Gold Prospecting - Getting Started

OK, so you've decided you want to become a gold prospector. Where do you begin? You turn to the internet, of course! We found a pretty good site about gold prospecting in Arizona: www.arizonagoldprospectors.com. Even though it gave us some good information it didn't really answer our questions of what kind of equipment we would need, where to go and basically how to get started. A little more searching yielded a gold prospecting store right here in Mesa, A&B Prospecting. We went there and were given a great introduction to gold prospecting in general and one method of looking for gold, metal detecting, in particular. Steve Robertson at A&B was wonderful in sharing his time and knowledge with us. Steve has been gold prospecting for over 50 years and really knows his stuff! We ended up buying a Tesoro Lobo Super TRAQ metal detector and other basic prospecting equipment like a good digging tool, jeweler's loop and collection vials. The other basic requirement we learned was that we needed to join a prospecting club.

A very brief description of how gold mining claims work: someone finds a likely place that gold may exist and then spends some time looking for gold there (more on other gold mining techniques later.) Once they think they've got a winner it's time to register their claim. The BLM (Bureau of Land Management) controls access to mineral claims on public lands. You file your claim with them, pay a small fee of $25 initially and $125 per year maintenance fee and you've got your claim! Claims are generally 20 acres in size. You now have the exclusive right to prospect for gold on that land. Anyone else who tries to prospect there is a "claim jumper" and while it's not like the old days where people were shot for such illegal activities, violence has and does occur. Don't do it! As you might imagine most of the productive areas have long since been claimed and many of them are owned by prospecting clubs. There are many clubs, but Steve recommended one of the largest to us, the Roadrunner Prospector's Club. Once you join the RRPC (or any of the clubs) you get the right to work any of their claims. So we drove down to the RRPC's office in Phoenix the next day after buying our metal detector and joined the club. It's possible to prospect for gold without joining a club but you'll have to be willing to do a lot of searching in very inaccessible areas. Some people do and are successful but it's far easier to buy into a club and get access to claims that are proven to contain gold.