After you have found gold with your detector, placered the wash to the best of your ability and are convinced that there are no more nuggets in a wash, it’s time to go look for a new place right? That’s just what a lot of guys do. They move from one area or wash to the next, picking up as many nuggets as they can with their Minelabs and moving on to the next patch, ever in search of new nugget gold. There is nothing wrong with this approach per se. After all, we all love to find gold nuggets and one of the most enjoyable ways to do so is by recovering the big pieces quickly with metal detectors. Still, it bothers me to think how few actually take the time to drywash the areas where they find nuggets.

We already know that if your doing it right, your doing a fair amount of digging to get all the nuggets. Heck, that’s half the work done already. Why not  start throwing that dug up dirt into a drywasher to see what comes of it. It’s almost certain that in the majority of cases there is more fine gold by weight in a wash than there is nugget gold. A lot of detectorists are leaving pounds of fine gold behind in the washes that they detect (not to mention gold nuggets). Testing and sampling for fine placer gold is the key.

Normally, I’ll carry a pan into a spot at least once to test the bedrock for fine gold. If there is water nearby then that is great for testing but if not, I’ll usually just use dry panning and then when I have a pan full of material winnowed down to a small amount, I’ll just use my water bottle to take a look at the concentrates and check for gold dust. This panning is just a nice precursor to heavier equipment. If enough fine gold is found in the pan, a trip in with the dry washer or mini highbanker is in order. In some cases, finding the fine gold streak may even be the key to finding more nuggets. A lot of detectorists stick with the wash and either spend little time on the hills or not enough time to sniff out a pocket where all that gold which ends up in the wash comes from. The hunter goes to a spot, finds nuggets in the wash, checks the upper banks and cleans it out as best as possible. Checking the hillsides, they quickly become frustrated and leave for greener pastures leaving behind the fine gold AND the nugget patch. Then you come along, unaware of the previous activity and either because you have a different coil, a different metal detector or a different mindset you get a couple of nuggets that the previous guys missed. Then suddenly, there is nothing. Well, check for fine gold. If you find some, follow it upstream. Watch how coarse the gold is. If it’s getting more copious or more coarse or both, you are headed in the right direction. If it runs out, back up and start up the sides. Tiny rivulets and guts on the side of a wash that is producing a lot of coarse fine gold will be a good place to check. Perhaps you’ll find the hillside nugget patch of your predecessors, or maybe you’ll even find the one they left behind.

Whatever your attitude toward fine gold vs. gold nuggets, it’s worth it to take along a gold pan and just see what you might be missing by just sticking with the metal detector.