It took me awhile before I finally got a nice mellow signal. My nugget turned out to weigh in about two dwt (pennyweight). Over the next few hours, we all picked up a few more nuggets apiece.

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.

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 focused on various layers of hard-packed flood material out of the creek, and we also obtained some material up quite a ways from the creek itself on bedrock.

Every time we prospected here we found gold, sometimes some really coarse flakes, but no large nuggets (yet).