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Bad Weather = Good Gold Rod Fitzhugh One of our favorite times of the year is when the monsoons or heavy rains come. And for more than one reason, in the past few years the drought has been bad. We adapt to it. We are Arizonans.
One of the big gifts rainy weather brings is a renewal of gold in washes, mostly flakes but sometimes a lot of them. You even get the occasional nugget too. The rains also send mass amounts of water and material through the big metal and plastic drain pipes that are all over the desert. These are some of the best sluices made. All you have to do is clean a few out, find the ones that have gold, mark the locations and return after each rain and get the gold! The rains also move material of flats and hillsides, often many inches. If you are swinging a detector this means in the area you hit and cleaned out last summer because your detector only goes so deep you now have a few inches off the top which means you are now down a few more inches than you were last summer. Which may mean more nuggets. As you journey in your travels and prospecting areas you find stretches of bedrock. Bedrock often contains crack and crevices that gold drops into when washed through the creek. One of my favorite things that I have done is catalog a lot of these bedrock stretches and return after the rains and collect the gold out of these cracks and crevices. It has taken us years to make a nice catalog of areas. And after the rains stop and the ground dries you can usually find a lot of gold in the benches near these areas. Personally I use many recovery techniques including: detecting, drywashing ( when dry ), panning and a few custom ideas I have come up with. If you are able to locate good stretches of bedrock and pipe locations one good thing to do is trace the gold back. Sometimes this is not possible, other times it is. What I am referring to is keep working the gold upstream until it begins to thin out or concentrate. If it concentrates you are into a paystreak. If it thins, make 90 degree turns and see if you get back into the gold. If you do follow it. Some paystreaks have been so dispersed over the years that the gold is just strewn through the washes and the concentrations have been spread out.
You can have a look at our Febuary flood stories and pictures at these urls: http://www.arizonagoldprospectors.com/floodgold.htm and http://www.arizonagoldprospectors.com/floodgold2.htm Just remember to be safe in bad weather. Flash floods come quick! Best of luck...Rod Fitzhugh Arizona Gold Prospectors www.arizonagoldprospectors.com
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