There were many small gold placers found and worked in the deserts in the old days, which had then been pretty much forgotten about. We all tried to be the first to re-discover these spots.

I metal detected a number of years before I saw my first nugget peeking out from the dirt before I had scraped or dug for it. This one was in the steep sidewall of a narrow, but deep drywash.

As I planned for my trips, I concentrated on how to lighten my pack yet still carry enough gear to make the trip productive and enjoyable.

A treasure-seeking young man whose name will forever remain anonymous made the months-long journey either over land or by sailing ship to California after word spread about the gold strike in 1849.

If you are interested in researching mining claims for any purpose, you will first have to decipher the BLM’s LR2000, a Rube Goldberg database seemingly designed by a 1980s Soviet-era computer hacker.

…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.