Sunday, August 19, 2012

Gold Prospecting - Hobbies

How popular is gold prospecting?

Gold prospecting as a hobby is getting bigger and bigger and as gold prices skyrocket and the economy tanks further, gold prospecting will only continue to grow.

Now let me roll back the clock a bit and start by saying that back in 94' I had just purchased a brand new Baja Bayrunner center console fishing boat and being into fishing I would always look for some shows on that particular sport and there wasn't much to be found. Now, you can go to the outdoor network or one of the other outdoor related channels on tv and find fishing shows all day long, and I think that as a growing hobby, gold prospecting can get to the point where there are at least more than just one show on tv.

TV networks starting to take a closer look at gold prospecting for entertainment.

Take a look at Gold Rush Alaska on the Discovery Channel, that was their highest rated show ever!! It beat out Deadliest Catch and all the rest of their line up, which kind of reinforces what Boomer and I have been saying for years and that is.. that the market is out there, and there are more and more folks joining the ranks for their shot at finding gold. Its fun, its good exercise, its camping, its enjoying the great outdoors, and if your lucky...well then... its also profitable, but if not, then at least you always have fun.

What is it like prospecting for gold out there in the middle of nowhere?

Picture this....your driving your 4x4 down a trail, 35 miles from the nearest paved road, you locate a nice clearing off the trail with plenty of area's to work your drywasher or metal detector, enough room to set up a couple of tents and have a nice fire so you pull over and in an hour or so, boom! You are all set up and ready to spend the next two or three days having fun, when the sun goes down you fire up the grill, throw on some big ol' fat steaks with some whole sliced tater's and some veg-all and your ready for a feast.

After dinner you pull out the radio, pop on your I-pod and enjoy some music, light the campfire, crack open some frostie's and then threaten all your buddies with the fact that you will be the one who finds a 1 ounce nugget this weekend...and come up with a game plan for tomorrowwhilst spinning some yarns of the past. If you haven't done this yet...you aren't living!!

Now lets just say for the next two days you don't find any gold, could you then call it a bad trip?? No way! Don't forget there's still fun in the hunt! Next time you will just have to find a better spot that's all, good thing is... you haven't seen another person or vehicle go by the entire weekend, just the peaceful serenity of the desert interspersed with the mechanical yet beautiful chug-chug of a drywasher or the audio threshold of your metal detector, it does NOT... get any better than that! Now you might not roll the way we do, and you don't have to, just to have fun, sometimes just being out there is fun enough.

So as the years go on and this hobby of gold prospecting grows, so will the information, new websites will pop up, older ones will get bigger and better, and maybe...just maybe, there will be a whole variety of gold prospecting shows on TV as well, but until then, there some great gold prospecting books as well as some good gold prospecting related online forums to keep us entertained as well as motivated in the off season. As a pal of mine and well known gold prospecting author named Jim Straight is quoted as saying "A detector sitting in a closet only findsdust"How true that really isstay well my friend





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