The placer deposits of Utah occur in two distinct types of environments. These are 1) placers found adjacent to, and derived from, gold, silver and base-metal deposits; and 2) placers found in major rivers and derived from unknown, distant sources.

… I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Brent Weaver, Garrett’s chief design engineer to talk about gold-oriented detectors, how they work and how prospectors can get the most out of them.

The placer gold shows up in ground sluice areas, hydraulic pits, secondary channels and hillside diggings. It is coming down the hillsides from an ancient channel left high and dry millions of years ago.

Within a very few minutes, I had my first nice sounding target. It turned out to be a nice earring-size gold piece that was about a half a gram.

Ray followed up by detecting the same area and I was happy to see that he did not find any good targets in the same line. So far so good.