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A federal judge has ordered the FBI to speed up the release of records about the search for the legendary gold, ruling in favor of Finders Keepers, the treasure hunting outfit that led FBI agents to the remote site.

Look around for areas where you don’t see detector holes or drywasher piles and try your test hole at these spots to determine depth to bedrock.

Many of the gold camps were violent places, but in this regard, the town of Auburn exhibited a different behavior. There were few of the duels or lynchings that characterized many of the other early settlements.

After washing the top sixty to ninety feet of gravel, the old- timers hit the bedrock. The bedrock paid one-eighth to one-half of an ounce to the square foot…

I didn’t follow-up on this opportunity at that time, as I already had as much on my plate as I could handle, but the potential for this property has never left my mind.

Based on historic indicators, last month’s precious metals performances gave us two reasons for optimism.

• Don’t bet on it…
• Finders, Keepers…
• Bigger “phish” get caught too.
• So long, Seattle!

I’m combining these columns this month because there is an overlapping issue I wanted to address -- the new Interior Department “working group” on mining reform

We want to assure you that we took our time, looking for someone energetic and knowledgeable, and I think we found the perfect match.

Prospectors deal with black sands in lots of different ways. I know that some prospectors worry about getting every speck of gold and save black sands in buckets until they have hundreds of pounds.

Sure enough, after hiking a couple miles uphill and hacking through some brush, we found the place just as he had described it.

The question that most new people have is, “What do I detect?” Most people have a picture in their mind of what it takes to make what they are seeing a good place to detect. This is what I will try to sort out for you.

Keeping in mind how the local topography affects where gold has been deposited can help you find more gold, and is certainly something the prospector needs to keep in mind.

Once I started dredging with heated water pumped into my wetsuit, I never went back to not having heat except late in the summer when the water is very warm.

The problem is every other nugget hunter and drywash prospector had the same idea. As a result, you can spend days, weeks, and even months detecting these areas and not find a single nugget.

The opal is larger than a brick and is broken into two pieces, which von Brandt said was a practice used decades ago to prove gem quality.