Sweeping Gold.

  Many times I have seen prospectors using metal detectors on dry stream beds and exposed bedrock, sweeping the coil back and forth waiting to hear the faint sound of a piece of gold.

  Every so often they will stop and sample a spot that made a sound. Sometimes they will find a piece of gold large enough to be seen and pick it out of the surrounding gravel. Most of the time it’s only a old piece of lead, bottle cap, nail or some other field trash.

  Like others, I was under the impression that after one of those advanced gold finding tools searched an area, all of the gold had been found.

  One day while poking around a claim in Arizona, I saw an old prospector sweeping the desert floor, not with a metal detector but, with a standard kitchen broom.

  That old prospector was standing in a spot that I knew had been gone over by every metal detector that had ever been at the claim.

  Could it be that in an area that had been picked over so completely, there was something left? Curious, I walked over to the old prospector and asked if he was having any luck? He looked up and said, I don’t know, lets find out.

  He dumped the dustpan in to his gold pan and started to wash out his gravels. It didn’t take long for the first pieces of gold to show themselves.

  I was shocked to see how much gold was in that one dustpan full of gravel.

  He saw the puzzled look on my face and offered me this prospecting tip.

  Follow the metal detectors and when they find a piece of gold large enough for them to bother picking up and when they move on, go there and remove all of the loose rocks and sweep the area clean. There's a lot of pieces of gold too small for the metal detectors to sound off on and sometimes they miss some of the larger nuggets they can’t find easily. They get tired of looking and write them off as hot rocks or trash, leaving them for me to find with my broom.

  From that day on, I have always carried a broom and dustpan with my prospecting tools.

Author: Prospector Jim.

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