I just got the Desert Fox with the speed control and have been trying it out on some of my friends tailings.  This is the most amazing gold getter I have ever seen, we are getting gold so small I can bearly see it. I have tried other equipment to get gold this small, but nothing I have seen works as good as this Desert Fox. Thank You very much!! 

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Angus

The machine runs great!!  Tested it with the
sample sand/gold the came with it.  Can't wait to get
it up to gold country!
Mike

"ME AND "TWO-STORY"

by Angus Niccolls

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I was about 13 years old when I went on my first prospecting trip with my uncle, Angus MacDonald. He was six foot seven, couldn't stand to sleep indoors and drove a stripped down Model T Ford he had modified for serious mountain climbing. He was known throughout the Southwest only as "ol Two Story" because of his height and he didn't bother to tell very many people his real name. He was a classic, "loner" and didn't want anyone to know anything about his business...especially where and how he prospected for gold.

Two Story was getting old when he took me with him the first time and although I didn't suspect it at the time, he just needed a "gofer" to help him pack in supplies and go for water. I was actually just a necessary evil and he tolerated my dumb questions in exchange for my help. I know now how lucky I was to serve my apprenticeship as a gold prospector under this cantankerous old master of the profession.

We struck a trail North from Sierra Blanca, Texas into New Mexico, across Southern Arizona and into the Eastern desert of California. Two Story preferred to prospect desert dry washes..."Any durn fool can prospect where there's water...so there's too many fighting over the gold!" He could read a desert dry wash like a history book and tell me what happened geologically millions of years back. Without formal education, he taught me more geology than any of the University professors I was to study under later in life. We spent a day or two in each of the "glory holes" he had located in his lifetime of wandering the desert. He told me "most prospectors look for a big strike so hard that they overlook the millions of small pockets of gold along the bends and curves of the countless dry creek beds. These pockets may catch only a few grains or maybe a few ounces of gold, but they refill yearly during the rainy season floods. Any prospector worth his salt and willing to work can make a good living in the desert."

Two Story would patiently put the grains of placer gold into the quills from dead buzzards (no neat little glass vials were available to us locally and "too durn expensive" at the mining supply in Denver or Tucson. We had fifty or so quills of placer gold when he brought me back home in time to go back to school. We had sold some gold to a Chinese storekeeper in Washington Camp, Arizona. Two Story considered gold to be more stable than money and never sold more than was necessary to buy provisions. I went out with Two Story four more Summer vacations, following about the same path and gleaning a few ounces here, a few grains there and sometimes stumbling onto a bonanza of fifteen ounces or more. I learned new things every trip... to check culverts along the roads...to always check the washes leading down from mountains where known gold mines were....how to dry pan...how to dry wash...how to use a rocker box. But mainly, I learned that our American deserts will always offer a living to common sense prospectors because as Two Story put it..."God hydraulics the gold out of the mountains and hides it in pockets along the creeks so that smart prospectors can eat regular!"

Two Story always ate regular and lived his way in the desert sleeping under the stars in and old hand sewn canvas sleeping bag. That's where they found him one cold day in February, 1946 along with several hundred thousand dollars worth of gold neatly packed in buzzard quills. Gold was worth only $ 35 an ounce in 1946 and by the time the human buzzards got through fighting over his gold, it was worth several Million dollars. Two Story never write a will and I was too far down the relation chart to be entitled to any inheritance anyhow. I wasn't back from the South Pacific duty in World War II so I couldn't even go to his funeral. But Two Story did okay by me... he made a pretty good prospector out of me and I still follow our path through the deserts of New Mexico, Arizona and California and occasionally stumble onto one of Two Story's "glory holes". It seems like 'ol Two Story is there behind me, griping because I'm putting the gold in one of those extravigant glass vials when a buzzard quill would do just as well.