With successively lower temperatures as the water mixture cools, new sets of minerals are formed and many of those stable at a higher degree of heat became subject to alteration as the temperature progressively moved lower.

As the ground thaws and dries out and the warmth of spring starts to settle in, it’s time to start afresh with a new prospecting season.

While a large number of locations have yielded some placer gold, most of the state’s placer production has come from a few productive districts.

Don’t hunker down and just keep digging in one spot where there is very little or no gold—if you don’t find it, you’ve got to get up and move on!

Gold is a fairly widespread mineral in the Italian Alps and in the Northern Apennines. It is found both in primary mineralization and in past and recent floods.