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Guy at a rock swap in Reno said to stop rinsing my trowel in the site bucket, and he was dead right
Two summers ago I was volunteering on a survey out near Virginia City and this older fella named Dale, who had been digging since the 70s, watched me dunk my trowel in the water bucket to clean it off. He said "son, that bucket is for the screens, not your tools" and told me to wipe the blade on a rag instead and keep a separate little jar for rinsing. I figured he was just being picky, but about a week later we pulled a tiny bead out of a screen and it took us 30 minutes to figure out if it came from the dirt or had been knocked loose from somewhere else. Turned out a guy on our crew had been rinsing muddy tools in the screen water and we nearly recorded the bead in the wrong level. Dale also pointed out that all that silt makes the water useless for flotation work, which I hadn't even thought about. Now I keep a roll of shop rags in my bag and a labeled rinse jar, and I've caught two other volunteers doing the same thing I did. If you're doing any screen work this season, what's your setup for keeping tools and sample water apart?
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