January 21, 2010

Welcome to Ruby's!

It's hard enough to find the perfect topic to kick off my new blog . . . my first blog. But it's been raining now for almost 24 hours straight. Being a desert rat, the world just doesn't seem to work quite right without a little sun. But I'm gonna wander through here anyway.

I'm going to introduce you to a few nuggets in the Ripple Library. Since the rain is pouring and the normally dry washes are flooding with water, I can only imagine all that placer gold being moved around and newly exposed. So I'll drop a little info about Arizona placers on you.

Click the Nugget to download the document.

"Gold Placers and Placering in Arizona" by Eldred D. Wilson, 1961

This handy little booklet (Bulletin no. 168 from the Arizona Bureau of Mines) has a brief discussion of each of the major gold placer locations in the state. Fifty years may have gone by, but the gold we find today is what the last guy left behind. Always good to know where they were looking.

"Gold Placers of Arizona" by Frank G. McClure, 1915

This takes us all they way back to 1915. An even smaller booklet (Bulletin No. 10 from the Arizona Bureau of Mines) that covers a very large subject matter. But this provides some good details of the same general areas and what was going on there in the early years.

Gold placers can be found throughout southern Arizona. These documents tend to focus only on the highly productive areas, or areas that at one time were thought to have great potential. Keep in mind that smaller placer areas exist in the state and can be quite rewarding to the prospector.