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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[Lanny in AB]

Drift Mine Part IV

Did I mention the bugs? I would be doing every would-be northern prospector a great disservice if I didn’t mention the bugs. The bugs are absolutely horrific, and that’s not hyperbole or over exaggeration for effect! The flying bloodsuckers have only one goal, to liberate your body of its blood supply. Moreover, the bugs come in an array of sizes too. Take horseflies, for instance. People say it’s an exaggeration that up north the horseflies are the size of cats or small dogs. That’s ridiculous. Anyone that’s ever tramped through the northern woods knows that the horseflies are way bigger than cats and dogs. Otherwise, how could two of them carry off a full-grown bull moose? Or, how could they flip a D-8 Cat over to drag out the operator that’s hiding underneath? The size of cats and dogs? What nonsense. Regardless of any myths you’ve heard, I just thought I should give you a heads-up about the real size of the bugs, just in case book learning had filled your heads with nonsense.

The next day when I went back to the pit where they’d broken through and hit the old drift tunnels, the boys had pulled all of their equipment and vacated the dig. They’d moved downstream about 300 yards, and they were busy stripping boulder clay to get at the rest of the Tertiary channel they’d tapped where I was now standing. Moreover, the ground was so rich in that particular area that the boulder clay was honeycombed with tunnels driven up from the river by the Old-Timers, following the contours of the rising bedrock, back in the 1800’s. As well, the area saw a resurgence of activity in the 1930’s as miners could make enough working in the summers to feed their families through the long winters. Even though it was backbreaking work, the effort not only kept them from starving, but it required no reliance on government handouts.

Those Sourdoughs were a tough, tough breed.

So, there I was with the entire pit to myself, and permission to do whatever I pleased. However, in sad retrospect, what I didn’t have with me at that time was a metal detector, and because of that, the place haunts me to this day. Moreover, as I move along with my tale, you’ll see why.

The blue sky was a welcome sight after the three days of overcast conditions. The sun was warm on my back and was already removing the chill from the morning air. A couple of humming birds fought each other as they squabbled for the rights to a stand of mountain flowers. Pines and firs had scented the air with their perfect aroma of alpine magic.

Breaking the spell, I dropped down into the pit carrying my pick, a couple of pans, my shovel, and of course, my gold bottle. Due to some great panning around those pillars and posts, I already had a nice collection of nuggets and pickers in my bottle, and the gold made a nice growl as I spun the bottle’s contents around. To me, there’s nothing better than the sound of sassy nuggets and chunky gold, captured in the bottle.

I strolled through the pit, examining what material was left. On the south end, they’d excavated several feet into the bedrock because it was highly fractured, so there was no material left there to pan. While I walked the length of the cut, rocks were sluffing from the loose glacial till far above the boulder clay, for the wall above the excavation rose steeply up the canyon side about eighty feet. Therefore, those tumbling rocks had a lot of time to pick up speed. Sadly, panning the margins of the cut where the excavation met the boulder clay would be far too dangerous; however, the memory was with me still of the visitor three days earlier, an uncle to one of the miners, that had plucked a four-gram nugget from the seam after he’d eyeballed it. Reluctantly, regardless of the lure of the gold in that ancient channel capped by the huge wall of boulder clay, I let reason rule and worked my way back to the north end where the big equipment had broken open the old drifts.

Furthermore, the north end was dramatically different from the southern portion. There was a layer of clay covering the last third of the cut. The miners had stripped down into the clay with their excavator until there was no more sign of any river run. The clay was smooth and slick where the bucket had done its excellent work, and what remained was nothing more than an ancient armor layer, as everyone knows that gold can’t get through clay. Nonetheless, I remembered reading in a book once about a prospector that had dug through the armor clay to see what was underneath, and what he’d found was worth his dig. So, I had nothing to lose, and I decided I’d give it a try.

It was easy digging with the shovel, as the metal cut smoothly into the clay. I lifted the contents out of the hole (I’d gone down about six inches), and I saw something out of the ordinary. There were thin bands of small pebbles and different colored sand and other materials that stood out in sharp contrast to the rest of the clay! I broke the clay off and scraped the material from the little lenses into my pan. There was a good stand of water in the cut already as the many springs from the hillside were busy filling the excavation because the pumps had been moved downstream to the new site.

As I mixed the material in the pan with my fingers, I could not only feel little rounded pebbles, but gritty pieces of rougher stuff. This can be a good sign. So, I worked the material in the pan until the clay cloud rising from the dirt had mostly stopped. Then, I set to panning.

It didn’t take long to pan the material down, as there wasn’t very much of it to work. But on this day, I realized that a small amount of material doesn’t always mean a small catch of gold. The center of the crease of the pan was lined with pickers! Of course, I couldn’t believe it. It had to be a fluke, right? So, I carved off some more clay from the hole I’d started, scraped all the material I could find from the lenses into my pan and started panning again. More pickers! These weren’t flakes. These were beefy, rounded chunks of gold.

Fired up now, I decided I’d dig down to see how deep the lenses ran in the clay. Below about eight inches, there was nothing but solid clay of a much harder variety. In the upper layer, the little pockets of pay were indeed irregular, composed of little lenses randomly salted within the top eight inches of the clay. Some deposits were three inches long, with the longest being about six inches long. They varied from a quarter to a half an inch in thickness. Moreover, I have no idea what Mother Nature was up those untold eons ago, but there had to have been some massive, mixing occurrence that churned down through that bedrock canyon to generate enough force to pack those gold carrying lenses inside inside that clay.

I started skimming the clay hoping to find runs of material that were a bit longer, but try as I did, all I could find were those small pockets, irregularly deposited in the upper portion of the clay.

However, after I’d exhausted what I could find through my hit and miss tactics, my gold bottle had a much deeper growl and it had that wonderful dense heft that only gold can provide.

The next year I went back with my metal detector, the Minelab 2100, as I wanted to run the coil over that clay to detect for pockets I’d missed with my haphazard dig and discover method, but Mother Nature had reclaimed the workings. For instead of an open pit excavation on a high bench placer, the area was now a duck pond, running about fifty yards long, filled with eight to ten feet of sparkling blue spring water.

Whatever rests in those strange deposits in the clay, waits there still.

All the best,

Lanny

 

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[EagleDown]

As usual, a fine provocative story!! As I read it and pictured your description in my mind, I imagined an area of clay, with boulders of various sizes scattered about on it. Then, possibly, a flash-flood coming through and taking the boulders out, leaving the depressions in the clay, from where the boulders had been resting. As the flood continued, (or, the next flood), the gold that was being kidnapped by the water took the opportunity to hide in these depressions. Then of course, over time, the depressions (and the gold) were covered by subsequent water flows.

It might take a few days, but do you think a p500 water pump might be able to pump the water out? They're not so large that it would be terribly difficult to carry in.

Anyway, another adventure well told!! Just waiting for the next one.

Eagle

 

[Lanny in AB]

As usual, a fine provocative story!! As I read it and pictured your description in my mind, I imagined an area of clay, with boulders of various sizes scattered about on it. Then, possibly, a flash-flood coming through and taking the boulders out, leaving the depressions in the clay, from where the boulders had been resting. As the flood continued, (or, the next flood), the gold that was being kidnapped by the water took the opportunity to hide in these depressions. Then of course, over time, the depressions (and the gold) were covered by subsequent water flows.

It might take a few days, but do you think a p500 water pump might be able to pump the water out? They're not so large that it would be terribly difficult to carry in.

Anyway, another adventure well told!! Just waiting for the next one.

Eagle

Thanks for your kind comments Eagle.

The problem isn't with pumping the site out, it's where the water would have to be discharged, and the only place to run the water would be straight down the hillside into the river, picking up sediment all the way down the 100 or so foot drop, and that's a big no, no, of course, as would be discharging the water from the pit directly into the river. The settling ponds were removed after the mining was finished, as that's where we pumped the water from the excavation (to stay ahead of the seepage) while they were working it.

Bejay had a great suggestion to take in my hooka outfit and to mount the outfit on a flotation device, then use the pressure water fitting from the pump to cut away at the clay to expose the pockets after locating them with my underwater detector. Other than doing something underwater, there aren't many options open to me, and that's if and when I make the long, long trek back up there, but it is still on my bucket list to hit that spot at least once more, so we'll see.

I think I'm getting kind of soft these days, as I enjoy working the gold without the hordes of bugs that frequent the northlands. The only things I have to put up with now, from the bug family, are the occasional horsefly (smaller variety, of course), and every once in a while, a mosquito hatch that's easily held in line with some bug dope laced with Deet, applied a couple of times a day, rather than the liberal dousing every couple of hours required up north.

Have you taken advantage of the low water levels in California to get in some good sniping? Or, has that opportunity fled?

All the best,

Lanny

 

[EagleDown]

Ah, I didn't know about the settling ponds. Darn shame. I haven't really had any oportunities to get out for awhile. We've been having such foul weather for the last month or so. Now, the opportunity might be gone for awhile as it's still pouring rain as I type this. On another promising note, I ran across records of an old mine that closed down in the '40s. According to the records, they were not only getting 'sub-surface' gold, but also surface gold. Whenever the weather lets up, I'll be heading up that way with my MXT and TDI. I'm sure they must have left a little for me. (lol)

 

[Lanny in AB]

Ah, I didn't know about the settling ponds. Darn shame. I haven't really had any oportunities to get out for awhile. We've been having such foul weather for the last month or so. Now, the opportunity might be gone for awhile as it's still pouring rain as I type this. On another promising note, I ran across records of an old mine that closed down in the '40s. According to the records, they were not only getting 'sub-surface' gold, but also surface gold. Whenever the weather lets up, I'll be heading up that way with my MXT and TDI. I'm sure they must have left a little for me. (lol)

I certainly hope you're able to find some of what they left just for you.

They always leave something behind, and it's a good thing because it keeps things interesting.

The biggest myth out there is that because someone quit working a mine (placer or hard rock), that there's nothing left to be found.

So, I for one am glad they did leave interesting finds.

All the best, and I hope you have a successful outing when the rain stops,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html

 

[kazcoro]

Drift Mine Part IV

Did I mention the bugs? I would be doing every would-be northern prospector a great disservice if I didn’t mention the bugs. The bugs are absolutely horrific, and that’s not hyperbole or over exaggeration for effect! The flying bloodsuckers have only one goal, to liberate your body of its blood supply. Moreover, the bugs come in an array of sizes too. Take horseflies, for instance. People say it’s an exaggeration that up north the horseflies are the size of cats or small dogs. That’s ridiculous. Anyone that’s ever tramped through the northern woods knows that the horseflies are way bigger than cats and dogs. Otherwise, how could two of them carry off a full-grown bull moose? Or, how could they flip a D-8 Cat over to drag out the operator that’s hiding underneath? The size of cats and dogs? What nonsense. Regardless of any myths you’ve heard, I just thought I should give you a heads-up about the real size of the bugs, just in case book learning had filled your heads with nonsense.

The next day when I went back to the pit where they’d broken through and hit the old drift tunnels, the boys had pulled all of their equipment and vacated the dig. They’d moved downstream about 300 yards, and they were busy stripping boulder clay to get at the rest of the Tertiary channel they’d tapped where I was now standing. Moreover, the ground was so rich in that particular area that the boulder clay was honeycombed with tunnels driven up from the river by the Old-Timers, following the contours of the rising bedrock, back in the 1800’s. As well, the area saw a resurgence of activity in the 1930’s as miners could make enough working in the summers to feed their families through the long winters. Even though it was backbreaking work, the effort not only kept them from starving, but it required no reliance on government handouts.

Those Sourdoughs were a tough, tough breed.

So, there I was with the entire pit to myself, and permission to do whatever I pleased. However, in sad retrospect, what I didn’t have with me at that time was a metal detector, and because of that, the place haunts me to this day. Moreover, as I move along with my tale, you’ll see why.

The blue sky was a welcome sight after the three days of overcast conditions. The sun was warm on my back and was already removing the chill from the morning air. A couple of humming birds fought each other as they squabbled for the rights to a stand of mountain flowers. Pines and firs had scented the air with their perfect aroma of alpine magic.

Breaking the spell, I dropped down into the pit carrying my pick, a couple of pans, my shovel, and of course, my gold bottle. Due to some great panning around those pillars and posts, I already had a nice collection of nuggets and pickers in my bottle, and the gold made a nice growl as I spun the bottle’s contents around. To me, there’s nothing better than the sound of sassy nuggets and chunky gold, captured in the bottle.

I strolled through the pit, examining what material was left. On the south end, they’d excavated several feet into the bedrock because it was highly fractured, so there was no material left there to pan. While I walked the length of the cut, rocks were sluffing from the loose glacial till far above the boulder clay, for the wall above the excavation rose steeply up the canyon side about eighty feet. Therefore, those tumbling rocks had a lot of time to pick up speed. Sadly, panning the margins of the cut where the excavation met the boulder clay would be far too dangerous; however, the memory was with me still of the visitor three days earlier, an uncle to one of the miners, that had plucked a four-gram nugget from the seam after he’d eyeballed it. Reluctantly, regardless of the lure of the gold in that ancient channel capped by the huge wall of boulder clay, I let reason rule and worked my way back to the north end where the big equipment had broken open the old drifts.

Furthermore, the north end was dramatically different from the southern portion. There was a layer of clay covering the last third of the cut. The miners had stripped down into the clay with their excavator until there was no more sign of any river run. The clay was smooth and slick where the bucket had done its excellent work, and what remained was nothing more than an ancient armor layer, as everyone knows that gold can’t get through clay. Nonetheless, I remembered reading in a book once about a prospector that had dug through the armor clay to see what was underneath, and what he’d found was worth his dig. So, I had nothing to lose, and I decided I’d give it a try.

It was easy digging with the shovel, as the metal cut smoothly into the clay. I lifted the contents out of the hole (I’d gone down about six inches), and I saw something out of the ordinary. There were thin bands of small pebbles and different colored sand and other materials that stood out in sharp contrast to the rest of the clay! I broke the clay off and scraped the material from the little lenses into my pan. There was a good stand of water in the cut already as the many springs from the hillside were busy filling the excavation because the pumps had been moved downstream to the new site.

As I mixed the material in the pan with my fingers, I could not only feel little rounded pebbles, but gritty pieces of rougher stuff. This can be a good sign. So, I worked the material in the pan until the clay cloud rising from the dirt had mostly stopped. Then, I set to panning.

It didn’t take long to pan the material down, as there wasn’t very much of it to work. But on this day, I realized that a small amount of material doesn’t always mean a small catch of gold. The center of the crease of the pan was lined with pickers! Of course, I couldn’t believe it. It had to be a fluke, right? So, I carved off some more clay from the hole I’d started, scraped all the material I could find from the lenses into my pan and started panning again. More pickers! These weren’t flakes. These were beefy, rounded chunks of gold.

Fired up now, I decided I’d dig down to see how deep the lenses ran in the clay. Below about eight inches, there was nothing but solid clay of a much harder variety. In the upper layer, the little pockets of pay were indeed irregular, composed of little lenses randomly salted within the top eight inches of the clay. Some deposits were three inches long, with the longest being about six inches long. They varied from a quarter to a half an inch in thickness. Moreover, I have no idea what Mother Nature was up those untold eons ago, but there had to have been some massive, mixing occurrence that churned down through that bedrock canyon to generate enough force to pack those gold carrying lenses inside inside that clay.

I started skimming the clay hoping to find runs of material that were a bit longer, but try as I did, all I could find were those small pockets, irregularly deposited in the upper portion of the clay.

However, after I’d exhausted what I could find through my hit and miss tactics, my gold bottle had a much deeper growl and it had that wonderful dense heft that only gold can provide.

The next year I went back with my metal detector, the Minelab 2100, as I wanted to run the coil over that clay to detect for pockets I’d missed with my haphazard dig and discover method, but Mother Nature had reclaimed the workings. For instead of an open pit excavation on a high bench placer, the area was now a duck pond, running about fifty yards long, filled with eight to ten feet of sparkling blue spring water.

Whatever rests in those strange deposits in the clay, waits there still.

All the best,

Lanny

I truly think that you have walked away from more gold than I will ever see in my lifetime.

 

[Lanny in AB]

Kazcoro,

The thing about gold is that you never know when you're going to stumble across a find, or where you're going to run into one. So, who knows, as you stick with it, you may be the person one day that finds far more gold than I ever have or will. At least, that's what I hope will happen for you.

All the best as you keep chasing the gold,

Lanny

 

[Brivic1]

G'day Lanny, I tried to send you these in a pm.

can you, or anyone else tell me if #1, #2 look like a tertiary river area[ 60 feet wide with redish soil on either side, and it would have been flowing about N/S ] As apposed to 3 and 4 which I googled as pyroclactic mudflow. Brian

 

[jair]

G'day Lanny, I tried to send you these in a pm. can you, or anyone else tell me if #1, #2 look like a tertiary river area[ 60 feet wide with redish soil on either side, and it would have been flowing about N/S ] As apposed to 3 and 4 which I googled as pyroclactic mudflow. Brian<img src="http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=970524"/><img src="http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=970525"/><img src="http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=970526"/><img src="http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=970527"/>

I know you didn't ask this of me . But it looks more like mud flows rather then river . the material is not rounded it has sharp edges on the ( the stones ) .

 

[Oakview2]

Lanny could you dredge this hole, using a blaster nozzle to cut through the clay?

 

[Lanny in AB]

Lanny could you dredge this hole, using a blaster nozzle to cut through the clay?

That's definitely a possibility, but the discharge dropping back into the hole would soon have me working in zero vis right quick I'd think. But, I like your suggestion, and thanks for posting your solution. I appreciate it.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

G'day Lanny, I tried to send you these in a pm.

can you, or anyone else tell me if #1, #2 look like a tertiary river area[ 60 feet wide with redish soil on either side, and it would have been flowing about N/S ] As apposed to 3 and 4 which I googled as pyroclactic mudflow. Brian/QUOTE]

I PM'd you Brivic. I hope you'll find an answer to your mystery.

Perhaps post your pictures over on the gold prospecting main forum and someone with far more experience will undoubtedly be able to help you.

All the best as you search for your answers,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

I know you didn't ask this of me . But it looks more like mud flows rather then river . the material is not rounded it has sharp edges on the ( the stones ) .

I'm glad you dropped in to help out. Always feel welcome to jump in with an answer. That's what TNET is all about, helping each other out. At least, I believe that's its greatest strength.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[jair]

I'm glad you dropped in to help out. Always feel welcome to jump in with an answer. That's what TNET is all about, helping each other out. At least, I believe that's its greatest strength. All the best, Lanny

if you think there is possibly any thing in it . brake some out and crush it and pan it down . I would do several areas Just to be sure you have convinced your self one way or another . Nothing like checking an area and some one ells comes a long in the same spot and finds a good prospect .

 

[Lanny in AB]

If you get lucky, you can sometimes get a signal on a nugget in material like that as well, that's if the run was gold-bearing, of course. But if you hit a nugget checking that type of material that way, you might be in for a real bonanza.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Oakview2]

Skip the blaster, point sluice toward discharge ponds, when empty get to detecting. And then post pics on TNET

That's definitely a possibility, but the discharge dropping back into the hole would soon have me working in zero vis right quick I'd think. But, I like your suggestion, and thanks for posting your solution. I appreciate it.

All the best,

 

[Lanny in AB]

Skip the blaster, point sluice toward discharge ponds, when empty get to detecting. And then post pics on TNET

That's definitely a possibility, but the discharge dropping back into the hole would soon have me working in zero vis right quick I'd think. But, I like your suggestion, and thanks for posting your solution. I appreciate it.

All the best,

Too funny! However, I do catch your drift.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Hot-rock Insanity, Part IV

So, I now had a nice nugget in the poke.

And, as usually happens when I’m out on a nugget hunt, I start to believe that I should be able to find another nugget. (It’s that nugget herd mentality, or nugget pack affinity, or something.)

As a result, I worked my way up the ramp, getting signal after signal, and finding piece after piece of trash. Sometimes it was a bit of bucket blade from the excavator, other times it was razor-sharp pieces from the rollers of the track, and yet at other times, it was round nails of the same size.

The rounds came from the 1930’s when someone was doing something to try to get the gold out from among those massive boulders. Moreover, they were burning a lot of those wooden structures that had round nails in them as well, and from time to time I’d find pockets of charcoal containing rusted, fire-discolored nails. What they were up to I have no idea, but it required a lot of digging to clear the ramp of their experimental trash.

At last, I was at the top of the ramp. The excavator sat there still, on its pad, the area they’d built so they could excavate the loose material from in between the rows of boulders.

I remember there were raspberry bushes growing off to the sides by the boulders, and the berries were nice and ripe. I don’t know about you, but every chance I get to feast on some wild berries (that I like), I’m always up for it. (That is with the exception of Salmon berries in Alaska. Forget that! Those things are nasty. Someone was probably playing a joke on me by getting me to eat those disgusting things in the first place, as I can’t imagine anyone eating them out of any kind of like.)

After scouring the bushes for zippy raspberries for a bit, and after getting a nice shot of cool water in me, I put my feet up for a while to contemplate life. The sky that day was a perfect blue. Every cloud had fled, and the sun was packing a lot of that heavy summer heat. Once again, the boulders were acting like a reflector oven, bouncing all of those sizzling waves back and forth between them, making the entire detecting zone much hotter than the far off cool areas of the green pines and firs that sheltered the slopes of the mountains that protected the boulder bowl I was hunting in.

As I was now quite rested and ready to have at it again, I flipped on the GPX 5000, ran the EMI check, tested the ground balance once more, verified to make sure the connections were tight on the little round sniper coil I was using, adjusted my headphones, and off I went to see what might be on the pad.

I decided on detecting the pad as my buddy and his friends had detected the excavation very meticulously, but when I asked him about the pad, he admitted he hadn’t thought about checking the pad, as there was so much trash on it. And, he was right: there was a lot of trash. Because of that, I was very happy to have the super-magnet on my pick. That magnet saves a crazy amount of time when ID’ing targets.

Moreover, the pad had all of the garden-variety trash of the ramp, with the addition of bits of wire, and instead of the same nail sizes as the ramp, there had been seeded a large variety of nail sizes, just to keep things interesting.

After I’d cleared the trash and tossed away umpteen hot-rocks, I slowed down and listened carefully. I got a whisper, scraped the surface, the whisper was now a faint tone, scraped again, now there was a definite signal. I did the dig and sift technique thing to get the target in the scoop, and then I shook what material remained in the scoop onto the coil. Whap! Growl!!

I moved the dirt around and the target growled again. I could see it now, but everything was the same color, that unremarkable tan clay color which coats everything in that particular deposit. Continuing, I isolated the target and dropped it into my cupped hand.

It was heavy, but it had what appeared to be a fold line running across the one side of it. I immediately thought of an electrical connection. The one thing I had not yet found that day.

By this time, I was hot and tired again. I’d dug a lot of worthless trash. I dropped my fist over my shoulder and was ready to toss the target into the boulders, but I stopped just before I committed, and instead decided I’d use a little water just to make sure.

I’m glad I did.

It was not an old electrical fitting that had been smashed flat. (The heat had warped my brain a bit, I think.) It was a nugget with a natural crease line in it.

Well, that fired me up, and you can’t make this up, but six inches over from that nugget in just a few swings, I got another break in the threshold. I did the same scrape and detect, scrape and detect routine as before and soon had another nugget almost the same size as the one I’d almost thrown away.

They were about half the size of my fingernails, all three of them, and they were all flat, (but still with thickness) which is understandable, as that giant boulder-mill would flatten any gold that was brave enough to run with it.

When I dropped into camp to show my buddy the three nuggets, he was quite surprised. He asked me where in the excavations I’d found them. When I told him I didn’t find them in the excavations, he wondered if I’d found some virgin dirt among the boulders (which still happens). But, when I told him I’d found them on the ramp and on the pad, he just shook his head, as he knew how much trash there must have been in either of those areas.

Well, truth be told, there was a lot of trash on that ramp and pad, and far too many hot-rocks were gathered in that hot-rock insanity zone, but once I’d gotten the area quieted down, that’s when I was able to hear the soft sound of the gold.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Tree!]

Lanny, your resilience is admirable. Trash is so demoralizing! Thanks for setting the good example of a dedicated miner.
Great story! It's a dream of mine to take on the great north where you place your stories.
Dan

 

[Oakview2]

I remember Eagle telling the story of Miner Pete building fires under boulders to big to move, after they were good and hot, pour cold creek water on them to split them into manageable pieces. He was drift mining old channel material along the Merced river. Perhaps they were using scrap wood to trying to do the same.

Hot-rock Insanity, Part IV

So, I now had a nice nugget in the poke.

And, as usually happens when I’m out on a nugget hunt, I start to believe that I should be able to find another nugget. (It’s that nugget herd mentality, or nugget pack affinity, or something.)

As a result, I worked my way up the ramp, getting signal after signal, and finding piece after piece of trash. Sometimes it was a bit of bucket blade from the excavator, other times it was razor-sharp pieces from the rollers of the track, and yet at other times, it was round nails of the same size.

The rounds came from the 1930’s when someone was doing something to try to get the gold out from among those massive boulders. Moreover, they were burning a lot of those wooden structures that had round nails in them as well, and from time to time I’d find pockets of charcoal containing rusted, fire-discolored nails. What they were up to I have no idea, but it required a lot of digging to clear the ramp of their experimental trash.

At last, I was at the top of the ramp. The excavator sat there still, on its pad, the area they’d built so they could excavate the loose material from in between the rows of boulders.

I remember there were raspberry bushes growing off to the sides by the boulders, and the berries were nice and ripe. I don’t know about you, but every chance I get to feast on some wild berries (that I like), I’m always up for it. (That is with the exception of Salmon berries in Alaska. Forget that! Those things are nasty. Someone was probably playing a joke on me by getting me to eat those disgusting things in the first place, as I can’t imagine anyone eating them out of any kind of like.)

After scouring the bushes for zippy raspberries for a bit, and after getting a nice shot of cool water in me, I put my feet up for a while to contemplate life. The sky that day was a perfect blue. Every cloud had fled, and the sun was packing a lot of that heavy summer heat. Once again, the boulders were acting like a reflector oven, bouncing all of those sizzling waves back and forth between them, making the entire detecting zone much hotter than the far off cool areas of the green pines and firs that sheltered the slopes of the mountains that protected the boulder bowl I was hunting in.

As I was now quite rested and ready to have at it again, I flipped on the GPX 5000, ran the EMI check, tested the ground balance once more, verified to make sure the connections were tight on the little round sniper coil I was using, adjusted my headphones, and off I went to see what might be on the pad.

I decided on detecting the pad as my buddy and his friends had detected the excavation very meticulously, but when I asked him about the pad, he admitted he hadn’t thought about checking the pad, as there was so much trash on it. And, he was right: there was a lot of trash. Because of that, I was very happy to have the super-magnet on my pick. That magnet saves a crazy amount of time when ID’ing targets.

Moreover, the pad had all of the garden-variety trash of the ramp, with the addition of bits of wire, and instead of the same nail sizes as the ramp, there had been seeded a large variety of nail sizes, just to keep things interesting.

After I’d cleared the trash and tossed away umpteen hot-rocks, I slowed down and listened carefully. I got a whisper, scraped the surface, the whisper was now a faint tone, scraped again, now there was a definite signal. I did the dig and sift technique thing to get the target in the scoop, and then I shook what material remained in the scoop onto the coil. Whap! Growl!!

I moved the dirt around and the target growled again. I could see it now, but everything was the same color, that unremarkable tan clay color which coats everything in that particular deposit. Continuing, I isolated the target and dropped it into my cupped hand.

It was heavy, but it had what appeared to be a fold line running across the one side of it. I immediately thought of an electrical connection. The one thing I had not yet found that day.

By this time, I was hot and tired again. I’d dug a lot of worthless trash. I dropped my fist over my shoulder and was ready to toss the target into the boulders, but I stopped just before I committed, and instead decided I’d use a little water just to make sure.

I’m glad I did.

It was not an old electrical fitting that had been smashed flat. (The heat had warped my brain a bit, I think.) It was a nugget with a natural crease line in it.

Well, that fired me up, and you can’t make this up, but six inches over from that nugget in just a few swings, I got another break in the threshold. I did the same scrape and detect, scrape and detect routine as before and soon had another nugget almost the same size as the one I’d almost thrown away.

They were about half the size of my fingernails, all three of them, and they were all flat, (but still with thickness) which is understandable, as that giant boulder-mill would flatten any gold that was brave enough to run with it.

When I dropped into camp to show my buddy the three nuggets, he was quite surprised. He asked me where in the excavations I’d found them. When I told him I didn’t find them in the excavations, he wondered if I’d found some virgin dirt among the boulders (which still happens). But, when I told him I’d found them on the ramp and on the pad, he just shook his head, as he knew how much trash there must have been in either of those areas.

Well, truth be told, there was a lot of trash on that ramp and pad, and far too many hot-rocks were gathered in that hot-rock insanity zone, but once I’d gotten the area quieted down, that’s when I was able to hear the soft sound of the gold.

All the best,

Lanny