I had prospected for a week on a new claim I staked. The first clean up gave me two nice pickers. Just from a few buckets of gravel. The next several days yielded barren cleanups. Hardly even a color of flour. Had I only had those cleanups that came after, I would have thought the ground was poor and moved on to better streams and wrote it off of as a certifiably gold free stream. The fact my first cleanup gave me coarse gold, meant the opposite is in fact true. Had I not chose to dig where I did, and found what I found, I would have never known.
Before you give up on any stream, sample as much as possible. In my case, I was on the fringe of a past gold rush area. Also, the harder gold is to be found, the less likely anyone else will figure out there is gold there and want to go through the work of recovering it. I have found that while there are general guidelines to how gold deposits, each stream behaves differently. The ratio of boulders to gravel, the force of water at high and low water. The amount of clay if any is present. There are all kinds of variables affecting whether or not you find any gold where you are looking. Where you are looking in one stream may be good for that stream but on a different stream you may have to change how you look at things.
