Prospecting & Detecting

Standing on the edge of the canyon just after daybreak, I was filled with equal measures of excitement and trepidation.

This article will focus on glacial deposits and some of my hypotheses regarding gold in the Midwest glacial area.

"The practice of gleaning goes back thousands of years"

Heading to the sierra for another adventure! On The Road Again.. 
 

Join Cal on an adventure in the Califonria high Sierras! 

Reaserch is a critical step in finding new areas.
 

And what do I think is the easy way? It’s what you can learn from the old timers that walked that ground many years ago.

If you want to get better gold you will need to put your detector down for a while .
 

More than one prospector has gone into that canyon and never came out.

The largest and most perfect single gold crystals are nearly always in the form of octahedra. These large octahedral crystals often possess deeply recessed faces.

The water instantly dropped though the screen, leaving a pile of mud behind! I was so excited that I replaced it with a 150-mesh screen, and the same thing happened!

It couldn’t possibly be a bullet or other trash this deep into the hill. No sir, it was a solid zip-zip signal that I know so well.

After pinpointing and recovery, he had his first nugget of channel gold in his hand. This was also his first nugget with the new detector.

Gold, on the other hand, is super rare, and is one of the rarest elements in the earth’s crust. It averages only 0.000004 percent of the earth’s surface. That is four parts in a billion.

This new map-based tool is far superior to the old version with lots of potential layers and information that a prospector can use in research.

The prospects I found are known to carry heavy chunks of gold, sometimes in quartz, ironstone, or many times a rusty-looking type of shale covering.

Then it occurred to me that the drywasher was designed by an engineer. Gotta love engineers! Those slide-rule geeks always tinker with gravity, angles, curves and flow.

… I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Brent Weaver, Garrett’s chief design engineer to talk about gold-oriented detectors, how they work and how prospectors can get the most out of them.

This helps me to see if there is a pattern taking place with where I am finding nuggets, and when I study the map layer with all of my pins marking nuggets, I can drop in new pins where I want to search the next day.