gold placers and dowsing
Lastleg,
I have recovered mostly fine gold from several spots I map dowsed for like 1/10-1 ounce per ton in central Indiana. I have 2 vials from a creek here at work, not a lot,less than a gram I spose but it sure is pretty yellow, recovered with my large highbanker and 2.5 inch dredge and lots of backbreaking work.Not rich yet, but hey , the gold was there in at least 3 cases where i had map dowsed the location from my desk at work ,200 miles away. In other spots, no gold, still scratchin my head on those as to why not? I did discover last month where I had field dowsed spots in 2 different creeks and gold started showing up as we dug into the gravel. The previous day we were mining in a bedrock creek with little gravel even tho the map dowsing indicated 100 + ounces there. Jeff and I seem to get the same approx results with our map dowsing so we check each other. But in that creekbed, it was a BUST, not a single speck of yellow showed up?
Next day, in the other creek, where I had not map dowsed, I walked up and down the creek with my copper L rods about 200 feet, until they crossed on both sides of the creek and over a loose gravel/sand deposit.We moved over there and started to pan.The lesson I learned is that there better be loads of black sand and iron minerals like red hematite showing up in your gold pan where your rods crossed.If so, you should find gold there too.If not, you probably will NOT find any yellow there. Digging deeper also helps,especially if you hit the black sands but no yellow.Dig deeper til yellow specks begin to show up, then deeper yet. Some gravel deposits can be many feet thick and my rods will respond to tiny pinpoint specks of gold whether I am thinking of gold nuggets or trying to block out thoughts of tiny gold.
I use plain old copper rods,about 1/8 inch diameter and will sometimes put a copper tube on the handle end to act as a bearing.When you use 2 of these rods together, they will sometimes both swing in parallel and you should follow the direction till they cross, preferably stay crossed as you keep walking along. If they cross and uncross right away, I usually ignore that spot.If they cross and stay crossed for several feet, I will walk 90 degrees and crisscross the spot and put down sticks to mark the boundaries/corners of the gold attraction area and start digging. I cannot yet tell how deep to dig or what size gold is there tho.
Now, some of my buddies seem to have this natural ability to home in on native gold deposits on their own and are big dowsing skeptics.I just don't seem to have that nose for gold myself so I need a crutch. Any tool that will aid in the search for the yellow stuff, whether it is 100% reliable or 30% is just that ,a tool, and I will use it. I do figger my results are maybe 40% accurate on average so far as I can tell. I don't know of any other method to use to look for AU deposits on a shoestring budget from home at locations hundreds or thuosands of miles away from me other than map dowsing. I learnt long ago, NOT to force a dowsing location onto your pendulum.Just go with an open mind and if it swings for gold, then ask gold concentrations, total max amount in the deposit, etc. I am finding out I can get better results with aerial photos vs topo maps and the smaller the scale of the map, the better.
My buddies do a LOT of sampling too, and I am doing that now as well as field dowsing. Where the yellow colors start to show up, we tend to focus our efforts there with the rods and panning. If colors in most every pan, we get a dredge or sluice in there.
My gold vials are here at work and my camera at home, not sure if I can take a decent picture to post here later, but will try.
Ps, I was in Arizona this year and saw several gold ore displays. Only a very few of the specimaens contained quartz and gold.Out of over 3 dozen sample ores, I never would have considered most of them to be gold bearing myself. Gold is NOT always yellow when you see the host rock in the field. It may be in that rock in microscopic particles at the dowsing rods will be attracted to but without doing achemical assay on the suspect rock, you would just tosss it aside and and cuss at your rods. I a had a piece of crystalline galena ore assayed and it came back with 1/8 ounce per ton of gold mixed in with the lead. I was shocked when I saw that.
Always learning, need to keep experimenting, wish I knew somebody with lots of native gold/gold ores to experiment with so I could learn more about why the rods react or don't react and the relationships between gold and iron and black sands.
Sorry for my rambling but you got me going...
-Tom
Where would YOU hide gold on your property? 
Then just swing your detector there or move something and see. The point is to take action and look. even if one never finds anything, I've noticed that this hobby takes my mind off other things for awhile if you know what I mean! 
: using a probe on any and all signals, dig all, and recheck holes.
