MY PASSION FOR MINING

Over the years I’ve had incredible opportunities to share with the world my passion for Prospecting and Mining. From Panning to Underground Mining around the world I have had and still today have a great life, out there.

I started field training folks in the early 90’s when I had a prospecting and mining store when I realized that no matter what a demo of how this works would never compare to hands on in the dirt training in the real places where gold is found.

For years I trained my customers and at every turn listened to what they felt were their challenges and worked to address these for everyone. I built training guides for specific pieces of equipment that I would check out to them and when the bookwork was done, we headed into the field.

To this day my greatest joy is not just finding my own gold, it is the look on the faces of those that I helped guide them to their first gold.

In 2005 the opportunity that changed my training life was placed firmly in my path when I sold a gold pan and the most basic book on gold to a man that had never been “out there” in his life.

I treated him as I did every customer and had him season his new pan in the seasoning tub while sharing with him how gold acted, the mystique of gold and my passion for the search. Before he left, he knew how to pan and where to look as he headed out to the local gold panning area.

The next time I saw him he showed me his gold and changed my life. He was a guy that knew a guy that knew a producer for a Travel Channel production company.

The rest is what I will say is history with a bright future!

The next thing I knew, I had a production company following a handful of new detecting students and I around for an extended segment of “Best Places in America to Find”. The cameras followed us throughout the day as I worked with different students on how to get the best out of their detectors.

While the production crew was apparently bored, they were there for every piece of buckshot, nail, cunks of foil and gold nuggets dug. At the end of the day, one of the cameramen walked up and thanked for the best day of shooting he had experienced in years. He shared that every target began to create an excitement that he could not exactly describe but when he got the first nugget of the day on film, from the first signal of the detector to my student’s nugget shakes on finding his first gold, he understood why we prospect. I talk to him every now and then and he sends me photos of the gold he finds from around the world. When he is not filming, he’s prospecting.

Realizing the power of and the opportunity to use video as a training outlet I delved into working to create videos that helped people better understand what they were doing over why. Working for Minelab we created a number of short videos to help new and seasoned detector owners alike.

When moving to the GPAA I had not thought about the opportunities that laid in front of us to use not only video but Television to forward the passion of prospecting.

As the host of Gold Trails, the GPAA brought prospecting to the masses. But ultimately the cost of airtime and the simple fact that I wanted to train and entertain over what the networks wanted which was episodes surrounded by despair and infighting won out.

With the ever-changing landscape of TV moving from the living room to the cell phone, YouTube and other Online media seems the greatest venue for getting out my and others passion for prospecting. Years ago, and yes, even before the early days of today’s internet, there was a service called Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and I embraced this as way to share my passion and mission for prospecting.

If you do not know what any of what I just typed is about, look it up. I am not going into detail because it makes me feel really, really old.

The world changes and I have always accepted and welcomed positive change. As BBS gave way to the internet and higher speed access, the landscape of bringing a message to those wanting to hear or see information on most any subject has become no more than a few mouse clicks away.

With Podcasting becoming a mainstay for millions seeking information because of Podcasting’s ease of access and the delivery of information it made perfect sense to me to adopt this next generation of communications.

Voice up Podcasting has opened doors to allow you to listen in at any time, virtually anywhere. The key to Podcasting for me, is to be able for my guest and I to paint the topics landscape in a way that you can visualize the conversation. In the cases that there is more needed than the mind’s eye, there are Vlogs.

As writer I have been told for years by my readers that they truly enjoy reading my articles and stories mainly for the fact that my writing style is such in that I in every sentence try to have my readers be a part of the story and not just a reader of.\nI will do the same with the On the Gold Podcast, with every topic my guest and I will strive to have you as a part of the episode over being a bystander. There is a great difference in talking to someone over talking at them, OTG is a conversation not a lecture.

I have always believed that I cannot keep what I am not willing to give away and by embracing the opportunities of video with Gold Trail and voice with On the Gold, I invite you to Join me as we share with you the real passion of what it is like to be, “Out There”.