Finding a Gold Vein or Lode

If you find vein or lode gold it can be a lot more difficult to deal with. In most cases a good amount of experience and research is needed in order to be successful at this type of mining and in being successful at developing new locations. It is useful to learn about geology but this type of mining will not be very successful for an inexperienced prospector if he only works around abandoned mines and mine dumps where other prospectors have extracted gold from. In the past the early miners often missed rich ore veins by a little and left the locations thinking it was barren. Due to the fact that the early miners only used their own eyes to guide them, they would often times follow a vein in a mountain digging just a few centimetres away from a richer vein, however since they could not see it they wouldn’t find it. Using a metal detector along the walls of old mines tunnels could show you the exact location of a rich vein that was overlooked in the past. 

Weekend or recreational prospectors are able to find now that moving all the tons of earth and a good amount of the difficult work has already been done for them. As a matter a fact, by searching the walls, roof and floor of a mine just a few centimetres deep can allow the miner to prospect a good amount in just a few hours worth of time, in comparison to the old time miners who probably took months to do the same.

Remember to not look over the great amount of ore that can often times be found lying around on the floors of a tunnel or next to rails between any mine and mill and its loading area. You should test these samples and study them well. This can be done by testing them with your metal detector, as this will show you the specimens that were not seen by the original miners.

In the same way dumps and tailing piles of old mines can also be appropriate locations to work in. They are the simplest and quickest sources of gold that is, if the prospector is aware of how to use a metal detector in the right way. It is possible to find big gold as well as silver nuggets hidden in chunk of rock that was thrown out. Since the miners in the past were not able to see the material that was inside, they would discard it, however, metal detectors have changed this problem.