Gold Prospecting Outcrop

Outcrop is a word that merely means the area where a mineral deposit comes into contact with the surface of the earth. There are occasions in which it does stick out on top of the surface many feet but in most cases it has been eroded at the same level of the surface and sometimes can even be buried under several feet of overburden.

After the prospector in conclusion gets to his original site of the gold, there might not be any indication at all an outcrop used to stand there. As a matter a fact, buried outcrops are most likely the best individual prospect for a person to find a prize for most of the ones that remain have already been found and investigated.

If you are able to see the outcrop you will not have any more problems concerning the search and you can get right into testing and investigating of the outcrop right away. In some occasions an outcrop will be at the same level of the surface and can be visually seen or with only a little bit of scratching done on the dirt. In most instances the contact spot will be buried from several inches to several feet down and the search for this needs to be done in a more methodical way than just the straight line or random search and most likely in a more systematic way than in the case of a triangle kind of tracking search.

You should first check out the land that is surrounding. It is very common that the high spot of the tracking search is not the highest spot in the area. The highest spot might be found on the side of a mountain, in a hole between a couple mountains, on a depression on the side of the slope as well as in many other spots but not at the head of a drainage structure.

You will in most cases be able to define in what direction the soil has been taken and which is going through erosion with some basic knowledge of geology and this should also be in a downward slope.

The search will need to start down hill from the location of the outcrop that is suspected. You will need to draw the base line across the slope at angles to the grade. The base line is in most cases informal and testing should start with the easier techniques at first. The starting point is around the middle and the work should move onto the side every so often in order to get rid of the possibility of working on the wrong side of the line first.