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The following is a brief story describing how I came to create The Gold Prospector’s Logbook, how using it helps me, and how it could benefit you too if you’re a gold prospector/miner.
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During the years I was a full-time gold prospecting miner, I chased gold throughout several of our western gold-producing states. I panned, sluiced, sniped, dredged, dry-washed, metal detected, and once, in partnership with others, turned to hard rock mining.
Though I gave it my best shot, I never made the BIG strike that I dreamed of. Typically, pickings were mighty slim, keeping me tied to a shoestring budget. And with gold selling for a meager fraction of what it is today, it was usually a struggle to just squeak by.
Thankfully though, whenever it got so bad that it seemed certain I would be forced to return to punching a time clock, I would usually score a juicy little patch of nuggets or a choice specimen piece just in the nick of time to save my faltering ass. I credit those cliffhanger recoveries to a lot of hard work combined with a little bit of skill and, I’ll concede, a heaping dose of good luck.
And no matter whether I was living high or barely scraping by, my time spent prospecting in the bush ranks among the very best days of my life.
Today, I’m deep into my seventies, still physically fit and sound of mind (according to me). However, I am no longer able to get out prospecting as often as I would like (major bummer!). So nowadays I daydream a lot about my good ol’ prospecting days and occasionally crow and go on about ’em with whomever I can corral (it’s an old-timer’s privilege).
The shame and the frustration is that with the passage of time, my memories have faded. Many crucial dates, location names, GPS coordinates, events, and gold production histories have become cloaked in the misty fog of time and space. It happened to me; it happens to us all with the advance of time.
So, to remedy that, I came up with a simple solution that I named, “The Gold Prospector’s Logbook.” The logbook is a speedy, hassle-free tool for chronicling and preserving important day-to-day gold mining history and associated metrics. I use it and have found it to be well-suited for the job.
The first page allows the prospector to record his name, contact, and emergency contact information, and there are 60 Log and 60 Note pages (121 pages in all). One logbook will see the average recreational prospector through several seasons, while the professionals, who spend so much more time working in the field, will require replacements more often.
Each Log page contains simple prompts opposite checkboxes designed to allow the prospector to quickly and easily record the types of gold recovered, the quantities recovered, the location name and GPS coordinates for each discovery, as well as the date, weather condition, method of gold recovery, and total hours worked. And there’s space for recording the names of companions, partners, and crew members. Plus there are convenient checkboxes for recording whether or not, at day’s end, you camped on-site, procured lodging, or returned home.
Opposite each Log page is a Notes page with plenty of room for recording the day’s supplementary information. There’s also space on the notes pages for sketching or pasting a photo.
Record and preserve the significant events and metrics of your gold prospecting and mining adventures in your Gold Prospector’s Logbook.
