Prospecting Tools and Equipment

The prospecting tools and equipment utilized for doing sampling on the search are the ones that should be used for recovering of smaller gold placers. In most cases the gold pan, dry washer and rocker are amongst the most favorite. A good many of the old time miners used to call these tools samplers and used to use them for those types of things only. The little portable dredge can not often times be used because as soon as the search is done in the stream there is usually not enough water around to make it run properly. Besides this, the foundation of sampling calls for a very exact estimate of the quantity of gold that is being recovered and in a lot of cases just a few little gold flakes can be found per pan. When there is a gold pan, dry washer and a rocker the chances and efficiency is a lot higher and possibility of allowing fine gold to escape are reduced a great amount.

The last decision of what tools you will need will be determined mainly by the quantity of water you have at disposal in the search area and the amount of gear and tools the prospector himself is able to take. A great number of good and successful searches have been done by only using a gold pan, so don’t rule it out.

Learning about the right way to dig a test hole is very essential. Due to the fact that the largest amount of gold is probably located at or close to the bedrock the prospector in many cases ends up digging a little hole in order to take his samples from a good amount of depth before washing them.

If the ground has not been very cemented, a little auger like the ones that are used for gardening is able to drill a four to six inch hole around four feet in a little bit of time and will be able to bring up a sample from this depth. One other tool that is used for this type of thing is the common post hole digger, however using these requires of more work. If you are using a normal spade you will need to dig up even more dirt however it is better than the final alternative, which consists of a pick and miners shovel.

In order to reduce work and make it possible to look at and check as many prospect holes as you possibly can, the sample hole should be made as small as possible. The gravel that you will be taking to test should be taken from the deepest part of the hole; make sure to be careful to not allow the dirt that is removed from the hole to fall back in because it will make finding colors a more difficult to do.

If a tracking search is being done in a desert there are a few cases when the general rules can be bent a little bit. If the base line crosses a dry wash or gulley, search for natural riffles as if you were prospecting a stream. You should try to picture the wash as if it had running water and focus on things like rocks, logs, or any other types of things that could be seen as an obstacle to trap gold that has come down the wash when there was a flood. If this obstacle is off the base line in either direction it is a good place to make a prospect hole in rather than on the actual base line.

It is not really worth it to try to find out where eddies were located during flood time because there is usually not enough time for them to deposit a good amount of gold to get preserved and accumulated.

You stand a better chance in desert areas in places where there is blow sand that may have gotten accumulated in dunes however in most cases the wind builds a little dune around a plant such as around tumbleweed. These little dunes often times have streaks of black sand on the top of them. There are usually always a little eolian placer and in many cases have very fine gold trapped inside of them with the black sand. This is another exception and it would be a better idea to test out this area than a normal spaced out location on the base line.