How big is the deposit? Are there boulders you will need to move? Do you just want to recover the nuggets or do you think there is good fine gold that you will also want to capture?

Each specimen is carefully examined to determine if it would be beneficial or not to use an acid treatment to reveal more of the gold.

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.

There were many small gold placers found and worked in the deserts in the old days, which had then been pretty much forgotten about. We all tried to be the first to re-discover these spots.

During my adventures I’ve learned a few key best practices that help me to consistently find gold nuggets with my detectors. You can apply many of these best practices to any type of prospecting. These best practices are really common sense; however, they are easy to neglect.

Standing on the edge of the canyon just after daybreak, I was filled with equal measures of excitement and trepidation.

The father-son duo spent years combing this bit of Pennsylvania wilderness with high-end metal detectors, drills and other tools to prospect for a fabled cache of Civil War gold.