Following the Clues

May 2019 by Ray Mills

It took me awhile before I finally got a nice mellow signal. My nugget turned out to weigh in about two dwt (pennyweight). Over the next few hours, we all picked up a few more nuggets apiece.

Using Vegetation and Soil Conditions as Prospecting Aids

January 2013
Wouldn’t it be great if you could know if there is gold in the ground without setting foot on the ground? Well you can, to a certain extent, if you can recognize mined ground from unmined.

Fault Zones and Prospects

June 2011
As we walked back we were just reaching the point of where the faulting should be and there, covered with deep grass, was very faint evidence of an old road going up the mountainside! What was that old road doing there?

Pocket Gold

June 2016
Once a seam is found it can be traced for miles in either direction. While you are tracing a clay line, you are looking for indicators. The indicators that I look for are ironstone, hematite, different color clays intermingled with the clay line, and a very iron-rich, brown gritty soil.

Keep Watch for The Unexpected

May 2019

As I have always done, I stashed those heavy black rocks in my pack and put them in the garden at home. They never were given a second thought until a half decade later…

Drywashing Arizona Gold

January 2016
His findings were not exaggerated—after running 82 buckets of gravels in two days we had a remarkable 27.8 grams of gold!

Hidden Value in Old Tailings

March 2014
The 15 rare earth elements were discovered long after the gold rush began to wane, but demand for them only took off over the past 10 years...

A Good Start

July 2011
We split up in order to cover a larger area and found good color almost everywhere. The bedrock was shallow on both sides of the river, but the inside bend was where we concentrated our prospecting.

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