Welcome. Tonight we’re going to talk about something that keeps coming up and it’s not too surprising. I’ve been asked this question a lot lately, especially as I’m going back and forth between gold in a storm and what happens to concentrate it and how you can get started mapping and finding gold near you and the two connect together with the following question. How can I find gold? This is a question that gets asked over and over again, whether it’s a novice or a professional, they keep asking the same question because this is the one you should always ask first.
How can I find gold? How can I find it near me?
What kind of tools am I going to need and how do I start this process? So one of the first things I wanted to kind of go over was really when you’re looking at gold and the process of finding and recovering gold, it’s two stages. Finding the gold or prospecting and then the recovery of the gold or mining. And when you go into the situation where you’re trying to mind first and ask questions later, that’s a serious problem. We’ve seen that in some dramatize television series.
Okay?
The point is you really want to start out by looking at your prospect or your place that you’re thinking about and knowing where to go and we’ve talked about this over the last few live sessions. One of the things I want you to be aware of is this, you know, government gold maps, the GGM thing, that link I’ve got there at https://sourdoughminer.com/ggm/ .
That is where I always start because when I build those maps in an area that I’m starting to think about looking or when I’m looking for looking near me or near where I’m going to be, I can build my own custom map of that area and start with where gold has been found before. That’s the number one step in any of these things is ask yourself, is there a golden in this region?
Even the guys on Gold Rush will typically look and say, you know, “what’s the history of this place?” By the way, the history is a big part of what makes the show a success because the characters that are bound in a place like that are amazing present and past.
You know, Mark Twain did, you know he lived up in the area around Angels Camp, California and many of the things he wrote about prospectors such as roughing it, were all about that area and all about the crazy life that prospecting is. So you want to be aware of what’s in the area and starting with a map is a great idea, but that’s not the only thing cause you want to take that map and we’ll go back to the opening screen and take a look.
So here I’ve got a site survey map. This is an example of a very rough draft that you can easily create in the field on your site by simply taking samples and plotting them out with respect to the different geographic features that your site has to offer. A piece of flat rock that sticks out in the middle of a sandbar and all that kind of stuff. This looks like bedrock coming out here. We’ve got the flow of the creek in summer.
We have an idea of what the flow was like in winter because of the width of this thing, edge to edge. And what we’ve done here is sample from side to side, perpendicular to the stream flow to find the concentrated zones for gold recovery. This is where we find the most colors in our pan as we go downstream. Building this kind of map is crucial to understanding what your prospect has to offer. When you go into the final phase, which is the recovery and mining strategy.
That’s when you go by the heavy caterpillar equipment and not before, unless you need to do a lot of deep samples. Then you buy specific pieces of equipment; an auger or some kind of a diamond core drill if you need to go that route. But the idea is you don’t go there until you know you have some reasonable chance of recovering that kind of money cause it’s just a stupid waste. You know, that’s, it’s a business eventually.
But as you’re doing it as a hobby, same problem holds true because now what you’re wasting instead of money is time.
You want to basically work on the areas that are known to hold gold, to start with, have the highest probability of giving you gold and will eventually turn out, or pan out – pun intended, into something useful.
That’ll give you a feel for where you’re going. Now let me get back to the screen. So, so if you’re working one of these areas and you start to find some gold, you want to make sure that you don’t get lost and just focus there. Because it might be that that’s just one of many areas and there’s a higher, stronger probability of finding golden and another section.
That’s why you methodically plot this out. And I go over that. Some of the material that we have for training, it’s too detailed to go into in a show like this right now.
The idea would be, hey, how do I do that? And how do I find that information so that I know what my prospect is going to yield?
So one, I don’t waste my time if I’m doing recreation or professional. Two I don’t waste money or gasoline or anything else or trips or you know, vacation time, you name it, it really doesn’t matter because it all comes down to time and money, and fun.
It’s not much fun to dig a hole after hole after hole and I’d find anything. So the idea is how can I find gold?
Spend more time where the gold was found before,
spend more time learning how to methodically prospect.
That’s what I’m here for. It help you learn that process so that you don’t go in with kind of a wild unstructured way of just going and wildly looking for gold.
Some say “gold is where you find it.” That kind of strategy is wrong. You want to basically go in with an idea that I think I know where the gold is going to be and let’s change that goal. This is where you find it to “Gold is where I found it.”
So that’s the principle I wanted to teach tonight. And that is where can I find gold? Start with the end in mind. Build yourself a map. Make sure you understand what you’re looking for. Get into the business of looking for the gold and finding it.
So that’s what Prospector Jess has to say tonight.
Prospector Jess, over and out. Good prospecting.
See Ya tomorrow.
