When working fine gold placers with a drywasher, there are some natural variables that can be beneficial as well as others that can be a hindrance to achieving good recovery.

What do you do when you’ve located a promising deposit of gold or gemstones, but it’s trapped in solid rock?

I metal detected a number of years before I saw my first nugget peeking out from the dirt before I had scraped or dug for it. This one was in the steep sidewall of a narrow, but deep drywash.

While sitting there, I wondered if I should go over the hole again. I did and got a louder signal that turned out being about another twelve inches deep.

The old timers typically washed these areas down to bedrock, and some areas appear terraced. I would imagine this is because these hydraulic mines were generally where the miners found old Tertiary river channels on the sides of mountains that were gold-bearing.