History & Geology

Palladium may well be an underexplored element and therefore an opportunity for prospectors and geologists. This is because they are often less than obvious and other than the native metals, a chemical analysis of samples is required to identify PGM-enriched rocks.

Exploration for and prospecting in search of similar deposits should focus on rhyolite bodies located in fluorite-bearing areas.

Gold can potentially be found in all the glaciated areas of the Midwest, but to find it in any appreciable amount one needs to look to areas where the gold gets concentrated by more recent water flows.

Bodie, California, in its heyday, was once rumored to be one of the roughest and most lawless towns in the American West.

He found 5 to 7 feet of gravel containing half an ounce per yard. This started a rush of placer activity and several other shafts were sunk, with some large multi-ounce nuggets being found.

Silver Peak is a small mining community in Esmeralda County in west-central Nevada, about 30 miles west of Goldfield. Although it’s fairly remote, it’s been an important mining center since the early days.

The Oatman/San Francisco Mining District’s historic gold production of 2.2 million ounces of gold since the 1880s makes this area Arizona’s greatest primary gold producing district.

The Reno Masonic Lodge was built along the railroad tracks back when Ulysses S. Grant was president and shortly after the Comstock Lode of gold and silver was struck in Virginia City.

New theories have been developed and they may lead to new discoveries and give prospectors some new insight on where to look for diamonds.

My partner had the contacts and it wasn’t long before we had an agreement in place and the company had a geologist on site. I recall a time when he was getting the lay of the land, so to speak, and he broke off a rock sample and inspected it with his magnifier.

While a large number of locations have yielded some placer gold, most of the state’s placer production has come from a few productive districts.

In 1967, a local resident showed me a pouch of small gold nuggets and flakes. Several years later I asked the same person where that gold was found. He responded, “From the streambed below the old stamp mill at Apex.”

Most of the commercial mineral deposits are on the south and southwest part of the range between Minersville and Milford, though small amounts of gold and silver have also been found in iron-rich outcrops in the basalt to the south of Milford.

The placer deposits of Utah occur in two distinct types of environments. These are 1) placers found adjacent to, and derived from, gold, silver and base-metal deposits; and 2) placers found in major rivers and derived from unknown, distant sources.

The other opportunity that I see is in seeking unusual types of deposits. Specifically, the prospector would be searching for the stuff no one (or almost no one) is searching for. These deposits are effectively hiding in plain view.

The gravels in contact with the bedrock or false bedrock base are often the richest. The same facts apply to the alluvial paystreaks that are formed on gravel bars; the lowest level of the gold-bearing gravel is normally the richest.

It is not necessary to have a PhD in geology, but you need to know the basics, so that’s what I am going to try to dig into here—the understandable basics of these gigantic gold deposits.

Gold is a fairly widespread mineral in the Italian Alps and in the Northern Apennines. It is found both in primary mineralization and in past and recent floods.

There are both hard rock and beach sand types of titanium deposits, but the hard rock deposits need to be at least 10 percent titanium while the beach sands often are economic with only two or three percent titanium.

…it was immediately evident the previous owner had not been using a detector. During just a few months of working the dumps part-time, he recovered gold in quartz specimens valued in excess of $40,000.