This article will hopefully provide a few constructive hints on how to use your downtime during the cold winter and the wet spring to best prepare for the upcoming nugget-hunting season.

Within this area, about two million ounces of gold and fifty million ounces of silver have been mined. Faults, dikes, veins and fissures that carry the ore form a concentric radial pattern—like spokes on a wagon wheel—around the caldera core.

Once you have determined that the land is locatable, the next step in the claim research process is to determine if the land has already been claimed by a previous locator.

We spent the morning in a meeting with one of the higher-ups at the US Forest Service. I presented him with 412 complaints received from our readers, along with a summary of the complaints to make his job easier.