renogeoff, when you locate the old mining camps, don't make the mistake that a lot of coin/relic hunters make: head straight to the foundations / ruins of the old processing and industrial type stuff. The areas where the miners worked at (concrete sluice foundations, stamp mill ruins, etc....) are not going to be the places where the coins/relics will be. Yes nuggets perhaps (old tailing piles, etc...), but not good for coin hunting. The best place for coins is going to be where the miners LIVED, slept, played, etc... not where the worked.
Quite often the only visible signs left in these areas, are where they worked, as those were the more permanent structures. But where they lived, was often nothing more than temporary tent cities, wooden "board and batton" towns, that will have nothing left to mark their sites. And these are not necessarily near the work areas. They could be a significant walk away, somewhere else. If you can find where these temporary tent cities sprang up (often moving around every few years to move to the next strikes), is the places to hunt. Less industrial junkage, and more coins d/t they slept on the ground in tents, gambled, drank, etc.... I've gotten some goodies like this around Folsom area, and believe me, when you survey the landscape, it seems more inviting to immediately head to the concrete foundations "off in the distance" of the commercial industrial processing stuff (since that's all one can see NOW). But my host had already informed me that we'd be hunting a non-impressive flat, with absolutely nothing at all there. He explained that this had been the miner's camp and chinatown district. That was a lesson to me, that I'm sure is true of other gold-rush areas in CA.
