Some of the best prospecting ground isn't pristine wilderness — it's the old diggings, abandoned shafts, and crumbling stone walls left behind by miners a century ago. In this episode of Gold Mining Tips, Andrew teaches you how to read old workings and find the gold the old-timers missed. You'll learn what different types of historic diggings reveal — alluvial workings, surfacing, shafts, adits, open cuts, water races, and stamp mills — and how to interpret the mullock heaps, tailings, and vegetation that surround them.

There's a moment every prospector remembers forever: the first glint of gold in the pan. In this episode of Gold Mining Tips, Andrew walks you through what to do when you find your first piece of gold. You'll learn how to secure the find without losing it, how to document the moment with photos, notes, and GPS, and the common mistakes to avoid — like biting the gold or scrubbing it clean.

Where can you actually go to find gold without breaking the law or breaking the bank? In this episode of Gold Mining Tips, Andrew tours the best public lands across the United States where you can legally prospect for free. From California's Auburn State Recreation Area and Oregon's four designated panning sites to Arizona's Lynx Creek, Alaska's Petersville Recreational Mining Area, and Colorado's Arapahoe Bar, you'll learn exactly where to go and what rules apply.

Gold doesn't sit randomly in the ground — it follows the breaks. In this episode of Gold Mining Tips, Andrew explains structural geology in plain language, showing how faults, folds, shear zones, and rock contacts control where gold mineralisation happens. You'll learn why gold-bearing fluids need broken rock to travel through, why some faults are loaded with gold while others are barren, and how the "sweet spots" form where structures bend, intersect, or pass through reactive rock types.

You've found the gold, panned it, cleaned it, and filled a vial. Now what? In this episode of Gold Mining Tips, Andrew tackles the practical question every prospector eventually faces: how do you sell your gold without getting ripped off? You'll learn how to determine purity, weight, and form, why you'll never get the spot price for raw placer gold, and how the "melt value" calculation works. Andrew compares the different types of buyers — refineries, jewellers, pawn shops, dealers, online platforms, and specimen collectors — and shares his "three-quote rule" for getting a fair price.

You've found gold — real, visible gold. But is it just a nice patch, or a deposit worth staking a claim over? In this episode of Gold Mining Tips, Jack Turner walks you through the process of evaluating your finds before you commit to a mining claim. You'll learn how to calculate grade from your pan samples, why the "nugget effect" makes single samples unreliable, and how to estimate volume for both placer and hard rock deposits.

Every placer deposit came from somewhere — a vein, a reef, the mother lode. In this episode of Gold Mining Tips, Andrew takes you beyond the creek and teaches the fundamentals of small-scale quartz reef prospecting. You'll learn what a quartz reef actually is and why it's the source of all that placer gold, where to find reefs using geological clues like faults, shear zones, and contacts, and how to recognise a gold-bearing reef by its quartz texture, iron staining, and sulphide minerals.

So you've found gold worth keeping. Now what? In this episode of Gold Mining Tips, Andrew walks you through the process of staking a mining claim — from the moment of discovery to legal ownership. You'll learn when it's worth staking, the difference between placer and lode claims, and the step-by-step staking process from marking boundaries to filing paperwork.

What if you could scout thousands of square kilometres of rugged wilderness from your kitchen table — seeing through trees, mapping hidden faults, and identifying the alteration halos that surround buried gold deposits? In this episode of Gold Mining Tips, Andrew reveals the power of remote sensing and GIS for gold prospecting. You'll learn how satellite imagery from Landsat, ASTER, and Sentinel-2 can map hydrothermal alteration minerals, how spectral analysis techniques like band ratioing and the Crosta method reveal invisible geological patterns, and how LiDAR can strip away vegetation to expose ancient mine workings and buried channels.

Why is gold where it is? The answer lies in geomorphology — the study of how landscapes form and change over millions of years. In this episode of Gold Mining Tips, Andrew takes you deep into the science of placer geology, explaining how gold moves through the landscape and where it concentrates. You'll learn the three main types of placer deposits — eluvial (gold that stays home), colluvial (gold on the move, slowly), and alluvial (gold in the rivers) — and how each one forms.