With rock hunting season in full swing in the Northern country, I’ve been getting a LOT of emails about jewelry making.   Whether you are a beginner or a seasoned jewelry crafter, you don’t want to miss this opportunity to get all those tools you’ve been asking about on sale. The sale is over on the 23rd, so act fast. Please do send us a picture of your finished work, though – we sure like to see them!

Tags: crafts, gemstones, jewelry making supplies, jewelry making tools, lapidary supply, rock and gem hunters, rockhound supplies

Because gold hunting is taking on interest for so many recently, I’ve been posting some information here on the Gazette for avid new gold enthusiasts. It suddenly occurred to me, though, that I may have put the horse before the cart a little bit in some of my articles. I’m going to correct that now and let you in on exactly where the gold hunt really starts – and where it starts…is on paper.

Serious amounts of gold have been found in about 3 out of every 5 states in the US. While there is still untold amounts of gold to be found it’s not as easy as it was in the 1800’s to find open land to prospect. You can jump right in and start fishing through streams for a cache, but it can also be a risky and disappointing way to go about any serious prospecting. There are a few things to consider before loading up the mule and heading off to the mountains that will greatly increase your odds of success – and decrease your odds of ending up in court.

Just because a mine or claim is no longer worked does not mean that the gold is gone. That particular property might or might not be still be off limits to hunters. Public lands are not always free for all gold prospecting areas, either. Some public land contains claims and other places are off limits to hunting at all. Some areas are restricted hunting, meaning you can use a pan, but not a dredge, sluice, or other equipment. If you are thinking that you can just slip into off-limits areas and slip out without notice, you are taking one healthy risk to your wallet or freedom. By getting some research under your belt before diving into the creeks with your prospecting gear, you can avoid not only fines, arrests, or being shot for claim jumping, you can also get a pretty good idea where your best bet is to find a good productive placer. The search for records can be time consuming, but it is a “must” do for anyone serious about gold prospecting.

While you will want to know the ownership status of the land you wish to hunt, it’s not going to do you much good to hunt if there isn’t a decent amount of gold to be found in the area. You may have heard that gold can be found just about anywhere, but a few flakes dropped by glaciers aren’t really going to make a hunt worthwhile. You should start your search by studying mining records to find areas from which good amounts of gold have already been found. State Bureau of Mines offices will have information about mining in the areas you are researching. Remember, thousands of people already have searched the country for gold. You aren’t likely to make much headway in new and untouched territory. Your best bet is to stick with known territories. While some people believe that areas that contain mines are tapped out, this is rarely the case. Gold in these areas still works its way down into streams and forms placers downhill from the sources.

The BLM office in the area you are researching will have mining and mineralogy maps. Once you study these and are content with pursuing prospecting in an area, you will want to do another bit of study. The BLM also has maps containing land status plats that show the ownership of public lands. You will find there where you are free to prospect. You may also want to check for claims that have been abandoned.

Claims can become abandoned for many reasons. Some might be abandoned because the area had been worked until the claim quit producing. Others may just have never been fruitful in the first place. Others could be abandoned due to other difficulties that the owner encountered, such as inability to get to and from the claim, illness or death, and a myriad other reasons. If a claim is abandoned and the land is open to prospecting, you might be able to pick up the claim for a low price and continue work on it. If it has been a considerable amount of time since a claim has been worked, it may contain fresh gold which continues to wash down into placer areas over time.

Local assay offices are sometimes willing to provide information about their own records of gold assays from local area claims, although sometimes you will be charged for records searches. If the claim produced gold recently enough, someone in the office might just even remember if it produced well.

A bit of geological study about gold is always a good idea for those who are extremely serious about prospecting, too. What you learn may just help you identify “new” localities near the older, known ones.

While these studies can be time consuming, most areas have several months a year (in some places most of the year) which are not suitable for hunting in the field so these are excellent months to do your “indoor” prospecting.

Once you have the information you need about open land and available claims, you are then ready to go out into the field and try your luck in the 2010 Gold Rush.

For the latest in gold equipment to aid you in hunt Click Here

Tags: Geology, gold panning, Gold prospecting, rock and gem hunters, rockhounds

Sometimes it gets frustrating being webmaster. It’s a LOT of hard work to keep a site vital and valuable to its members and viewers. Many times the feedback and is next to nil from our side of the keyboard. Sometimes I wonder why I bother at all when I could just sit back and do my own research and continue becoming more informed on my own instead of spending endless days and nights doing the endless research, writing, creating, giving others a place to share, communicate, learn, and advertise their own related concerns.

Every now and then, however, a note arrives in my email box and let’s me know that my efforts are not in vain. Today I opened my email box to find this note:

Thank you for making it easy to use your site and all the info will keep me, the husband, and our 2 beautiful little ladies busy! We are so thankful for all the help you have given us. It was so easy to understand and so fun to learn all the history and search for all of these older not on the map places…it’s taught us more than to go get gold, but to learn our areas, our state history and how to really research what we are looking for. Links are great too!
– D’Anna

D’Anna – Thank YOU. It was awesome to hear that. You just picked a day that I really needed to hear it to write to us, too.

You see, RHS1 was becoming a vital resource for rockhounds. It took years to build and just after we really got into the swing of things with many contributors and members making friendships, sharing, having fun, and doing business here we were suddenly hit by a ruthless hacker, injected with some nasty virulent viruses, and generally had our whole php system wiped out…..for those that don’t know, that’s the system that allows us to build interactive programs such as our forums, photo gallery, and this gazette.

This all happened at a time we were losing our wonderful technician to real world concerns and health issues. It took major amounts of unpaid efforts and time to find another able and willing tech and to build this back to an interactive place again. Having to start all over with the slow process of building our community back, the frustrations sometimes become overwhelming. It’s very hard to be patient building the second time around.

All in all, an email like this one, a post in the forum, or a picture posted in the Gallery actually mean something to the staff here at RHS1. We enjoy our community and it makes all the time and effort worthwhile when we see others finding it a valuable and fun place to stop, learn, share, and make friends.

Your email just provided me with another month’s worth of patience for rebuilding our community, and we appreciate you, too, D’Anna. Thanks again. A further Thanks to all of our contributing members here at RHS1. After all – the bottom line is that RHS1 isn’t about us – it’s about YOU.

Tags: rock and gem hunters, rockhound forums, rockhounds, rockhoundstation1.com

Sure gold is “where you find it”. Anyone even thinking about taking up prospecting has heard that one. It’s probably the most frustrating answer any beginning prospector ever hears when asking where to look for gold. Where the heck exactly is “where you find it” located and why do people keep telling you that?

While that answer is a bit frustrating for the beginner there is a lot of truth in it. Gold can turn up in some pretty unusual places. Sometimes it has been sprinkled through areas by ancient glaciers or waterways. There are stories of people finding gold and thinking they had found a place to stake a claim, to discover later that they had only found the remnants of some unfortunate prospector’s lost cache. Trains and carts being wrecked while hauling gold to smelters have spilled loads of ore which might be found later in the streams downhill.

While you might run into bits of gold scattered by such events, you might also appreciate a word of where you might be more statistically inclined to make an actual strike of some good concentrations of “color”. It’s really not as mysterious as it has been made to sound.

When you get to a gold bearing region you must choose a spot to hunt. Your main concern is that you are not hunting on someone else’s property or claim. There are places you can still be shot for this, and some places where the claim owners take this right very seriously, so always make sure you know you are not “claim jumping” before you dig in.

The best place for the beginner to start is where you know that there are mines or claims uphill and upstream from your chosen location. Gold will wash downhill into a stream over time. If you can find a spot where a stream flowing downhill from known gold localities converges with the stream you are going to hunt, this is a terrific place to start.

Gold is heavy. It can be carried by a rapid current, but when the current slows down, the gold will drop to the creek bed. Start by hunting down stream from a converging creek or area of color uphill from you. Look for spots in the creek where fast moving water is impeded or slows down. The base of a small waterfall is always worth checking as are areas where the current is diverted by large rocks. Bends of the creek where water rushes in the middle but slows along the shore of the bend are another good area. Don’t be afraid to be creative. I know a man that swept a year’s living expense worth of gold from an old corrugated pipe that ran under a road where a creek passed through. The grooves of the pipe had served as a sluice to catch the grains and nuggets.

When panning, you will want to dig a bit rather than just scoop from the top dirt. You might find some traces of color just scooping the top of the creek bed, but because of its weight, gold will work it’s way down until it eventually hits something that prevents it from going any further. The smaller the grain or the more recently it has been dropped, the closer to the surface you might find it. The deeper you dig, the more you will find if you are searching a good area. Cracks and crevices in rock are also a great place to find grains of gold, but you may need special suction equipment to get it out. There are items you can buy very inexpensively that will help you do that.

Just as there are the right places to look for gold, there are also the right times of year. You will want to wait until late summer or early autumn which is when the streams are at their lowest and slowest. A good plan is to go look the creek over during it’s high season and take notes of the currents when the water is high. Returning later during the low season, you will already have an idea of good places to look for gold that has been spilled by the full spring currents.

Through practice you will soon become able to size up good spots on a creek to pan. When you take your cache and proudly show it off, if someone asks you where you got it, you can just smile and say “it was right where I found it”.

Don’t forget folks — You can find everything you need for a successful gold season at: Black Cat Mining

Tags: Gold, gold panning, Gold prospecting, gold prospecting tips, prospecting equipment, rock and gem hunters

The Snyder Pow-Wow in Calavares county, CA  was a real success this year, it seems from the large amount of vendors and visitors having fun there yesterday.  I was a bit wowed when I got there as I  hadn’t expected the event to be so large.  It took me around an hour of wandering around just to find Bob (RHS1 member, coldwatergold).  I won’t pretend I was in any hurry to get to his club’s tent after I got to the show, though.  What an interesting array of rocks and fossils, not to mention a few other things I had to walk through to get to there.  Bob’s tent, by the way, was the Calavares Rock and Gem Society tent.  That was a fun bunch of folks to talk to.

There were a few pretty spectacular rocks in that place this year.  I talked to many vendors who I hope we’ll see pictures from in the photo contest In June.  I saw a few specimens that are spectacularly vote worth at the very least.  It was also fun just standing around shooting the breeze with people who don’t give you the RCA dog head tilt when you say you’re “a rockhound”.

I saw the best piece of Graveryard plume I’ve ever seen there (and am really hoping to have that pic entered in the contest) and some of the nicest chunks of Virgin Valley black opal I’ve seen to date, too.

Thanks go out to Al who was at the Tuolumne Sunshine Mine display with owner, Gilbert Gonzalez.  If the soapstone I get after talking to Al about “what to do” in this neck of the woods is anywhere near as nice as some of the specimens he had, I’m going to have a lot of fun on the find and afterward, too.  Gilbert had a pretty spectacular display of gold there, too.  I enjoyed that one.

The most spectacular display of the day, for me,  was the tourmaline and sunstone display at the Spectrum Mine booth. The tourmalines were gorgeous, greens, pinks, watermelons, predominated.  One  pencil like and beautifully faceted raw crystal that went from green on one side to a watermelony pink was particularly striking.  The sunstones were plentiful,  with both cut and polished sunstones of the pink tones with copper inclusions.   I caught a good look of their items just as they were packing for the day.  When petite Jessica picked up that huge glass display with all those beautiful tourmalines in it and carried them to the back of her rig I held my breath a little bit.  If she’d dropped that case, I know it would have brought a few tears to my eyes – I’m sure she’d have completely melted down.

The best part of the show apart from the people I met though was while people were packing their wares for the day and I was walking to the gate to leave.  Okay some background is called for here.

A few years back in Idaho, I found this really neat little “rock” that sparkled like it had metal in it – I thought it was some different metal dusts cemented together from some sort of mining procedure or another.  It was a pretty piece and so I took it home and never really looked at it under a light with a loupe.

So when I saw something just like it at the show, I ducked under the tent the folks were trying to shut down to find out what that thing was.  Well it turned out to be corundum.  So I came home and got that rock  in the sun with a magnifier glass and it is phenomenal.  The crystals are a too thin for lapidary, but as a display piece, it is beautiful.   It was better “finding” it the second time than it was the first.  I can’t believe I had it all this time and never looked at it closer. The metal shine on the faces completely disappears at some angles and allows me to see the sheer beauty of that blue.  Next time I am in that area I can hope to find something a bit more phenomenal.  At least I’ll recognize it for what it is even if I do see some metalic sparkles in the light.

I took a few pictures at the show but won’t know what turned out and what didn’t for a few days.  It’s the first time I ever used that camera so I’m not sure how skilled my shooting was.  Whatever turns out will be on the photo gallery in a few days.  Maybe some more of my finds will, too as long as I have the camera accessible.  The corundum, I’m afraid is going to have to wait until I can get a worthy shot of it and to do that I might have to find someone who knows more about photographing minerals than I do.

Until next time

Life’s Short, Rock Hard.

Tags: California rock and gem shows, gemstones, Gold prospecting, lapidary rough, lapidary supply, rock and gem hunters, rockhound equipment, rockhound events

RHS1 member, Bob Young (coldwatergold) just emailed me the other day about a huge rockhound pow-wow going on next weekend in Calaveras County, so of course I had to stop by the Gazette and tell everyone about it.  I’ll be at the show around noon on Saturday to meet Bob and his rockhound friends.  If you are in the area I hope you stop by.  It sounds like it is going to be a lot of fun.   I’ll  have pics and some gab about the show in a few weeks, so if you don’t get to go,  you can come here and find out what it was that you missed.

Here’s the Info about the Pow-Wow if you are interested in dropping by and having some rockhound type fun, too.

36th Annual Snyders’ Valley Springs POW WOW

May 7-9, 2010

Tags: California rock shows, children's activities, gemstones, gold prospectors, lapidary rough, rock and gem hunters, rockhound equipment, rockhound events, rockhound supplies

Just a note about the upcoming Pow Wow Club event near the Saddle Mountain Washington area.  I’ve been there and the some of the petrified wood there is spectacular.   If you like Rockhound get togethers, this is one you don’t want to miss.  You can read more about it in the March Newsletter – which includes a download to help you find the event and/or contact the club:

http://www.rockhoundstation1.com/newsletter.html

Tags: petrified wood, rock and gem hunters, rockhound events, rockhound newsletter, Rockhounding Washington, rockhounds, Saddle Mt, Washington

Hi Everyone. 

I want to remind everyone to get their BEST pictures of their most awesome finds ready.   On  June 1st  we will start our CALENDAR PICTURE CONTEST.   The 13 pictures with the most votes will be featured in the 2011 Gem Hunter’s Showcase Calendar.  The Picture with the most votes will be featured on the cover.

Each picture will include a caption with the finder’s name, the region the stone was located, and any contact information – such as shop names and locations and/or websites that the winner would like to have included.  Free advertising and some high test bragging rights for those of you finding the most awesome gems and taking great photos.

Please do make sure that the pictures you send are of gems that YOU find.  RHS1 is not responsible for plagiarized  material. If you use someone else’s pictures or info and get caught doing so, it will be YOU that is responsible, not RHS1.   I’m pretty sure our rockhound community is above this kind of thing, but legally – I have to put up this statement, so here it is.

TO ENTER THE CONTEST
1. You must be a member of RHS1 to participate in this contest.  Registration is free – membership is always free. Make sure to put us in your email so your confirmation doesn’t go to your spam folder.  If you have difficulties registering,  just drop me a line and I will activate you myself.

2. Send your picture  to us via the “contact US” button by June 1st, 2010.  Include your username,  the name of the mineral specimen, and what region you found it in.    We will accept 2 pictures from each contestant.

Pictures will be posted on the Photo Gallery on June 1st  with instructions about how to vote.  Voting will continue until the last day of August 2010 – On September 1st  we will announce the winners.

HAVE A ROCK SHOW COMING UP IN 2011?  STAY TUNED FOR INFORMATION ABOUT HOW TO HAVE YOUR SHOW LISTED ON THE CALENDAR so nobody will forget to visit your show!

I’m looking forward to some spectacular pictures this year!

Tags: Gem Hunter's contest, gemstone picture contest, gemstones, rock and gem hunters, rockhound calendar, rockhound photo gallery, rockhounds, rockhoundstation1.com

Up for sale is an awesome rare collection of Yellow Cat Redwood from Utah. This material was used by Tiffany in the 30’s to make jewelry before the mine was closed. All funds raised by this sniper sale will be used to help with medical costs of a old rockhound who had a massive heart attack a few weeks back. He has loads of stuff and we are helping out with this sale. The sale starts at 8pm Eastern Standard Time this Sunday, simply log onto www.elegantcabs.com at 8pm and have at it .

Sunday Feb 28 at 8pm Eastern Standard TIme
AT: http://www.facebook.com/l/05455;www.elegantcabs.com
log onto the site now and preview what will be available

Tags: lapidary rough, lapidary supply, petrified wood, rock and gem hunters, rockhound calendar, rockhounds, Yellow Cat Redwood from Utah

If you are new to gold prospecting, here’s a head’s up for you. You have probably heard a lot of tips about how to prospect gold, but rarely have I seen anyone mention gold trapping, although I know many prospectors practice trapping.

During run-off season water is rushing too fast to do any panning. You can however set “traps” in areas you think might produce gold. By doing so you can save much time later in deciding where is and where isn’t a great place to pan. As any experienced prospector knows, just because a spot on a creek looks good to prospect doesn’t mean it is, and knowing which ones are productive ahead of panning season is a great help.

To set a trap you will still want to find areas in the waterways that current is slowing down enough to drop small particles of gold. Just under small waterfalls is a great place to put a trap. A sluice box is a good item to use for a trap under a small waterfall. As the water flows over the edge of the fall and into the sluice box, the gold which would have usually fallen onto the streambed and worked it’s way underneath will be caught at the bottom of your sluice box instead. Later you can just pan through your sluice box to see if it contains gold. If it does, you know where to pan for all the gold that has been dropped in that area before you got there to check things out.

If you see an area in a creek that a rapid current slows significantly enough to drop gold particles, you will want to place the trap right where the current begins to slow. a ribbed sluice will do the trick for many areas. You will want to put something at the front of the trap that will will slow the water hitting it and redirect the current around it. A sheet of metal or a rock will serve this purpose. Gold will hit the blocade and fall into the trap as the water is slowed. Later in the season as water levels fall and slow down you can pull that trap out of the water and check it for gold particles.

When panning season comes around you will only need to pull your traps to find which areas will be productive places to begin your panning or dredging. You get to spend your time panning the gold instead of searching for places that you might find gold if you pan. You should place at least three or four traps in varied locations. The more you place, the more likely you will be to find a productive location to begin prospecting later. Check your traps periodically and if you find they are not producing any gold, move them to a different location.

A last note about placing traps, though, is that you want to place them where others are not likely to run across them before you get back to them. Find spots that you can monitor with ease. Whenever possible, set the trap in a way it won’t be noticed by someone just walking by the trap. Your aim is not to help someone else locate the mother lode.

To find the best gold prospecting equipment at prices that won’t claim your whole cache – CLICK HERE.

Tags: gold panning, Gold prospecting, gold traps, rock and gem hunters, rockhound supplies, rockhounds