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.
The Gold of Plumas de Oro
Their rewards were far better than they had anticipated, resulting in one of the best clean-ups they had ever seen.
Mom Finds 3.72-Carat Yellow Diamond
“Much of the ground where Ms. Hollingshead found her diamond is made of unweathered volcanic rock. When it rains, flowing runoff often leaves loose gravel, and sometimes diamonds, on the surface in these areas.”
Gold in the Slate Creek Basin
In some areas these channels were thousands of feet wide, and just figuring out where you are in some of these diggings is a challenge.
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Setting up a gravity dredge
A Good Start
We split up in order to cover a larger area and found good color almost everywhere. The bedrock was shallow on both sides of the river, but the inside bend was where we concentrated our prospecting.
Detecting Old Pocket Diggings
Looking around, I could tell that this was an old hand-digging. As I walked around the perimeter of the digging I could see shovel and pick marks scratched on the clean, hard clay and bedrock.
Finding Gold in Tailing Piles
Old mine workings and tailing piles can represent opportunities on many levels, from the chance to simply find a nugget on up to the commercial reworking of the old tailings for profit.
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• Weathering, Erosion and Placers
• The PIGMI—a DIY Crevice Tool
• Diary of a Diamond Prospector
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