Gold is where you find it. The best place to find gold is where it has been found before, there are traces of gold in virtually every state, the quantity and quality varies considerably from what we like to find, but it is there.
Not everyone has the patience and skill to find gold, but the skill can be learned if you have the patience, and like many other things in life, like playing a musical instrument, not everyone takes the time to become proficient in their pursuit of gold.
Prospecting itself is where the fun is. It’s like playing the lottery, the next place you look may be the glory hole where you find gold dust, specks, flakes, that large nugget or maybe even a vein. I personally have done all of these. Every time it adds to the temperature of my gold fever. I really enjoy that. And yes, I do have a major case of that GOLD FEVER.
There are many ways to hunt for gold. The general term is “prospecting”. It is said that it all begins with panning and always ends with panning. However, as we progress through several stages in prospecting, we add to our skills and success in finding gold, we have a tendency to want to make our search faster and more efficient. I have been fortunate in my prospecting and over the years acquired many pieces of 'professional' equipment. Some of the equipment I make myself from scratch, modified an existing piece of equipment or have purchased a great tool from one of the many manufacturers of gold equipment. Most equipment is fairly inexpensive at the level the novice prospector, but when you get to the point where I am currently at, it starts to get expensive. But then I have been fortunate enough to recover enough color to finance my purchase of the more elaborate equipment. The more material I process, the more color I recover from nature.
On the left you can find links to pages that describe the simple methods of prospecting. These are the basics. I have found over the years that most everyone feels they are an expert and do each method their way. In their opinion, it is the best, foolproof, efficient and rewarding. I have found that you can always improve on a specific method, and in my opinion, mine is not perfect, I don’t claim to be an expert, but I am able to find some color, and I think I can safely say that I have found more color than a lot of prospectors out there. Basically, I feel for the amount of time I spent looking for color I have been successful in my return for my efforts. The bottom line is “I love my hobby, that’s why I’m still doing it after all these years”.