How to Research Prospecting Locations and Mining Claims

April 2020 by David Hughes

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.

The Summer of ‘81

November 2019

When it was all setup and running, you had everything coming off the dredge riffles into the boil box. At the hole section, some of the water got sucked down and pulled a lot of black sand and over heavies…

Maitland Bar Nugget to Go On Display

January 2016
The box sat in a hallway and employees began using it for impromptu cricket games, no knowing what it contained.

Sunshine and Gold

January 2016

His eyes were gleaming and he was smiling as he dropped his first piece of gold into my hand. It was a small, earring-size nugget, and he had found it almost immediately.

Greenhorn Finds Gold in Colorado

November 2016
Using a snuffer bottle to pick it out of the pan, he continued his panning efforts. He continued to find more yellowish stuff, but it wasn’t shiny like he thought gold should look.

The Gold of Plumas de Oro

March 2011
Their rewards were far better than they had anticipated, resulting in one of the best clean-ups they had ever seen.

A Gold Mine on a Washington Beach?

February 2012
Bela and Barbara Kovacs began prospecting for gold about seven years ago as a family orientated outdoors activity. A welder by trade and lured by the simple fact that beach sands can contain small bits of precious metals, Bela decided a few years ago to build a sand sucking contraption that can sift the shoreline for anything worth keeping.

Confluence Placers

June 2013
Confluences of placer streams are well known as concentration sites for heavy minerals. The basic reason is that...

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