Prospecting & Detecting
The Ups and Downs of Nugget Hunting
April 2017 by Fred Mason
I returned to the WSPA claim. Still smug from my previous success, I was thinking I could not fail. However, the gold gods had other plans.
A Trip Down the Yukon River
My girlfriend Beth and I decided to take our canoe down the Yukon and do some gold dredging...
Research and Fieldwork Yield Some Promising Gold
A week later, a small team of us hit it again, and this time the gold really showed up.
Gully Prospecting and Mining
This article is about our recent gold prospecting adventure, which has yielded over 20 ounces of specimen gold—with more to come.
Old Mine Sites and New Technology
We’ve had two trips to the deserts of Nevada and explored mines and mill sites, hiked miles of ravines in California, and swung our detector coils over thousands of square yards of bedrock.
A Father and Son Prospecting Adventure
As I write this, I am still on a rush from taking my 9-year-old son, Jeffrey, prospecting for the first time this past weekend. It’s not that he hasn’t been along on numerous outings before: this is the first time that just the two of us went out for a day of drywashing and detecting under the desert sun.
Where Should I Start?
Digging in the right spots will produce excellent results, like this group of nuggets taken by the author while metal detecting during the last few months. The biggest nugget is over an ounce.
Pros and Cons of Big Detector Coils
Years later I returned with a new detector with a smaller coil and detector technology more sensitive to smaller nuggets. I found my first nugget within five minutes. I had a second five minutes after that.
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