I poked my head out of the water and said, “You won’t believe what I am going to show you!”

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.

Let’s examine why your placer gold looks the way it does and what you can tell about its journey based upon its appearance.

So let’s dive in and see what I can do to convince you that this is the year you should be out staking your own claims.

More than one prospector has gone into that canyon and never came out.

The area was mined intermittently from around 1900 to 1915, but was also mined in the late 1800s, with a total output valued at about $100,000, which is around $9.5 million at the current gold price.

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.