Randomly Searching for Gold

To begin with, the prospector that is on a straight line or a random search is in many cases doing a triangular search with a lot more discipline than he even knows himself. A good deal of experience can take care of and get rid of a lot of the marginal places where gold might not occur in. learning to obtain this kind of sense will only come through practice and years of prospecting and there is not any assurance that it will work in a new surrounding where the geology might have varied.

Another problem also has to do with experience and it is the ability to be able to read a watershed the right way. There are some old timers that have the ability of reading the slopes they look at with such insight that it would take the less experienced prospectors years to get to the same level. When a straight line is followed these highly experienced prospectors are able to almost always make the right choice when it comes time to change a high point from just testing one or a couple prospect holes.

Almost all of these two distinctive kinds of searches have been done when the search line went along a drainage gulley or a dry wash. In this kind of situation either of these types of searches are much more convenient than the triangular search. The good thing is that nearly all lode-prospecting trips will go along with such a watercourse until the last few miles. The triangular search will then be able to help set the most probable high point.

The primary rule when it comes to a lode search would be to go along all the watercourses whether these have water that is running in them or not until the depression deteriorates into a watershed that could have drained one or two or more high points and after this a triangular search could be done on it until a pattern is able to be developed that shows the gold has come from the smallest area of suspect high ground possible. This will the turn into the high point of the tracking search and the most probable are for the outcrop to be hidden in.

After the tracking search has been done and the prospector is almost sure he is at the general area of the lode, the third part of the search starts and this consists of searching for the outcrop or source of the float. It would once again be a good idea for us to define the word outcrop the way the miner knows this word since it is a term that is usually not understood by people in general. When this word is heard often times people imagine a big mass of white quartz that is dotted with gold that sticks out upwards at around twenty or more feet in height. Even though this might sometimes occur, without the gold that is, the term outcrop has a very particular significance to miners.