Prospecting & Detecting
It Pays to Know Your Bedrock
November 2017 by Michael Matus
On our last trip, we brought ropes and went down the first waterfall forty vertical feet, only to be confronted by a second, sixty-foot-high, overhanging waterfall that emptied into a slot canyon.
Gold in The Midwest--Part I
Gold can potentially be found in all the glaciated areas of the Midwest, but to find it in any appreciable amount one needs to look to areas where the gold gets concentrated by more recent water flows.
Sold: 87-Ounce Nugget
A gold prospector in central Victoria, Australia stumbled across an 87-ounce gold nugget in early February 2015, after his wife told him to head outside to get some air. He had given up smoking a few weeks prior and was getting a bit “grumpy,” she told him.
A Good Start
We split up in order to cover a larger area and found good color almost everywhere. The bedrock was shallow on both sides of the river, but the inside bend was where we concentrated our prospecting.
Tips on Crevicing for Gold
When everything is still dry, one of my favorite methods of prospecting is using a straw to blow out small cracks and crevices that dot the exposed bedrock along a stream.
Detecting Alluvial Bench Deposits -- Pt II
Walking around the gulch and exploring the upper drainage, picking up different rocks and inspecting them with a good loop, and looking them up in a field guide of rocks and minerals of your region will help you understand how the gold got there.
Weathering, Erosion and Placers
The big interest to prospectors thinking about the effect of erosion is not what might happen long into the future, but what they might find in the rivers later this summer when the water levels go down.
How Should I Work This Prospect?
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?
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The Bawl Mill
• Legislative and Regulatory Update
• Ask The Experts - How do I work this glacial deposit?
• Ask The Experts - How do I best recover gold in pyrite?
• BLM Cancels 10-Million-Acre Sage Grouse Mineral Withdrawal
• Take it to Bedrock
• The Beatty Mining District of Nevada
• Flood Plain Gold Deposits—What Are They Really?
• Exploring Iron Oxide Copper Gold Deposits
• Conrey Dredge No. 4
• Melman on Gold & Silver
• Mining Stock Quotes and Mineral & Metal Prices
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Over the Divide: Nancy Glenn; Sondra (Adelson) Bernzweig
