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The Colorado gold rush A.K.A the Pikes Peak gold rush was one of the largest ones in US history. Tens of thousands of miners flooded the area looking for quick money. This massive immigration led to the creation of many cities and the state of Colorado, which was a part of Kansas and Nebraska.
Many of the founded cities during the gold rush became ghost towns but some of them remained like Denver. This is due to many reasons. The quantity of the easy-to-reach gold decreased drastically. Moreover, gold was discovered in California.
But this is not the end of the story. 26 years after the end of the gold rush, Tom’s baby was found. It is the largest nugget found in Colorado so far. You can always find gold. It’s there waiting for you. What you need to do is upgrade your tools and look for other ways to find it. One of the tools that proved to be reliable for gold prospecting is a metal detector.
There is an overwhelming number of them on the market. An ideal gold detecting machine has to have certain features to perform well. Entry-level machines are not designed for this.
The machine needs to be super sensitive in order to detect the tiniest nuggets. You don’t want to miss any of them because gold can be sold for a lot of money. This means that the metal detector has to operate in high frequencies. The frequencies of the devices available on the market are between 18 kHz and 71 kHz.
In addition to that, An ideal gold detector should have an adjustable ground balance, whether manually or automatically. In many cases, nuggets are found in areas containing a lot of other minerals. These minerals interfere with the machine causing it to emit false signals. The device will go haywire and it will become unusable. This is when ground balance comes in handy. It allows the metal detector to forget about these signals and focus only on those coming from gold.
Because entry-level detectors operate in low frequencies (usually 8 kHz) and the ground balance is not adjustable, they cannot be used for gold prospecting.
If you are using a drill you need different drill bits for each material and hole size. The same applies to a metal detector. You need different search coils to get the most of your device. A coil is the closest part of the detector to the ground. They are composed of an emitter which emits an electromagnetic field and a receiver which detects electromagnetic fields indicating the presence of buried metals.
Like drill bits, search coils come in different shapes and sizes. Each one of them is suitable for a certain situation. For example, larger coils can go deeper but they are less sensitive to small nuggets. Small coils can be used in tight spots like under rocks; however, their depth range is limited.
The two most common shapes of search coils are the concentric and the DD. In the first configuration, the transmitter and the receiver share the same center, this is better for pinpointing the target. On the second, they are overlapped and it can separate targets better than the concentric coils. To make sure you don’t leave any nuggets behind, scan the same spot over and over using a different type of search coils.
The good old panning is a great method for nugget hunting. Pans are so cheap compared to metal detectors. And they work just fine. But you need water. That’s why you have to stay near streams. With a metal detector, you can hunt dry places away from any water sources.
The second advantage is that these devices can detect gold hidden inside rocks. You can find gold in tailings piles left by gold mining dredges, drywasher, and mines.