- Details
- Written by Ismael Jones
- Category: Prospecting Tips
- Published: 22 February 2005
- Hits: 11117
I had someone come over last week who had blown the front-end of his detector when playing with building coils and needed a part to fix it. When he came over we sat and talked mostly technical and then he pulled from his pocket a bag with over a kilo of Gold! My eyes just about popped out of my head. Most of the gold was flat and large. He explained that he got it around 25 metres from a main road and in a period of under 2 weeks. This was last year and he got around 4-5kg over 3 trips. Of course I was interested in where and how and asked him so. Of course he wouldn't reveal the exact area but gave me a general area but most importantly what to look for.
He has a few rules that he follows:
- he never goes where others had been before
- He never follows tracks
- he always looks for certain ground.
The ground he looks for is always where there is a wash or old river bed (not creeks) and always looks for bedrock showing in places to indicate that the ground is shallow.Also he looks for remnents of old hills. He uses predominantly the 8" minelab coil for patch finding. I found this quite interesting as he wasn't really looking at the normal signs. He does look for old mines or signs of oldtimers and works out from there generally north & south. He has been doing this for 25+years and even uses a little portable plane to search for areas. He uses Geo Maps and not the NatRaster maps. I know what I will be doing on my next trip and that is following his descriptions. I would like to go over his areas also as he only uses a 2100... (he he) so I know I can go a lot deeper than him. That was also the other thing, all of the gold was less than 15 inches deep...
So just one of the stranger land types when searching for gold. I think that one of the hardest problems most of us face is not taking the chance that "ordinary ground" could hold a lot of surpirises. I know I often look at areas and think "well if there was gold there surely someone would have found it or least detected it". How many times do we ignore areas because they are right next to a major highway? Sometimes the obvious places can be quite producitive. I have seen numerous areas like this person has described but never once have I stopped to check it out. That is about to change!