Getting Started Gold Prospecting, inspirational story about Arizona. [S7-E24
Channel: Nugget Heads
Date: 24/06/2019

Getting Started Gold Prospecting, inspirational story about Arizona gold prospecting. A Novice prospector starts off his journey with a used ten cent pie tin from a thrift shop and earns his way to the detector he wants through consistent hard work, patience, and persistence.

Hey friends and internet, want to share an inspirational story with you about a friend of mine. And it's really kind of cool, because he started prospecting with very little money, and very little equipment, and he paid his way through it. And so it's something really cool that anybody can do. You can do it too. So let's jump right in. So a little bit of backdrop about myself. I started prospecting in the mid-1980s, it wasn't the digital age back then. We didn't have internet and cell phones and forums and YouTube and Facebook and all of that good stuff. So it was a completely different world when you're getting started back then. So fast forward to the two thousands. Prospecting forums existed since the 1990s in one medium or another. But after about 2000 they really started to take off, and there's some really popular ones.

There's been some that have died out over the years. But this story starts with a forum. And one of the forums back then had an outing, and some of the forums still do these outings. I know Bill at Nugget Shooter does outings I think twice a year, and that's really cool to be able to bring people together. Same thing, exact same concept. The forum of the time, someone came on there and said, "Hey, I want to do an outing." And a lot of people got together during this outing, and it was people from all different prospecting skill levels, from absolute novices and beginners, to people who've been doing it for quite a long time. So I went to this outing with a good friend of mine, Loslo, who's also a veteran prospector. And when we were up there, we met this other guy, and he was just getting started. He was very, very new to prospecting. He didn't have a lot of money. So he hung out with us for the day. He wanted to check out what the detectors were doing, and so he figured out that he pretty much wanted a detector, but the lack of money, it forced him to start somewhere else. And he started with a 10 cent pie tin from a thrift shop. And so he took that 10 cent pie tin, and he started panning gold up at Lynx. It took him about two weeks to get enough gold to buy an actual gold pan. And he either took the gold into the prospecting shop up there and traded it in, or he sold it to him or something. But anyway, there was an exchange, gold for actual gold pan. And we liked this guy a lot, and wanted to help him get started. So every now and then he'd come on a prospecting adventure with us when he could. We'd loan him a detector. And so he was able to get a little taste of detecting himself, and he knew he really liked it. So it took him about two years of going panning at Lynx all the time, and coming detecting with us now and then, borrowing detectors to find enough gold to actually buy one himself. And he ended up buying a Minelab, SD2100. Minelabs makes some of the best gold prospecting detectors out there. Just a great, and I highly recommend MineLab detectors. So he bought this SD, and this was probably around 2005, 2006, and it was used and it came with some coils. So he had went from having nothing, asking questions to a pie tin to a gold pan to borrowing equipment when he could, just to learn all he could, making friends, and just working his way up, saving the gold and buying the SD. So that was really cool. It took him about another year and a half to really get to know the detector, and become proficient with it to where he was super confident in it, and he was able to find gold consistently. But he did it. And you can do it too. So if you're sitting there and you're looking at a price of detectors and you're going like, "Hey, I don't know if I can ever afford a detector. I'm just getting started. I don't have anything. I don't have any money, really." My friend, and he's always inspired me, hope he inspires you too. He started with a 10 cent used pie tin from a thrift store, and made his way up to a detector. And that is really cool. Hard work, determination, persistence and patience. They always pay off, and you can do it too. Take advantage of the resources available to you. Forums, Facebook groups, everything in the digital age is at your fingertips. Outings. Kudos to Bill at Nugget Shooter for still doing outings. I mean that's just super cool. I think Rob Allison still does them on Nugget Hunting too. I don't know. I don't keep up with what everybody's doing. But Bill and Rob are both great guys and they have great forums. So use the resources available to you like my friend did. Ask questions, work hard, get your 10 cent pie tin, whatever that is for you, and you can make it happen. So anyway, I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope it inspired you.