oldmancoyote1

Mary Hill wrote a booklet Hunting Diamonds in California. A geologist I met who specialized in conventional diamond geology said he searched the pit Hill mentioned and found no indication of diamonds. The diamonds found in California apparently are not from kimberlite pipes as found elsewhere. Looking for a pipe would not be a very promising approach. Your best chance would be exploring a pit using an ultraviolet light after dark. I should mention that rattlesnakes can fluoresce too.

Azurite(blue) and Malachite(green) are two rather soft copper minerals with stunningly pure bright colors. They are relatively common and not that expensive. You could moderate their intensity by mixing some white or black mineral powder. They tend to form acids when wet, so seal them well. Show a picture of your work as I do woodworking too.

Nice gold. Consider making one of Two Toe's hooked probes (see his youtube videos) made from a windshield wiper arm. I find it gives a lot more control than a screwdriver tool when extracting gold from cemented gravel adjacent to bedrock.

Thanks

You have had a lot of success over the years. I imagine you have found some wonderfully large masses of gold. Think about each of those for a few moments, especially those in the lower 48. Does anything appear as a common feature of their locations? Surely not everything would fit the same mold, but was there anything present frequent enough to indicate one location might be a little bit more likely to yield big gold than another? Thanks

That's similar to the area I reported on recently. It was placered by individuals until it was hydrauliced by a large company and then worked again in the 30's. There seems to be more gold left over from prior activities than I had imagined. I thought folks were much more thorough. There is a large bedrock exposure 5 minute walk from where I live during the summer that I thought was so public and so obvious that it was exhausted. Someone told me otherwise, and this week I have started finding flood gold and small nuggets.

At my rate, it'll take that long especially since the fires make my area largely inaccessible. Nice photo.

You are right. I dug 6 more holes. For 3 the bedrock went straight on down. Based on this tiny sample, I will follow two rules: 1) I won't dig unless the site is sort of hemmed in by bedrock on at lest two sides (it's probably too deep if it isn't); and 2) I won't dig unless there is evidence someone got gold within a couple of feet (I will miss some gold, but I won't fail as often.).

What was the site like? Those certainly aren't river rocks in the picture.

BF44: You misunderstand. Everyone on this forum knows about crevasing. Digging for hidden cracks and holes before metal detecting was a change in my preferred strategy. "New for me", get it?

After 3 years with a friend's DFX and 4 years with my own Makro Gold Racer, I finally found gold. Tried a new spot and a new technique. I found 63 pieces in 5 days and my buddy found 81 working right next to me with a Gold Monster. My little VLF can't compete with the big iron, so I needed a new method. I started digging where the bedrock went under the sand and gravel. Following the bedrock along, I noted a few small spots of cemented gravel in cracks and holes in the bedrock. Carefully excavating these gravel patches and detecting as I went let to a wonderful few days. Just detecting from the surface has proven to be a waste of my time.

Fire brick.

It's still way to out of focus. The tiny details are telling.

Someone described nitric acid as less aggressive than muriatic acid (HCl). I would never use nitric acid except under professional supervision in a hood. I have use HCl at home since high school. I carried it around in my pocket. While its vapors will corrode nearby metals etc., it is not a powerful oxidizer like nitric acid which I regard as extremely dangerous. Perhaps the commentator was referring to its action on minerals as being less aggressive not to safety issues. I think it is best to avoid any misunderstanding by mentioning nitric acid is a dangerous material.