Picking the right spot to placer has to do with years of experience, and a little luck. The textbooks can tell you where it should be, but sometimes the rules just don’t seem to apply.

…early last fall, I found my first gold-rich patch along a few crevices in the same river and found five grams of gold nuggets in one outing.

My friend came walking in from the garage with what looked to me like a stick of dynamite. Chuckling, he said, “Have you ever been gold mining?”
In my head I was thinking, “Not at 3 am in the morning with dynamite.”

When he got home that night, he looked at the plotted points of gold and trash he had dug and saw that there was a distinct line where the gold nuggets were being found.