What to do in the case of Highly Mineralized Grounds

There are grounds that are too mineralized to trust a discriminator and it would probably be able to detect bigger pieces however the smaller ones would be overlooked. If the prospector lowers the sensitivity of his detector down to a level of three or even three, he might be able to bring down the effect of the ground mineralization on the accuracy of the discriminator. By making sure the coil passed over the exact middle area of the target the prospector might be able to get a more accurate reading and by moving the loop a bit slower and passing it over the target this way can make the response be enhanced. This is an instance in which the discriminator can and cannot be used on a multipurpose detector. If it cannot be used on the detector it is highly suggested not to. In these cases it is better to simply dig, even if it takes more time, at least you know you are not letting anything go by. Always dig when in doubt. If you are working on the tops of ridges, with the hope that the rains and winds have done the job of uncovering deeper pieces of gold, make sure to work the sides of the gullies where erosion can bring the nugget a little closer to the top. If there is exposed bedrock, work on the areas where the crevices might have trapped a piece of gold. If you see little pockets of sand in hollow areas of the bedrock that have worked like natural riffles and stop at every dry wash pile you run into. In many occasions gold can be found at dry washers when in the desert. It is a little bit difficult sometimes to tell the difference between these piles of rock and gravel from the natural mounds of the native soil in the desert. However if you inspect it closely you can notice that the dry wash tailings are made up of material of the same size. This means that the fine tailings have almost the same consistency of pure sand, the medium tailings have rocks that are almost equal in size and the coarse tailings look the same, however they have bigger stones. All these kinds of piles can have gold in them; just remember that the bigger the rocks the bigger the gold is in most cases.