If you’re looking for something new to get gold we have found it. We first saw it at one of the GPAA gold shows being demonstrated by Angus Niccolls of Camel Mining Products.

Just a side note but I have always liked the name Angus and wanted to name one of my sons Angus but my wife didn’t care for the name and if your married you will understand why my wife won (don’t mess with the boss). We did end up naming him Andrew. Watching Angus operating the Mountain Goat Trommel I was fascinated at how well it worked and how good it was at removing the gold from the gravels. I knew that Camel Mining Products have been manufacturing gold recovering machines for a long time but I didn’t realized it had been 37 years until we got talking to Angus. You have to make good products to last in business that long. Camel Mining never has dropped a new product on the market before they had spent a lot of time testing and refining it. Angus said that he had worked with the Mountain Goat for over a year before he thought it was ready for the public to see.

Angus told me that in his younger days he had worked as a trommel operator for several large mining companies. Some of the trommels he worked with were as long as 40 feet. Working with them he knew that trommels were great gold recovering machines but with their size not really practical for the small miner and prospector. It has taken him a long time but he has at last developed a portable gold recovering trommel. The Mountain Goat is built on the same principals as the huge mining trommels used by the major mining companies except it is a lot smaller and is portable. They say they call it the Mountain Goat because it will eat anything and is light enough for you to carry it up the side of a mountain.

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Jim Klein is a well known and respected writer and lifelong gold prospector. This field test of the Desert Fox appeared in the March/April 2002 issue of Gold Prospector Magazine.

Our field trip this month is in my back yard and storage shed. The shed is where I keep all the buckets of concentrates from my field trips and my wife is always asking when I am going to get around to cleaning it out.

Thanks to Camel Mining all those buckets are cleaned out and the gold that was in them is safely put away. I owe them another thank you for the first piece of mining equipment that has gotten my wife interested in prospecting. This is after almost forty years of prospecting. She has always been happy to be my official photographer for all my books and articles on finding and mining gold. You see she has this thing about sleeping in beds and taking baths and eating hot meals on plates and things like that. Personally a peanut butter and honey sandwich is a very good breakfast, lunch and dinner out in the mountains.

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