Winter time can be wild all along the northern area of Nevada, we drove to Utah in the middle of winter and stopping for fuel at Elko it felt like the skin of my face was being blasted off with the cold wind, if we lived in that area, I'd bury a quonset house under a whole lot of earth and sod. I've met people out on the desert in those areas that make enough out of finding gold to get by, there are many abandoned mining sites that still have a lot of gold, it wasn't enough to keep their operations going, but I've seen some very large nuggets taken from so called run out places, even places walked over thousands of times, simply because most people didn't have the patience do walk slowly and listen to their detectors. I've seen 1 to 26 ounce nuggets, the biggest I found was a 1/4 troy ounce. My wife couldn't take desert living but if I spent enough time out there, I'm sure I'd find enough gold to take care of everything. One guy I met out there found a 10 pound nugget, because he always had nuggets in his pocket is the reason I bought a Fisher Goldbug 2, the two times I was out on the desert using it I found at least 100 small nuggets each time and the longest time we spent on the desert was 6 weeks, that's the time I found the 1/4 ounce nugget. This is just my few pennies worth of info, others may not do so well as it actually took me about a week to tune myself into the detector to get to know little variations of tones that indicate a find and to also slow down my sweeps to overlap each sweep.
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