Prospecting & Detecting

Located 23 miles south of Libby, the land surrounding the Libby Creek area has been of interest to prospectors since the early 1860s, when it was home to up to 600 miners working at a camp known as Libbysville.

The question I had, and likely you have too, is when an old channel is cut, how far does the placer gold in the cut channel move down in a river or creek that continues to erode deeper and deeper?

My friend came walking in from the garage with what looked to me like a stick of dynamite. Chuckling, he said, “Have you ever been gold mining?”
In my head I was thinking, “Not at 3 am in the morning with dynamite.”

The interesting thing about the Mother Lode area is that we can pretty much find at least a little gold in any creek or river (and even in some of the many dry gulches).

Prospectors who specialize in nugget detecting are especially interested in this special desert type, as it produces nuggets that are close to the surface of the ground and therefore more suitable to be found with a detector.

As a gold prospector for the past ten years, I thought that I had a fair understanding of the steps necessary to find gemstones.

Nevada produces about 75% of all the gold mined in the US. This means that all the other 49 states combined only produce 25%, and this includes California, Alaska and Arizona.

My mining partner Keith McBride and I spent a week in May working on a twenty-nine man crew split up into six teams at a couple of “pay to mine” mining camps.

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.

In this article I am going to talk about the different sources of gold and the clues a prospector can follow to find the source.

It rained over four inches that night and the creek flooded both my backyard and my workshop. When I opened the door to my workshop Christmas morning, an unwelcome sight greeted me.

Then I came to a section of recently exposed gravel that looked unworked. Water seeped out all around, making the ground beneath a sea of slick mud.

…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.

The lesson of keeping one’s eyes open to other possibilities is one of the great secrets of successful prospecting. Prospectors need to always be on the lookout for opportunities.

This rock had been with a family for many years and they were cleaning up an old workshop that had lots of minerals and miscellaneous “ore” samples.

How rich does a hard rock ore have to be for it to be worthwhile to process and extract the gold?

Every year I go through this and every year it becomes more difficult to find new territory that is available for us to prospect. Is there anywhere that hasn’t been worked?

The coin trading world has a new gold standard, after the only known 1822 half eagle $5 piece in private hands sold at auction in Las Vegas…

Knowing how to get the greatest depth performance out of your detector can be a handy thing, but it’s not an easy, simple matter.

I’d start the day by crawling out of my dome tent, cooking up some Spam and eggs, and heating water for instant coffee on the Coleman stove.