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.

I recently had the opportunity to spend a day exploring around Butte, Montana and was amazed by the amount of mining that has taken place there. The old-timers called Butte “the richest hill on earth” and had pretty good reasons for doing so.

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.

New theories have been developed and they may lead to new discoveries and give prospectors some new insight on where to look for diamonds.