Prospecting & Detecting
Who Says You Have to Own a Claim to Find Gold?
April 2012 by R.E. Divine
Most of us know making a profit as a small-scale miner is difficult; however, sometimes we combine luck with a little skill and bring home a few ounces of the yellow stuff.
Volume is the Key to Success
While recovery rates are important, they must necessarily be secondary to the volume of material processed. Running more material at lower recovery rates is generally preferable to increasing the efficiency of the system.
Habits, Procedure, and Where Is The Gold?
In my early days of nugget hunting things were fairly simple. Just headphones, a pack, a detector and a small pick were all I needed for my search for great wealth.
Using Structural Clues to Locate Buried Placer Channels
They must have assumed the paystreak was spotty and had been mined out, so they never mined as close to the side of the valley as they should have.
Beach Mining for Placer Gold
What I saw was a beach area that was just completely covered in black sand. Rubbing my hands close together like a kid in a candy store, I could not wait to get set up.
Placer Channel Sampling
Sampling gold placers can be rewarding, but remember to treat the samples so you are not high grading or low grading your results. Learn the rules and apply them so your samples are accurate.
Keep Watch for The Unexpected
As I have always done, I stashed those heavy black rocks in my pack and put them in the garden at home. They never were given a second thought until a half decade later…
The Gold Of Horseshoe Bend
And we eventually reached gold. It was a winding crevice of beautiful white quartz lined with small nuggets and loaded with fine gold. There were flakes and small granular pieces—there had to be a hundred or more.
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