Right away I got a target, and it ended up being gold from a nice little bench. With only an hour left of daylight, I continued heading upstream and found five more tiny pieces of gold with my VLF…

The placer gold shows up in ground sluice areas, hydraulic pits, secondary channels and hillside diggings. It is coming down the hillsides from an ancient channel left high and dry millions of years ago.

Prospectors who specialize in nugget detecting are especially interested in this special desert type, as it produces nuggets that are close to the surface of the ground and therefore more suitable to be found with a detector.

As a guide to those who are thinking of taking up this activity or those who currently practice this trade, I have created a listing of the primary tools and equipment I use when nugget hunting.

Within a very few minutes, I had my first nice sounding target. It turned out to be a nice earring-size gold piece that was about a half a gram.

Historically, Montana has been an important gold producer, in terms of both lodes and placers, and it still produces gold for the prospector today.