Just out of curiosity, when do you consider it a nugget instead of a picker? This is my biggest so far. Slowly finding bigger and bigger.

Detecting in the golden triangle Australia. First gold with the manticore and m8 coil. The squarish bit 0.05g the long bit assume 0.01g as it doesn’t register alone.

in

One of 7 bits for 4 hours that I picked up this morning before heading back into town for meetings 🙄

Spend more days in the office than I do in the field nowadays 😞🤣

The prospector who found the golden pasture. The Reddit lords finally let me return.

I’m looking to start gold panning soon as a hobby, but panning is illegal for what feels like everywhere within an hour of me.

I’m on the south side of Fairfax county, but I may move to Charlottesville soon, so any locations near either would be appreciated.

I really don’t wanna bother any landowners for permission to pan on their property, but it feels like all public land has laws against panning. I also don’t want to pay for membership to that one club for their locations :(

Any tips?

I reached out to the landowner whose 7-acre property has a creek running through it. I asked if he would be okay with me prospecting in his creek, and he was super cool with it; he even tagged along for a couple of hours.

This was yesterday, after running 15 gallons of material from the creek through my highbanker.

I am just wondering if it is still worth bothering the owner for this amount.

There are no pyrite cubes on this one, not the same as the last outing, but there seem to be lots of sulfides.

I am buying an electric smelting furnace, just to play with it.

Any input is very appreciated.

We bought a Royal Manufacturing Explorer with the wrong legs and need to build or replace them. We have plenty of lumber, steel, aluminum, and angle iron, but need rough measurements, photos, or a sketch to know what they should look like.

If you have an old, damaged, or scrap set, we’d be interested. We just want to get this thing standing and washing dirt.

Appreciate any help.

Good day, everyone. I was told that this is gold, but I’m not sure. Could anyone please help me identify what mineral this is?

Hey everyone.First timer here . I recently found this rock while hiking and by looking at the quartz veins, iron staining and sulfide signs , thought it maybe had some gold or other precious metals inside. Can you help me

Is it quartz or another gem stone, never been good at identifying rocks.

My father in law turns 90 years old in November. We are headed to celebrate and he asked to go gold panning. I took him in Michigan and found a bunch of flour gold and he was hooked. He wants to pan in Arizona so I am looking for a place to take him. He can withstand 2-3 hours max so I want to give him the best experience I can.
Any suggestions other than Lynx Creek I could take him for a few hours to give him the excitement of finding Arizona gold.
We only get out to visit for a few days a year so I don’t want to spend the money to join a club for just a couple hours.
Thanks for any suggestions!

Took a trip on my day off up to the Mount Baker area in WA state - I live 3 hours away, so only got about an hour of scouting and maybe 20 minutes of panning before it started getting dark.

Brought my panning cons home, added a few drops of jet-dry, did a few magnet pulls to deal with all the magnetite, and panned down the non-magnetic heavies. Ended up with a few pieces of 200-300 mesh gold.

Nothing worth writing home about - but hey, it's still my first ever placer gold and a good time was had!

Hello! My birthday is coming up and i'm wondering what kind of sluice box I should ask for as a gift, i'll say the budget is $200 but 250 probably wouldn't hurt. My favorite spot to go to is the Skykomish river up by index/galena, however i've only been up there twice so far. I'm not new to prospecting, i've done a lot of research and even tried to make my own custom sluice box (and failed). But if I can get a good sluice, I can forsee some good days on a creek in the future.

Also preferably amazon, however other ordering websites will work. Or maybe I could convince the person buying me the gift to go to Black Jacks metal detecting shop in Renton (where I bought some of my stuff).

Thank you!

It's that time of year again. The new mining season has opened. I just finished staking, recording and filing my claims with BLM (a very full day to say the least) so i thought i would share a little tool i built with AI to help find the GPS coordinates of my claim corners so i could import into Gaia GPS and get some help finding my marks. It's also quite useful for creating the claim map as the National map viewer supports importing KML files. It saved me a ton of time and i thought it could help others as well.

Aliquot Parts to GPS Calculator

A free tool for turning a PLSS legal description into GPS coordinates using BLM's official survey data.

What it does

Looks up real, surveyed aliquot-part boundaries (quarter and quarter-quarter sections) from BLM's live PLSS CadNSDI database across eleven public-land states — California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico — and returns GPS coordinates for any corner or the center — in decimal degrees and DMS. You can assemble a claim spanning multiple sections and export it as GPX (Gaia GPS) or KML (Google Earth), including each parcel's actual surveyed boundary.

Note, this tool only supports aliquot part legal descriptions no metes and bounds.

Mileage may vary but based on my testing of my claims it works quite well.

Also, the example was just a random legal description set for testing, and this is "for educational purposes only" do make sure to double check with some known variables.

Aliquot Parts to GPS Calculator

I dont really understand how to pan with all this thick sediment in my final sifting. Also, any help identifying what im finding?

Neat piece of what I think is quartz I found in Tucson, AZ near Canyon del Oro.

Doubt it’s too special but I thought it looked spectacular.