A few pointers that may help you locate good gold locations…
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An interesting read and some valuable information to give an indication only of likely spots.
Today a great deal of attention seems to be given to looking for gold in streams and rivers but this article points out other likely spots and not without value. In the early days of gold fossicking with a metal detector some likely spots were the eroded tops of spoil heaps where hydraulic sluicing pipes came up. Often good gold would ‘splash’ out of the top and end up on the ground near the base of the pipe. I had also heard of someone doing dredge tailing heaps and getting some as well. Of course this was after nearly a century of rain and wind had blown the cap material off.
Only a short time ago I heard of someone with a detector finding a small nugget in a tailings heap where the old timers had thrown their spoil and another fellow finding good gold in the face of a sluiced cliff which had never been completely worked and there are many of them.
In river bed rock you will find that fractured, fragmented and friable bedrock is better holding bottom than smooth bedrock with rounded and undulating crevices. Deep Stream between Outram and Middlemarch had very little gold from a point half k below the Outram - Middlemarch bridge to a point maybe five ks down due to the hard rounded bottom with few crevices and holding bottom and yet further down stream it was amazingly rich with crevices holding many ounces including large nuggets. in fact finding anything less than what you guys now call ‘pickers’ was incredibly rare. I remember six ounces of gold and nothing under about .25gram - always nuggets BUT the bottom was fragmented, large crevices, fractured bottom and soft schist in places and the same form of bedrock for miles.
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In Oz detecting over in WA we’d actively detect the spoil heaps from old timers dry blowings. Always found a few small nugs.
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