I’d like to offer some practical comments about staking and maintaining mining claims. Owning your own claim is the dream of many prospectors. I’ve made good money off my mining claims, both from the minerals I have found on them as well as from leasing out some of my claims to larger mining and exploration companies.

I was amazed and surprised, and I took a moment to admire how beautiful this coarse chunk of gold was. It later weighed exactly one-half ounce.

Ray followed up by detecting the same area and I was happy to see that he did not find any good targets in the same line. So far so good.

That prospecting effort you are about to spend your time on...is it worth your effort? If you are going to devote your time to it, you will need all the facts you can get.