Most small-scale miners want to know how they can set up a system much more cheaply. The difficulty is in the balance of putting together a decent small-scale system at a reasonable cost.

I have figured out over the years that the winning combination is hard work, persistence, knowledge, and a little luck. This leads me to describe one of my best finds ever, a “honey hole” of placer gold, if you will.

It is not necessary to have a PhD in geology, but you need to know the basics, so that’s what I am going to try to dig into here—the understandable basics of these gigantic gold deposits.

In last month’s issue we covered the initial discovery of gold, the subsequent gold rush that occurred around Nome, some of the geology of the area and past production. We’ll conclude the article in this issue with a further examination of the geology and deposit types, discuss the resources...