Prospecting & Detecting
Placer Gold Deposits of New Mexico
February 2019 by Chris Ralph
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.
It's Hard to Find Gold!
...even the best prospectors have times when they do not find gold. It is all about taking chances against tough odds and succeeding.
Extracting & Smelting Your Gold
Unfortunately, not all the gold that we prospectors find is pretty, or appealing to the eyes. They are not all nice, bright, shiny nuggets with lots of character that carry high collector value.
The Gold of Plumas de Oro
Their rewards were far better than they had anticipated, resulting in one of the best clean-ups they had ever seen.
Prospecting Research
These are just some of the ways I have been able to find new spots to metal detect for gold.
Using Vegetation and Soil Conditions as Prospecting Aids
Wouldn’t it be great if you could know if there is gold in the ground without setting foot on the ground? Well you can, to a certain extent, if you can recognize mined ground from unmined.
Pot Hole Gold
It was early in the 2008 season on the Mokelumne River near Pine Grove, California. Considering the potential for high water through the month of June, my wife Fran and I set our sights on investigating some of the pot holes in...
A Few Tips and Tricks for Beach Mining
When you think about the extremes to which a miner will go to get a little gold, it occurred to me beach gold could be "easy pickings."
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The Bawl Mill
• Ask The Experts - Do I need something other than a fire assay for PGMs?
• Ask The Experts - This low-grade ore is not worth processing
• The Hunch
• Resurrecting An Old Hard Rock Mine—A Series of Small Victories
• The Basics of Exploration Leases and Contracts—Part I
• Gold Prospecting for Better or Worse: A Long Hike
• Mutiny on The Mason
• Who Jumped Whose Claim First?
• The Value of Evidence
• Over The Divide: Charles "Chuck" Cushman
• Melman on Gold & Silver
• Mining Stock Quotes and Mineral & Metal Prices







