NorthofNorth

Hey folks, new to the forum here. I am working and playing in the state of Alaska, and live in a decent gold bearing area, but it’s mostly flour gold from glacial dust.... geologically speaking it’s pretty young soil with lower levels of mineralization (I was told). The area was never thoroughly mined, because of the difficulties encountered extracting this fine stuff with old methods. Anyway, I have been picking some old-timer’s brains on how to get started, and he suggested this method for this fine stuff.... he liked to locate the mineralization zones with a detector, then dredge or sluice that. That way he would only process the more concentrated material. There are the occasional nuggets, but very scarce compared to the flour. is this a realistic method for doing a little weekend prospecting? I have been looking into detectors (the last one I had was 15 or 18 years ago and it was a very basic bounty hunter great for a kid, but....) seemingly most detectors are trying to tune out the mineralization, and I am searching for it. I was looking at the gold monster 1000, and equinox, but can’t decide if their advanced discrimination would help or hinder my goals. Any thoughts on this technique, and what machines to consider to achieve the goal? Of course I’d like something that could treasure hunt, and do everything else great too, but I know that’s not usually how this stuff works. Thanks for your time and patience. In the meantime I am going to be educating myself on the forum. Trying to soak up all this knowledge.