Bedrock and Gold: The mysteries . . .

[Lanny in AB]

Do you love to chase the gold? Please join me--lots of gold hunting tips, stories of finds (successful and not), and prospecting poetry.

Nugget in the bedrock tip:

I had a visit with a mining buddy this past weekend, and he told me of an epic battle to get a nugget out of the bedrock, and of what he learned from the experience. I thought some of you might like to learn from his mistake.

While out detecting one day, he came across a large sheet of bare bedrock. The bedrock was exposed because the area had been blasted off with a water cannon (a monitor), by the old-timers! It was not fractured bedrock, in fact it was totally smooth.

He was not optimistic at all of the prospects of a nugget. But, for some reason (we've all been there) he decided to swing his detector over that bedrock. After a long time, just as he was about to give up on his crazy hunch, he got a signal, right out of that smooth bedrock.

There was no crevice, no sign of a crevice, nada! So, he had to go all the way back to camp to get a small sledge and a chisel. The signal in the rock intrigued him, but he still wasn't overly optimistic. For those of you that have chased signals in a similar situation, sometimes there's a patch of hot mineralization in the bedrock that sounds off, but this spot, according to him, was sharp and clear right in the middle of the signal, not just a general increase of the threshold like you get when you pass over a hot spot in the bedrock.

Anyway, he made it back to the spot and started to chisel his way into the bedrock. If any of you have tried this, it's an awful job, and you usually wind up with cut knuckles--at the least! Regardless, he kept fighting his way down, busting out chunks of bedrock. He kept checking the hole, and the signal remained very strong.

This only puzzled him all the more as he could clearly see that it was solid bedrock with no sign of any crevice. He finally quit at the end of the day, at a depth of about a foot, but still, nothing in the hole.

An experienced nugget shooting friend dropped by the next morning to see him, and asked him how the hunt was going. My buddy related his tale of the mysterious hole in the bedrock, and told the friend to go over and check it out, and see if he could solve the riddle.

Later in the day, the other nugget hunter returned. In his hand was a fine, fat, sassy nugget. It weighed in at about an ounce and a quarter! After my friend returned his eyeballs to their sockets and zapped his heart to start it again, he asked where the nugget had come from.

Imagine his surprise when he heard it came from the mystery hole!! He asked how deep the other guy had gone into the bedrock to get it. "Well, no deeper" was his reply.

So, here's the rest of the story as to what happened. When the successful nugget hunter got to the bedrock, he scanned the surface got the same strong signal as my buddy. He widened out the hole and scanned again. Still a solid tone. He widened the hole some more so he could get his coil in, and here's the key and the lesson in this story, he got a strong signal off the side of the hole, about six inches down, but set back another inch into the side of the bedrock!!

My unlucky friend, the true discoverer of the gorgeous nugget's resting place had gone deep past the signal while digging his hole!!

Now, of course, a good pinpointer would easily solve this problem. The problem was, my buddy didn't have one, so why would he widen the hole, right? Well, the other guy was the one with more experience, and that's why he did. It was a lot more work, but what a payoff!

So, my buddy's butt is still black and blue from where he kicked himself for the next week or so for having lost such an incredible prize.

Some nugget hunting lessons are harder than others to learn. . . .

All the best,

Lanny


P.S. When in gold country--check the bedrock, regardless of whether it looks likely or not! Mother Nature likes to play games sometimes.

 

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[63bkpkr]

So at one point in his thread Lanny was explaining how to find 'placer gold' in solid bedrock using a metal detector and some simple rock modification hand tools. I read what he posted and thought Hmmm, I've not found any gold with my detector yet even though I'm out where gold exists so maybe I should try his suggestions out. So I did the driving, shouldered my backpack and went down the mountain for two weeks to see what I could find.

So I'm down in the canyon, I find some signs (sqr. nails) I wave the detector and it says that under that rock there is some gold.
Center of Picture is the gold that was under the rock
Just to the right of the GMT tm is the gold flake I found under the rock.

Another hunk of bedrock but the detector said under here. Its all in the pan after the section of "solid" bedrock was removed.

And more from under these sections.

And this is the total that I found under "solid bedrock". Including some lead shot both round and flat. This lesson taught me how to use my Whites GMT detector. Thank you Lanny!

 

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[Lanny in AB]

So at one point in his thread Lanny was explaining how to find 'placer gold' in solid bedrock using a metal detector and some simple rock modification hand tools. I read what he posted and thought Hmmm, I've not found any gold with my detector yet even though I'm out where gold exists so maybe I should try his suggestions out. So I did the driving, shouldered my backpack and went down the mountain for two weeks to see what I could find.

So I'm down in the canyon, I find some signs (sqr. nails) I wave the detector and it says that under that rock there is some gold.
Center of Picture is the gold that was under the rock
Just to the right of the GMT tm is the gold flake I found under the rock.

Another hunk of bedrock but the detector said under here. Its all in the pan after the section of "solid" bedrock was removed.

And more from under these sections.

And this is the total that I found under "solid bedrock". Including some lead shot both round and flat. This lesson taught me how to use my Whites GMT detector. Thank you Lanny!

Congratulations on finding a way to get some on that outing! I'm glad you found some of the tips helpful.

It should get easier from now on when you get out there in that gorgeous country of yours again.

Nicely done, and all the best,

Lanny

 

[IMAUDIGGER]

First - high fives to the both of you for sharing experience and knowledge.

Did I read that correctly...two weeks straight of dedicated detecting/panning/prospecting each day?

 

[63bkpkr]

Yes two weeks straight of all those items with time out to drop into the river to cool off and then get back to it! I've shoulder surgery coming up in early April but I'm hoping to at least be in the general area late in the year..........63bkpkr

 

[Lanny in AB]

Last year before the wildfires became too big and before the bush ban my son, grandson & I explored some new ground. We were lucky to come across some old mining ruins.

View attachment 1559217 ...... View attachment 1559218 ..... View attachment 1559219 ..... View attachment 1559220

Great to see a family prospecting adventure. When my boys were young, we went on some unforgettable prospecting trips, memories for a lifetime, so nice to see you're valuing the same things. Those are some great pictures, and finding those wooden sluices is a rare thing, as in the area I work right now, I've only ever found two of them, one much older than the other, but rare things to find indeed.

Looking at your pictures, I like the old wash-plant, and it sure is amazing to see how adaptable and creative miners could be to find a way to get the job done. They really did use to adapt and use whatever they had close to hand to get the job done.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

So we are looking mostly for Placer gold, stuff in existing rivers or stuff in ancient rivers. In 2011 I was out in the hills for 3 months though I got there a bit early.
And the roads looked like this or worse. I went exploring a little lower on the mountain, just flat out brush busting to see what I could see.
came across this ancient 'stream/creek/river?' beginning to leak out of its historical location.

used the GMT in the area but had no signals. A short distance down the hill I found this nice quartz vein

Still no signals on the detector. Looking back towards the placer leaking from the hillside

And one last shot of the placer Some day in the future this spot might be worth checking out. Oh wait, this was taken in 2011 so it has been 7 years. Hmm, more on the list of things to do this summer..............63bkpkr

The thing about chasing those old channels, they're quite a bit like modern ones as some hold gold and others didn't, but it's cool you found one and recognized it for what it was.

I don't know if you had any glaciation in your area? That one shot looks like glacial while the other shot, the stones are more rounded.

You sure are a stout adventuring type of man, and I'm not sure a mountain goat could follow some of the trails you've travelled in your quest for solitude and gold; I tip my hat to you sir.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Hazy Sky With Flat Bedrock



Hazy sky, and hot, hot, hot. That’s what I remember on that outing. All the way up those steep mountain grades and hairpin turns from camp that day into the spot I’d chosen to work, the sky was filled with the smoke-generated haze from the ornery forest fires of last summer.



I parked my mount for the day, my diesel 4X4 (I’d hauled a heavy trailer in earlier that trip, therefore the diesel) on a flat I’ve used before for a nugget-shooter’s take-off point. To get fitted out for the day, I made sure I had all the materials I’d need as I didn’t want to backtrack to the truck: steep hikes on unstable slopes, why, that’s no fun! So I try to get rigged up right the first time. Furthermore, hot like it was, I packed extra water, as working a canyon bottom in high summer is rather like self-cooking in a solar oven, smoke haze or not, nature finds a way to keep on baking. As I’ve stated before, I freight my outfit in a five-gallon bucket as it doubles for a bailing bucket, lunch bucket, equipment bucket, and it’s far more comfortable than a mountain rock, plus it’s mud and clay free to boot. (Too much cantankerous clay where I detect.)



Off to one side of the area I lit off into, I noticed the tell-tale slump of a long abandoned adit. That particular location was well known for underground workings, mostly old-timey ones from the 1800’s, but the miners that came in the 1900’s used mechanized equipment to strip the overburden those old boys couldn’t remove with their limited resources. However, it was easier for the twentieth century miners to remove lots of overburden to get to the rich pay riding in the last six or so feet of that ancient channel, with the best gold on or in the bedrock of course. It wasn’t uncommon for those miners from the last century to take two or three feet of bedrock, and in rarer cases of Eldorado goodness, to take even more.



So, seeing that old adit tight on bedrock under thirty or so feet of overburden gave me hope that I might be in a likely spot, but the sight of it caused me to admire those old boys too as working underground while tunneling, mucking, and laying track beneath thirty or forty feet of overburden is a flat-out fun killer.



To reflect a bit, I’ve examined many old adits while working with the modern boys when they cut into them (also watched big equipment drop into holes when the old workings caved!), and I’ve seen what those salty dogs had to dig through to get to the gold, all while working in weak light with bars, picks, and shovels. The obstacles, massive boulders, cemented gravels, endless cobble, and solid bedrock were bad enough, but in certain cases they had to cut raises through that same bedrock to chase the gold-bearing channel (all while keeping a gentle upward slope for drainage!). In addition, more hard work was required when they cut down into the bedrock to clean out the rich places. To relate more, those Old-timers didn’t just cut a single tunnel, for if the pay was rich in the main drift, they’d cut off to both sides (crosscutting) making rooms to ensure they got the bonanza gold, then when the values slackened, they’d continue with one main tunnel until they hit the rich stuff again. In situations where the entire base of bedrock was incredibly rich (especially in the gut of an ancient stream), they’d room out the entire area by working back and forth, then backfilling tunnels for stability as they worked their way across the bedrock chasing that buried gold. Add to this their work of cutting and installing timbers, driving lagging, laying track, breathing bad air, working in the damp while facing the dangers of collapse while tunneling in the dark all day to come out to the dark of night, and they’ve earned my respect.

Because those Old-timers were quite good at sniffing out the placer underground, I’ve seen the heartbreak and disappointment of the modern boys when they’ve stripped off massive overburden only to find the Sourdoughs beat them to the gold, licked the plate clean so to speak. However, I’ve also seen the sluices running yellow with the gold left when those tough hombres, through bad luck, missed the good stuff by drifting several feet off to one side of the pay, so sometimes the boys today do get it right.

Clearly, I was optimistic I’d find some gold in that old canyon cut where the Old-timers and the younger pups of later days had chased the gold as well. Now, detecting for gold is no sure-fire proposition. It’s hard work, and there’s often heaps of disappointment as I’ve dug my share of trash, enough it seems to sell for scrap! No matter, after I left that steep learning curve behind, I’ve found enough goodies to keep me plugging away.

When I got the detector fired up and ready to unleash it on the gold, I noticed that unlike other areas I’d been sniffing through earlier in the summer, this spot lacked the transition zones, the humps and troughs, the little bull quartz pockets too. This was flat bedrock, and it was more whitish and light gray, of a composition unlike the rest of the bedrock I’d been working. Because of that, I was out of my comfort zone, a little intimidated so to speak. The abandoned ground did have something going for it though, but I’d yet to decipher what it was.

I had to start swinging the coil to open the ball.



After collecting the usual batch of waste chunks and shavings of track and blade, I repeated a sweep over a spot that just whispered. I used the pick to scrape a bit, and hit the spot with the coil again. The signal was no longer a whisper but a soft, sweet sound in my ear. As I scraped some more I noticed what was going on: I was working into a thin crevice, the packed filler material the same color as that bland bedrock. Well, I kept at it, and soon I had a nugget, flat as all get out, but a gold nugget for sure. As is usually the case, the first one seems to signal a rush of sorts. But at least I didn’t have to worry about any claim jumpers or desperados.



What I learned that day was yet another lesson in the workings of gold. When Mother Nature gets tricky with caching the gold, I’ve got to be patient enough with each peculiar area to riddle out the new secrets. As I’d been plumb spoiled the last few outings, and because I figured I’d learned all of the secrets of the canyon, it must have swelled my head almost enough to bust my hatband, and I guess I got sent back to the schoolhouse for more learning.

I kept at that bedrock the rest of the day (and I’ll tell you, I drank water like a horse after a day-long ride through the desert). What I found was that unlike the other places I’d already scouted, this spot hid the gold in thin crevices that weren’t very deep, but as I’ve stated earlier, they sure as shootin’ were tough to see. It was like I was up against a master camouflage game of sorts, and without the detector, I’d have flat-out lost the gold hunting game that day. Regardless, I adopted a whole slew of small flat nuggets, some of them “skaters” too. (We call them that when we’re sluicing because they love to get flipped up and skate across the riffles of the clean-up sluice.) However, some of those tricksters were thicker, and those are the ones that weighed up, but there just weren’t any round, fat little beauties that day. What I did notice that might be related were the large boulders that had been moved by the miners, and I don’t think Nature could have built a better hammer/roller-mill for producing flat gold in any of her streams.



Never look a gift horse in the mouth, and never look slew-eyed at flat bedrock; just be happy you came out ahead.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[bcfromfl]

Wow, what a great day! I love your pics, too! Sometimes as I read your posts I try to imagine what you're describing (which you do very well, BTW), but oftentimes my old brain doesn't quite understand. The photos help me see exactly what you're working with.

Awesome haul! Do you ever find locations that warrant going back day after day, perhaps a couple weeks' worth of detecting, or are the places you discover fairly localized and only require a few hours to clean up?

 

[Lanny in AB]

Wow, what a great day! I love your pics, too! Sometimes as I read your posts I try to imagine what you're describing (which you do very well, BTW), but oftentimes my old brain doesn't quite understand. The photos help me see exactly what you're working with.

Awesome haul! Do you ever find locations that warrant going back day after day, perhaps a couple weeks' worth of detecting, or are the places you discover fairly localized and only require a few hours to clean up?

To answer the question about repeat visits, yes, sometimes, but at other times it's a one-day hunt as most of the spots are smaller areas (larger ones are a rare exception). However, I do sometimes revisit with a PI and have had some nice success, but at other times, I've cleaned the area with the VLF's (I use the word "cleaned" loosely because I've found gold where others swore the site was cleaned and vice versa for sites I've finished with, LOL.) and have not found any gold with the PI's on the repeat visits.

I will say this though, that I've revisited sites to only check on whispers, exceptionally slight threshold-breakers so to speak and have found gold that way. I feel this is one of the most misunderstood concept by all beginning nugget shooters: they want the headphones to blow off the side of their heads with gold signals, and very rarely does that happen. A vast majority of the gold "whispers" or slightly "bumps" or disturbs the threshold and most beginners write it off to ground noise, etc.
But, if I'm in an area that's produced nuggets, or back on another day knowing I took out a good nugget haul, I've been rewarded many times with extra gold for following that "investigate the whispers" philosophy. Oh, and you have to slow down too if you're going to be a nugget whisperer (not a horse whisperer, but there are similarities, sort of, just kidding.).



As for weeks worth of detecting in one spot, I've only ever found one of those and the only reason it survived was because of the insane amount of hot-rocks that drove other nugget shooters out as even PI's reacted to those rocks in a very positive manner; it was a bizarre exception to the rules, but there were sure a lot of beautiful nuggets that came from there. As for a current place that would last for weeks, I'd love to find one one day without the crazy hot-rocks as that would be a real party.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[63bkpkr]

Hi Lanny, as usual wonderful sharing both in words and pictures! You were in some High Country on that trip which I can understand as out where I play there are Hydraulic sites at close to 8,000', them old rivers were wide/deep & in some cases really high! Thank you for sharing!...............63bkpkr

 

[Lanny in AB]

Hi Lanny, as usual wonderful sharing both in words and pictures! You were in some High Country on that trip which I can understand as out where I play there are Hydraulic sites at close to 8,000', them old rivers were wide/deep & in some cases really high! Thank you for sharing!...............63bkpkr

Hi Herb,

Thanks a lot for dropping in to leave a comment about the stories and pictures as it's much appreciated.

As for hydraulic pits high up, yes we have those as well, and I love the high country for the crisp view it provides and the awe-inspiring mood it brings.

We have ancient channels that snake up high through the mountains, and I remember mining in Idaho where I was told by the locals that an old channel went right over the mountain.

It's hard for me to imagine a situation like that, but when you think of glaciers as being miles high, then meltwater running from them, I guess Mother Nature could have put a channel anywhere she wanted.

I remember working up north where some large-scale placer miners were working an ever descending series of overlain channels, six in all, all running from different directions, and all gold bearing, with a very rich channel right on bedrock, and everyone of those old channels had drift-mine tunnels running through them. Those Old-timers knew how to find the gold, and they sure weren't afraid of hard work to get it either.

I watched the modern miners open a bunch of those old tunnels to boot, but that goldfield was only up around four to five thousand feet, but lots of detectable nuggets and knobby character nuggets hung out there too, and I'd find them wherever anyone had disturbed any dirt chasing placer with modern equipment. I'd like to take a crack at that gold with the great new detector technology I've got now vs. the old Minelab 2100 I had when I first hit that goldfield.

I mean, the 2100 found a lot of gold, but there were quite a few bedrock hot-spots where we were finding great nuggets; however, because of the insanely hot bedrock, the 2100 would only run on one side/field, so we were very restricted by depth. The new machines would do much better, especially with the great selection of coils available now. Then, there's also the Minelab Z, but I'm not in an area right now where I need that technology as my current 5000 PI and my little VLF's pack a powerful combination punch to clean up the gold as the ground I'm currently working isn't that extreme.

I'd love to go back again some day, but the roads are terrible, and the bugs are far worse, so two terribles do provide a bit of a roadblock, but the nuggets there aren't flat like some of the nuggets I've been finding lately.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

The Tale of Shifty Eye (Written on the lighter side of prospecting with a liberal license based on a true event.)

Now Shifty Eye was a man that liked to brag about his gold. He’d talk to anyone that would listen. However, in telling his tales, the truth was easily expendable.

Shifty was a tall, loose-geared fellow with blond hair, blue eyes and big knuckly hands. He dressed like any northern prospector, and he seemed a friendly enough sort; nevertheless, he certainly was a bit of a mystery.

You see, old shifty used to appear every year in the gold fields with a nugget bottle. His appearances were quite Leprechaun like, as if he’d just popped out of the ground. No one ever saw him come into the area when the nugget hunting season began, and no one ever saw him leave when Old Man Winter got close to being cranky, but there were sure enough plenty of Shifty Eye sightings to prove he was there.



To backtrack a bit, having a nugget bottle in gold country sure isn’t a crime, but attaching a whopper of a lie to to the story of where and when the gold came from, that’s the root cause of Shifty’s whopper. Moreover, his nugget tale qualifies as a distinct moral breach, a fantastic fabrication, for Shifty was a man that embraced exaggeration so he could avoid any association with truth.

As for Shifty Eye’s name, well, he came by it honestly. You see Mother Nature had some fun with him while tooling up for the early building process. She fabricated one of Shifty’s eyes with an individualized program, one completely independent from that of his other eye. His normal eye followed the polite eye contact rules of civilized conversation, but the other eye had a wanderlust that rejected the rules. Let me try to explain . . .

In a conversation, most folks hold their gaze on the person they’re parlaying with, yet Shifty had only one obedient eye. His other eye was downright rebellious because it would depart the planet during conversation, the action making the other party mighty uneasy. That bedeviled eye wandered from one side to the other, sooner or later looking up to the heavens, then rocketing downward to have a peek at his boots before its jittery journey was done. It’s beyond comprehension how any person could try to stay focused while following one of Shifty’s tales. Clearly, Mother Nature surely got full entertainment value when she built that independent eyeball, and that’s all I have to say about that.

As for altering the truth, those old torture devices from the dark ages, like the rack and such, were no better at stretching and misshaping things than Shifty’s brain was.

To illustrate, I was alone on an old worn out bedrock claim at a junction on the trail one day when I experienced my first Shifty sighting. One minute I was by myself, and the next, Shifty appeared, silently easing himself out of a tangle of bushes on the claim’s border. After his magical appearance, he started to shake his gold bottle up and down without saying a word. Well, any self respecting miner, such as myself, just has to ask what’s in the bottle, and so Shifty up and obliged me. “See this eleven-gram nugget I’ve got”, he says, “Well, I found this rascal here on this claim yesterday with my metal detector, so I was a comin’ back here today to see if there wuz any friends still hidin’ out that needed findin’.” The grin on his face was something to see, but his wandering eye flat out un-jarred me thereby distracting my attention from his glorious tale. I was so rattled in fact that I can’t recall a single detail of how he supposedly corralled that nugget.



Now, there’s nothing wrong with someone like Shifty finding gold where he said he did as I myself have detected nuggets on supposedly worn out claims, but there certainly was an anomaly in Shifty’s story. You see, the year before, he’d popped out of the same bushes on the same claim with the same nugget and told the same story to an old Sourdough friend of mine, and the year before that, he’d flogged the same tale of the same nugget to another friend of ours. Retold stories like this just cemented his shifty reputation and validated the two-pronged origin of his name, as in conjunction with his misbehaving eye, things like the truth were clearly shifted around in his brain as well.

Then one day in late fall, he shifted smoothly out of our area, and no one has seen him since. So, if he shows up in your stomping grounds to spin his yarns of nugget finds, don’t try to make eye contact or you’ll wind up in the same shifty position we found ourselves in while you try in vain to eyeball the situation.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Jim Hemmingway]

The Tale of Shifty Eye

Now Shifty Eye was a man that liked to brag about his gold. He’d talk to anyone that would listen. However, in telling his tales, the truth was easily expendable.

Lanny... your tale describes a possible similar psychological profile that we observed with a club member many years ago. That fellow invariably “found” unusually large or otherwise valuable gold rings in our water hunting sojourns, or he would likewise display a pocketful of quality silver coins at the local park hunts. Always more or better than everyone else would find.

I think such behavior can result from a personal insecurity, for example, a sense of inadequacy or low self-esteem. Alternately, it could be an egotistical issue insofar as he apparently felt it important to establish a successful persona with his club peers in the hobby. It seems to me that such behavior is intended to attract attention to themselves for whatever the underlying reasons might be. Sometimes I think this type of person does not suffer from any sense of inadequacy, and does not necessarily crave for attention, but rather they are just plain crazy.

We occasionally see examples when such behavior is more extreme, to the point of attempting to subtract from the accomplishments of others in the hobby. In such examples, it appears to be a case of trying to bolster themselves, but unfortunately it is sometimes done at the expense of others. Shifty Eye certainly went out of his way to put one over on his fellow hobbyists, his actions were disturbing and certainly abnormal, but thank goodness the result was rather harmless.

Jim.

PS: Sometime ago, I described to you some minerals from the Bancroft area of eastern Ontario. I'll post one photo here, it is not an outstanding example by any stretch, but it gives you an idea of what we're doing with non-detectable minerals lately.

​

 

[Lanny in AB]

Lanny... your tale describes a possible similar psychological profile that we observed with a club member many years ago. That fellow invariably “found” unusually large or otherwise valuable gold rings in our water hunting sojourns, or he would likewise display a pocketful of quality silver coins at the local park hunts. Always more or better than everyone else would find.

I think such behavior can result from a personal insecurity, for example, a sense of inadequacy or low self-esteem. Alternately, it could be an egotistical issue insofar as he apparently felt it important to establish a successful persona with his club peers in the hobby. It seems to me that such behavior is intended to attract attention to themselves for whatever the underlying reasons might be. Sometimes I think this type of person does not suffer from any sense of inadequacy, and does not necessarily crave for attention, but rather they are just plain crazy.

We occasionally see examples when such behavior is more extreme, to the point of attempting to subtract from the accomplishments of others in the hobby. In such examples, it appears to be a case of trying to bolster themselves, but unfortunately it is sometimes done at the expense of others. Shifty Eye certainly went out of his way to put one over on his fellow hobbyists, his actions were disturbing and certainly abnormal, but thank goodness the result was rather harmless.

Jim.

PS: Sometime ago, I described to you some minerals from the Bancroft area of eastern Ontario. I'll post one photo here, it is not an outstanding example by any stretch, but it gives you an idea of what we're doing with non-detectable minerals lately.

​

Hi Jim,

It's nice to hear from you again, and every once in a while, we get a colourful character that drops in to our stomping grounds that likes to exaggerate or live a bit of a fantasy, but that's no different from other goldfields I've worked in before, every area seems to sprout them from time to time.

Shifty didn't have much of a sense of humour which would have made him a more entertaining and affable sort, but he certainly was unforgettable. My friend's grandson met him one day, and it made him uneasy, but he certainly couldn't forget him.

That certainly is a beautiful specimen you've recovered Jim. You are a superstar in your field, and you really know how to display your finds to really make them pop!

Nicely done, and all the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Move Those Rocks!

I remember watching a video a long time ago when I was first getting into nugget shooting. I had chased a few coins, but I was truly a babe in the woods when it came to really understanding a metal detector, and it would be many buckets of trash later before I ever found my first nugget. However, what struck me in the video was the advice, if a person was in a likely gold spot, to move the rocks, not just spend time detecting around them.

Well, last summer, I found myself in a spot that had been previously worked by placer miners. The excavation had rocks the size of washtubs all over the place. Bedrock was still exposed in spots, and in other places there was a layer of cobbled slump, along with areas covered with some of that gooey clay the glaciers left to trouble anyone that chases the gold.

The day was hot, and as you already know, truly smoky due to the massive forest fires, and about the last thing I wanted to do was wrestle boulders on such a day, so I set off detecting the prime spots, places where I could easily swing the coil, and guess what I found? That’s right, nothing, zip, nada. Plus, this was after a couple of hours of dedicated searching, hitting every nook and cranny, running the sensitivity up as high as I could to still allow metallic signals to surface through all of that background noise. Yet, the old workings gave up no gold; however, there was metal: bits of track, blade, and some copper and brass bits too, but that was it.

So, as it was hot, and as I was tired, I snuggled up to a tiny corner of shade, tore off all my equipment, drank several bottles of water and had myself a high energy snack. I even treated myself to a nice chocolate pudding for dessert!

Looking once more at my surroundings, the boulders really stood out this time. I had a nice long bar for moving big rocks, but it was back in my truck, and as that dang bar is one heavy item, I wasn’t eager to go get it. But, it does give about the best leverage I’ve ever found for any bar. (Short story about the bar’s history, my grandfather fabricated it long ages ago, and I inherited it. Moreover, that bar has figured in more than one of my nugget shooting stories, and I hope I always have it and never lose it, as that bar’s a true one of a kind; it can’t be bought in any store.

So, I had a bit of a problem. I didn’t really want to hike all the way back to my truck, but I’d exhausted the ground everywhere except under those boulders. Added to the thought of hiking out, moving those boulders wasn’t going to be any fun either, but I really wanted to find some gold that day, so I had no choice. It was back up the steep bank to return to the truck to get my bar.

After a few slips and slides, I was back with the bar. The afternoon was doing nothing but getting hotter and the surrounding forest was strangely silent, the pines and fir almost leaning in like they were listening. Nature had hit the mute button for some reason, and perhaps it was due to the heavy smoke of the day. The visibility was down to under a mile when normally I can see for tens of miles without problem. As for bugs, even the insects were taking time off. It seemed as though I’d be the only one making noise that afternoon.

I walked across to a place where there was a bit of a trough, and in that trough were three boulders. I slammed the bar under the side of a hefty boulder and went to work. Now, moving boulders is a bit of a rough science, and the movements that produce results come with practice, lots of trial and error for sure, but when a person finally gets the rhythm and learns where to keep easing and levering that bar, the boulder finally moves, bit by bit. If some momentum gets any traction, sometimes I can get the boulders rocking too, then at the right moment, one more mighty heave with that big bar moves them enough to expose the ground underneath them.

So, that’s what happened. I moved that boulder enough to reveal the bedrock underneath, and I saw the sign of a crevice! I couldn’t gear up fast enough to take a crack at detecting the spot.

Now, you can’t make this stuff up, and truly I’d been skunked all morning, but after a few swings of the coil, and zip, I had a signal. I scanned again to make sure of the sound, and it was a definite hit, not a whisper, but a cracking good sound. I grabbed my pick and scraped material from the crevice, then scanned again. The signal was louder, and now the meter was pinning in that sweet golden zone! After repeating the dig and scan process a few more times, I had a nice five-gram nugget!

One boulder moved—one nice nugget.

Now I could continue on with the details of the rest of my day, but it would only be a rehash of my aforementioned boulder moving techniques, followed by the never-ending loop of scanning, then target recovery. So, for the remainder of my nugget shooting time, I moved a lot of boulders and happily found a slew of nuggets.

Of course there weren’t nuggets under every boulder, in fact, many boulders hid no gold, but moving those rocks did lead me to one nice slanted crevice that rose up the side of a trough, a diagonal seam with little river rocks and clay that gave up three more meaty nuggets. In addition, I found lots of smaller nuggets and recovered the finer gold they travelled with.

Moving those rocks sure paid that day. That old video tip from way back really works when looking for nuggets in good gold country.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Terry Soloman]

Yummmm.. Chocolate pudding! Oh, and a five-grammer.

 

[Jim Hemmingway]

Of course there weren’t nuggets under every boulder, in fact, many boulders hid no gold, but moving those rocks did lead me to one nice slanted crevice that rose up the side of a trough, a diagonal seam with little river rocks and clay that gave up three more meaty nuggets. In addition, I found lots of smaller nuggets and recovered the finer gold they travelled with.

Moving those rocks sure paid that day. That old video tip from way back really works when looking for nuggets in good gold country.

Lanny… we were encouraged some 30+ years ago by reading about Charles Garrett’s experiences and his advice to move boulders whilst working in the silverfields of northeastern Ontario. It took us many years to begin to conscientiously implement that good advice.

The experience you related with moving boulders to increase the odds of finding gold is a good reminder to readers to not ignore such opportunities. Over the years, our technique eventually included trenching productive ground if conditions looked favorable. It is hard work and involves moving very large boulders, but on average the effort has proved worthwhile. This modus operandi accounts for a lot of our small but high character silver recoveries that are both attractive and affordable to everyday buyers, as illustrated below.

Jim.

​

 

[Lanny in AB]

Lanny… we were encouraged some 30+ years ago by reading about Charles Garrett’s experiences and his advice to move boulders whilst working in the silverfields of northeastern Ontario. It took us many years to begin to conscientiously implement that good advice.

The experience you related with moving boulders to increase the odds of finding gold is a good reminder to readers to not ignore such opportunities. Over the years, our technique eventually included trenching productive ground if conditions looked favorable. It is hard work and involves moving very large boulders, but on average the effort has proved worthwhile. This modus operandi accounts for a lot of our small but high character silver recoveries that are both attractive and affordable to everyday buyers, as illustrated below.

Jim.

​

Hi Jim,

As for Mr. Garrett, he certainly pioneered a lot of great metal detecting technology, and I remember reading his materials when I was starting out. In fact, the first metal detector I bought was a brand-spanking-new Garrett Scorpion, one I took to the goldfields of Montana for one of its first runs. I chased a vein of gold in a prospect tunnel, chiseled out the material, crushed the quartz and panned out gold! I couldn't believe it, but that old Scorpion Gold Stinger could track veins. As for finding nuggets, it would do that too, but the ground I was trying to find nuggets in at that time was far in the Northern wilderness of British Columbia, and the ground was so insanely hot, the little Stinger just wouldn't even run, nothing but overload. So, that's when I switched to PI's and started to find the nuggets in those awful conditions.

However, I did read all of the material I could get my hands on that Garrett had published on how to chase gold, and I watched a video of him working an ancient channel out in the desert where he was detecting the downside of boulders held in a high exposed wall, and he found nuggets! He even demonstrated how to dry pan I believe. Here's a link to his obituary with some interesting history: https://www.garrett.com/mediasite/charles_garrett_obituary.aspx

All the best Jim, and as always, thanks for dropping in,

Lanny

P.S. For those of you that haven't checked out Jim's writings on native silver ores and his tips on how to find it, or for those of you that haven't looked at the pictures of his gorgeous specimen finds, you're really missing something!

 

[Lanny in AB]

Yummmm.. Chocolate pudding! Oh, and a five-grammer.

Hi Terry,

Thanks for dropping in, and as for the gold I'm finding, it pretty much tops out at around seven grams, and any of the larger pieces settle into that 4-6 gram range. There have been bigger ones found in the area I'm hunting (up to an ounce and a quarter of the ones I've been allowed to see), but I just haven't been lucky enough to get my coil over one yet. But quantity has been my friend lately, so that keeps me going.



All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Old Placer Mines



I remember the first time I looked into an old placer mine. I was working with some large scale placer miners in north-central British Columbia, deep in the boreal forests that blanket the mountains there with pine and fir. The mining boys were working deep channels, ancient placer deposited eons ago, dinosaur era (or older) channels capped by 50+ feet of overburden, most of which is terribly obnoxious stuff labelled by the locals as “boulder clay”.

However, I have to backtrack a bit to explain: boulder clay is simply a thick layer of clay garbage peppered with big rocks that the glaciers had dredged up while they were scouring the continent. Doing what glaciers do when they’ve invaded what used to be living land, some of those glaciers were miles thick, top to bottom, so they had unimaginable power to transport all kinds of things. To clarify, just imagine them as unimaginably huge bulldozers on insane steroids as that’s what glaciers working in concert with continental ice sheets were, insanely powerful bulldozers of unimaginable size. They moved what they wanted, and left it where they wanted to as well. So, that’s where boulder clay came from: boulders of all sizes riding in sticky clay randomly deposited as discarded glacial muck that just happened to bury anything it wanted, including gold-bearing streams.

However, when the glaciers were out playing some things would slow them down for sure, like mountains, but not much else as even parts of the mountains got ground away, with only the highest points of the highest peaks escaping the effects of that relentless force.

If a placer channel was lucky enough to be protected by what the locals called “bedrock rims”, then the channel deposit got to stay where it was, if no bedrock walls protected the deposit (down in its v-shaped tomb), the glaciers cut right down into the underlying bedrock of the deposit as deeply as they were allowed to go, tore the deposit out, and carried it off to who knows where to redeposit it on a whim, and that’s why sometimes a rich placer deposit is found where it has no business being, and there is no accompanying channel to be found anywhere in the vicinity that originally bore the gold.

So, the local placer miners had learned all of this through hard trial and error, but the Argonauts, the early Sourdoughs, didn’t have the benefit of tons of mechanized steel to cut and dig to get to the gold, but they did have their brains and the knowledge that filled their minds with the lessons they’d learned about buried channels from their experiences in California in the mid 1800’s, and a lot of those miners followed the gold north along the Rocky Mountains, finding similar gold deposits and buried channels, so when they hit the boulder clay, they improvised by going under it to get to the gold. Furthermore, they had to have strong backs and well-muscled shoulders and arms for the insanely difficult work of pick, bar, and shovel to get to the gold.



The way they’d do this, and I saw their handiwork, is they’d test along a current streambed to find richer hot spots of enrichment where gold from buried channels was working its way into the modern day streambed, then they’d test to follow where that enrichment was coming from. (I myself found one such enrichment channel entering a river one day with my metal detector and combined with the use of my sluice and pan to sample was able to chase the gold into the bank. What a blast that was! Lots of nuggets were stuck in the clay and on the bedrock as they were tumbling out of an ancient channel in the bank. The modern day channel was simply doing renewed concentration work each spring by chewing through the material to leave the heavies on the bedrock and sticky clay while washing the lighter overburden away.



As the bedrock I’d located slanted up from the river at about a thirty-degree angle, and as there was about twenty feet of boulder clay on top of it, I was limited in what I could do with the hand equipment I had with me, but looking up the hill was revealing. I saw a tunnel.

Now, it wasn’t the portal of an Adit as that had long since disappeared. The original entrance was cut into by modern day miners as their bulldozer clawed its way around a corner of the boulder-clay covered mountainside, a corner that just happened to be on bedrock! Moreover, that bedrock was up-bank from me, on the same line as the rising bedrock, so the Old-timers had discovered the same enrichment channel I’d stumbled onto, gone up the mountainside and started a mine by drifting along that bedrock where the gold deposit was richest. But, as I stated, that entrance was gone; however, there were still clear pick marks in the clay on the sidewalls where those old boys had labored. So this wasn’t the first mine I looked into (the one mentioned at the beginning of my post) as the remains of this tunnel were swallowed up by oozing clay.

No, the first mine I really had a good look into was uncovered by the placer miners I’ve referred to earlier. They’d taken off fifty or so feet of overburden, in the form of boulder clay, and they’d hit the bedrock underneath. However, the Old-timers had beat them to most of the gold. Moreover, this mine was at least a hundred feet above the modern streambed, and I have no idea where the Sourdoughs’ original entrance had been, but if it followed protocol, those Argonauts of the 1800s had found an enrichment zone in the river, found bedrock, tunneled along that bedrock uphill leaving enough slope for drainage, and then they’d cut their way while continuing up the mountain to reach a gut (the low-point of a channel, a fantastic enrichment zone at times) where an ancient river had played with the gold dim eons ago.

Finding that gut, those early miners had worked the placer by hand, tunneling around, over, or under huge boulders, cutting down into the bedrock in rich spots, but working throughout the winter months in the stabilized temperatures of a mine that resisted the outside temperatures that often plunged to -40 or lower, the temperature in the mine remaining constant with the ground and groundwater unfrozen at that depth, allowing those tough old boys to keep tunneling and mining until they could emerge in the spring, much like groundhogs with the warmer weather, so they could then sluice in the spring thaw what they’d wrestled from Mother Nature during the winter. (Unimaginably lonely, hard work to me.)

So, there I was staring at the timbers of a mine tunnel that ran back under the boulder clay. The side timbers were still intact, and they were huge round timbers cut by hand. Whoever had cut them had tremendous respect for the original fifty feet of overlying boulder clay. There were also squared timbers for the sets with lagging topping everything for the tunnel roof. (The lagging would have been driven forward along the tops of the sets to keep the tunnel intact and to stop material from falling down onto the miners.) A lot of that lagging had the consistency of celery, the wood transformed from its original sturdy state by decades of groundwater that altered it. So, there was no way I was going into that tunnel, but it was fascinating to look at and into, and it was fascinating to wonder at those who had engineered, constructed, and then mined it.

Of course, the downside of finding the mine was that the Old-timers had taken most of the richest ground, but the modern placer miners still did well, and I’ve seen that scenario repeated many times since, but it boggles the mind to imagine what those old boys took out, as I know what the modern miners get from the leavings, and it’s often enough substantial.



I’ve also seen areas that were “roomed out”, incredibly rich ancient placer channels that were cut into, then mined out by running parallel tunnels back and forth (backfilling for stability) across the deposit from side to side until there was nothing left, so when the modern miners hit one of those massive excavations, it’s a crying day.



On this thread somewhere, I’ve written about detecting and panning the dirt around those old mines’ pillars and posts, and what a bonanza it sometimes produced for me, all from the small amount of intact dirt buried long ago while the boys from the 1800’s fitted those posts or pillars.



Since that original encounter with that long-sleeping mine, one so rudely awakened by modern placer excavation, I’ve been privileged to see many more mines from the 1800’s cut into since, including those of the last three summers, but the sense of wonder and respect for the Sourdoughs that engineered and built them never leaves me, and I hope it never does.



All the best,

Lanny