tim907

I have a similar issue. I prospect in the Petersville and Cache creek area of Alaska. Highly mineralized ground with lots of hot rocks. I currently use a gold monster 1000 and have found some gold with it when detecting known dykes, but trying to cover much ground with it drives me nuts with the constant signals from all the hot rocks. I think I am going to pull the trigger and get a SDC 2300 since they are known to handle highly mineralized ground well but are still basically turn on and go like the gold monster.

When Dave Turin was down near Valdez he came up to Petersville where I mine to check out some of the claims one of my neighbors has for sale. On the show they did a little prospecting and brought in an excavator to do a sample run. I was curious what they would find. Unfortunately there was some sort of emergency back at their operation near Valdez and they shut down their sampling operation before it really started, so no results. Funniest thing was that the claim owner apparently didn't want them to use the real name of Petersville for the area. So instead they used her last name and called it Stevensville.

I second the recommendation of Chris Ralph's book. Also the magazine ICMJ's Mining Journal is full of interesting articles every month.

Seems like it would be a great adventure. While everyone has their own comfort levels with regards to possibly dangerous places off the beaten path, I feel like the fears of some are excessive. I have traveled by myself to a few places many people would have considered no go zones with no problems. I made two solo trips to the Russian far east in the mid 90's shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the first time illegally (my visa was only good for St Petersburg thousands of miles from Khabarovsk where I landed). The other trip was 10 days in Pakistan's Northwest frontier province after flying into Peshawar. Luckily for this trip I knew a guy there who's sons took me all over the area, they even took to me to the Khyber pass on the Afghan border and we walked across into Afghanistan. This was at the time the Russians were fighting in Afghanistan and the US was helping provide missiles to the Mujahideen, so Americans weren't as controversial in the area as now. I found many of the locals in both places friendly and helpful, they were often impressed that I was willing to travel to their area alone. A key point to these trips being successful was likely hooking up with locals, especially since I didn't speak more than a few words od their language.

That's a great sample pan anywhere!! I took my side by side up Petersville road yesterday to see if I could make it to my claims yet, made it past cache creek but got stopped by snow drifts just 2 miles from my claims so no gold yet. I did see a wolverine from just 20 feet away so that made the trip for me. Hoping for sample pans like that when the last drifts melt in a week so.