I pulled out the nuggets I had worked on previously and looked at the size of the wire basket that the items to be cleaned are placed into. It looks much like a miniature french fry deep fryer.

Selecting the wrong coil can potentially cause you to miss nuggets, so you want to be sure to select the best option for the situation at hand.

The old timers typically washed these areas down to bedrock, and some areas appear terraced. I would imagine this is because these hydraulic mines were generally where the miners found old Tertiary river channels on the sides of mountains that were gold-bearing.

This was “pocket” country. All around were “pockets” that had been hand dug by old and new miners.