Fall Drywashing—Just the Right Time of Year

November 2018 by Chris Ralph

I could see lots of quartz, both loose on the hillsides and in the numerous small prospect diggings. There was a small gold rush here more than a century ago.

Detectors: Past, Present and Future

June 2016
Detectors were invented long before I was born, but it was in the 1960s when they started to become an item popular enough to power a fledgling industry. The key development was miniature transistor technology replacing the old fashioned tube technology of the 1950s, making lightweight, affordable detectors possible.

Prospecting Underground: Use Caution

April 2011
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.

Arizona's Youngest...and Oldest Prospector

June 2014
I started with, "Hey, Rusty, tell me about the time..." and that was all it took.

Small-Scale Miners Rock the Mining World

August 2012
With the high price of gold, there are many new prospectors out in the hills all over the United States, and while we would all prefer to be finding those larger nuggets, it doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes all that is available is nothing more than a few small flakes. The truth is, new prospectors are sprouting up all across the planet—especially in the developing nations.

Getting Started

June 2017

He excitedly told me he was going mining and wanted to know where he should go, how to do it, and so on. After he calmed down, I got excited. “I need to go!” was my response.

Sniping for Gold—The Next Best Thing to Dredging

October 2020

I poked my head out of the water and said, “You won’t believe what I am going to show you!”

Fells Flat Gold

March 2012
My wife Fran and I were brushing and repairing the road to our claim when we were interrupted by a fellow in a pretty yellow Jeep heading out to the local town of Quincy, California.

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