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.

We’ve had two trips to the deserts of Nevada and explored mines and mill sites, hiked miles of ravines in California, and swung our detector coils over thousands of square yards of bedrock.

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.