How to Metal Detect for Gold

Make a trip down to your local Bureau of Land Management or Forest Service headquarters. Purchase copies of maps on the river you are interested in gold detecting. BLM and Forest Service maps will show open mineral collecting areas, active mining claims, private property lines and abandoned gold mines.

Use your metal detector to check abandoned mine rock piles. Gold ore was hand-sorted by old-time miners. Gold often was missed by using this hand-sorting method, so run your detector over these piles to find missed nuggets or rich pieces of gold ore. Check all trails leading into and out of the abandoned gold mine with your metal detector. Gold ore was packed out, and sometimes ore fell out of wagons or off of pack animals near the trails.

Check gold-bearing rivers in the summer when the water level is low. Free gold--or placer gold--deposits are replenished yearly on river banks from spring floods. Detect the inside bends of the river. Gold naturally piles up on these inside bends because of the way the river current deposits material before it flows away from the bank.

Look for cracks in the bedrock or quartz veins that cross-cut the river. The cross-cut bedrock cracks use gravity to act as a natural trap for bigger pieces of gold. A cross-cut of a quartz vein should always be metal detected, as it may be one of the main sources supplying the river with gold.