years—Part II
You keep all you find at Ganes, with weekly tallies kept for a loose competition that I find helps motivate me. I seriously try to find more nuggets than anyone else in a given week, and usually make it or close to it.
Detector Brings New Life to An Old Lode Mine
…it was immediately evident the previous owner had not been using a detector. During just a few months of working the dumps part-time, he recovered gold in quartz specimens valued in excess of $40,000.
Drywashing Arizona Gold
His findings were not exaggerated—after running 82 buckets of gravels in two days we had a remarkable 27.8 grams of gold!
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