Prospecting & Detecting
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.
Tips for Detecting Old Hydraulic Pits
There are several counties around Shasta County that offer very good gold detecting. Many of these locations are old hydraulic pits. While detecting these old pits over the years I have come up with some ideas on how to go about hunting them.
How to Research Prospecting Locations and Mining Claims
If you are interested in researching mining claims for any purpose, you will first have to decipher the BLM’s LR2000, a Rube Goldberg database seemingly designed by a 1980s Soviet-era computer hacker.
Piggin' for Gold
Take a look at the picture—it’s pretty simple and you can build it yourself.
Hard Rock 101: Blasting With Kinepak Explosives
Fortunately, there are products on the market that can address these problems and make a small-scale mining operation feasible.
Gully Prospecting and Mining
This article is about our recent gold prospecting adventure, which has yielded over 20 ounces of specimen gold—with more to come.
Pocket Gold
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.
Swing and a Miss
A very good baseball hitter might get a hit roughly one time out of every three at-bats, but for prospectors often the results are much sparser and it may take many trips before the prospector hits a home run.
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