Sunshine and Gold

January 2016 by Ray Mills

Swing and a Miss

July 2014
A very good baseball hitter might get a hit roughly one time out of every three at-bats, but for prospectors often the results are much sparser and it may take many trips before the prospector hits a home run.

Cold Alaskan Gold—Part I

September 2012
Crowds may be great for football games or the Fourth of July, but not for prospecting. So, this summer, while thousands of gold seekers were heading to the coast of Alaska, I headed to a remote part of the Interior.

Dredging Backwards?

October 2012
Before I tell you what dredging backwards is, I’ll tell you why my team and I decided to give this very unconventional dredging method a try.

Going Over Old Ground With Newer Technology

May 2020

When we got set up and I started to swing the coil over a small mound, I got a good signal, faint but repeatable.

Making Adjustments to Catch Fine Gold

November 2013
This fine gold that is so common is probably the most notorious for eluding our riffles and mattings.

Prospecting Underground: Use Caution

April 2011
In underground placer work, the contact point of the bedrock tunnel and the gravel is a very weak point and always has to be timbered. The bedrock here is thin, fractured, and the gravels loose from many years of oxidizing.

California Gold Adventure

January 2014
All locations gave up some gold, but one particular section of exposed bedrock with steep, packed crevices kept giving us good, consistent results. We had found our spot.

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