Gold nugget hunting requires that you dig all targets and that means digging lots and lots of trash. Face it, miners were very messy and they have littered most placer areas with every type of metal imaginable. They were not worried by the fits it may give us metal detecting in 100 years. Some people start finding to many bits of lead or iron in an area and they move on, they are missing gold! I have personally found more than one nugget in places where someone else was digging. Did they tire of digging trash? or did they just not work the spot as well as they should have? Either way they left gold.

  I have learned over the years that the mood you are in directly affects whether or not you will find gold. On those days you go at it only half hearted and start passing up targets because your sure its just another bullet, you are leaving gold for the next feller that digs all targets. This little fact I learned the hard way several years back at the cost of a three quarter ounce nugget!! It was in a trashy area I had been avoiding even though we had found gold on the same hillside. I sent a fellow I had recently met to the area to try out his new detector and the rest is history.

  Shown is about 60 hours hunting's worth of trash and there are even a few nice old buttons, old cap and ball slugs, buckles, etc,found while hunting. Sometimes the "trash" can turn out to be a valuable artifact and anything interesting or strange should be kept for later identification. Then there are the coins, jewlry, and trinkets of all kinds lost by miners of years past. Then sometimes there is the chance that loud "must be trash" signal is a long lost miners stash. thats been true more than once. I wonder how many walked on by sure that loud signal was another tin can?

  Now we get to the hot rocks, or are they? when in gold country you are also will be dealing with hot rocks and most of what you read tells you to kick them aside. This is ok as long as you identify them first because what you are kicking aside may just be a meteorite. They are tough to identify if you are not an expert, so in most cases of a strange looking rock, keep it. there are places a person can get samples identified at no cost and some meteorites are worth much more than gold.

  Most gold detectors have a iron ID feature you can use to tell if your target "might " be iron. In most cases after you get to know your machine it can be 85% correct, what about the other 15%? This feature can be helpful in the identefing hot rocks and that is what I use it for the most. So my advice to all interested in nugget hunting with a metal detector, be patient that next bullet or bit of iron may just be a nugget.

Good hunting