Prospecting tip, How to find gold in old gully's, testing with a pan.

How to find gold prospecting in old, dug out gullies and washes.
A dry gully will concentrate gold just like a creek, a flood every few years works out to be a lot of water over 150 years! The Goldfields of Australia are full of these places, most of them still have good gold to be found! In this video I show you how I prospect and test this sort of ground and find a few specks of gold.
I'll be back with a sluice/highbanker and run a heap of of this clay gravel though and see how we go. If you are digging like this please make sure you backfill your holes and make good the land afterwards to help keep our hobby/profession going.
Thank you to my Son Oliver (11) for helping film the first parts of this clip ;-)

[@mohammednovalija]

So I dig in the gully looking thing and it comes up as topsoil with scrubworms in it.
So do I keep digging deeper until I hit gravel ? How deep should I dig to reach the gravel before I quit ?
And if I hit some gravel within a shovel head or two , how deep a layer of the gravel should I go for putting in my bucket ?

[@billingmetals]

Basically dig until you hit gravel or bedrock/hard clay, test that gravel or the stuff scraped off the bottom and if no gold hit another spot in the gully until you do. It is worth sampling a bit from each different depth, sometimes the best gold is not right on the bottom in old, worked ground like this.

[@mohammednovalija]

@@billingmetals I'll give it a shot either before or after the annual mosquito plague begins.
I have tried the walls of gullies with little success.

[@billingmetals]

@@mohammednovalija The mosquitos have started here! Awful things.
It can vary a bit from gully to gully but it is basically a new lead/deposit forming as the ground settles back over a century and a half. Good luck with it, when you hit a good patch there can be a lot of good ground to work.

[@mohammednovalija]

@@billingmetals Thank You for replies - I like the thought that detector people may well have missed nuggets due to the depth

[@billingmetals]

@@mohammednovalija No trouble at all. Yes there are plenty of nuggets too deep for any detector to reach, more that there are shallower ones I'd feel safe to say.

[@yilinliu3431]

Do I need a licence for this😅

[@billingmetals]

Not in Victoria, all you need is a miners right as long as you are only using hand tools to dig.

[@kenweis7913]

Man times is lean

[@billingmetals]

Ha ha, yeah it's not rich but sluicing it would be well worth it, we have found small nuggets in there detecting so it will produce some bigger bits.