I’m sure we all have, at some point in time, gone out detecting and ended up not having the success we thought we would have. Here are some helpful game-changers that work for me and may work for you, as well.

Look around for areas where you don’t see detector holes or drywasher piles and try your test hole at these spots to determine depth to bedrock.

Some of the items that I’m going to go over are outcroppings, ditches, exploratory trenches and contacts/surface materials. I am going to speak about each of the above items in as much detail as I can, and then towards the end of this article I will tie them together.

Old tailing piles extend for miles. There was still plenty of water flowing here, so WPA members set up highbankers at several settling ponds.

Once across, I panned a couple of spots around some old grass roots and the fine gold was amazingly heavy. Every pan I ran after that had lots of color.

My first day using my pinpointer I detected an area where the fellas’ big guns had swooped in and cleaned up all the “big gold” and I got over sixty tiny pieces of gold.