Prospecting & Detecting
Excavator Testing Wet Placer Ground
April 2013 by Jim Halloran
The excavator or backhoe has become the tool of choice for testing placer ground. These machines are the best way to explore and sample a placer deposit if the ground is not too wet or frozen and bedrock is not beyond the reach of the machine.Trying Out the New Highbanker
The 2011 gold season had finally got underway on the Middle Fork of the Feather River near Quincy, California. Cold weather and high water had pushed gold mining into mid-summer, but things were looking up.
Prospecting and Mining Old Mine Sites
In some places valuable ores can be found within the waste material of mine dumps, sorted ore piles, and detrital vein matter at the surface. Though many of these old mine sites can be an excellent source of gold, not all are created equal.
Detecting for Gold—Finding Nuggets Where You Least Expect Them
Many friends have come up to my locale to detect for gold. I am writing this article hoping that it may help anyone who uses a detector to prospect for gold nuggets.
Attention to Detail - Part II
Ditches almost always started in the high country and contoured the mountainsides, making a long drop, usually many miles away, to the goldfields. There are ditches in Trinity County that originate at seven and eight thousand feet in the Trinity Alps that carried water almost thirty miles.
How Do I Recover Gold In Black Sands?
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.
Small-Scale Miners Rock the Mining World
With the high price of gold, there are many new prospectors out in the hills all over the United States, and while we would all prefer to be finding those larger nuggets, it doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes all that is available is nothing more than a few small flakes. The truth is, new prospectors are sprouting up all across the planet—especially in the developing nations.
Sampling Placer Stockpiles
Sampling other people's stockpiles or dumps has some inherent risks that sampling undisturbed ground does not have.
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