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.

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

Family Maps of Hinds County, Mississippi, Deluxe Edition - Grab it through Amazon!

[crashbandicoot]

Suction Eddy Gold, Part I

I prospected a river quite a while back. It was far to the north, down in a steep canyon lined with lots of alders, pine, and fir. Rugged slopes led down to the stream, and I was trying to find a spot where I could detect or pan for some of the nice coarse gold the area was known for.

I took a wrong step and got smacked in the face by an alder while trying to get down to what was clearly an active suction eddy during Spring Flood.

The eddy was straight down the mountain slope from where an old placer tunnel went in, about a hundred feet up slope. The mine (called a “drift” mine by the locals) went into the mountain on a bedrock hump, about seventy feet above the river. The Oldtimers had seen the hump and drifted toward it along the up-sloping bedrock that rose from the river, hitting the hump then driving underneath about fifty feet of boulder clay (almost exclusively clay, yet sprinkled with boulders and lesser rock dumped from the long gone Ice Age glaciers). [The mine entrance is still there, but the tunnel is caved in.]

Some modern miners had come in with big equipment and made a road around that bedrock point on the hill, cutting into the bedrock as they widened the road, while slicing across the drift mine entrance.

Now, what a dummy I was--I didn't detect that scraped off bedrock hump where the drift mine had gone in! Instead, I went over to the entrance, and hauled several heavy buckets of material down to the river to pan.

What a miserable time I had getting those buckets down to the river, skidding down that 30 to 40-degree slope covered in broken bedrock and loose cobbles. Fun? Not as much fun as a double root canal, but just about. Still, I was way over the legal-limit for fun.

Every bucket held gold, but only flakes. And, as I was chasing coarse gold, after lugging three five-gallon buckets of clay goo from the mine entrance to the river, I'd had enough fun.

But, since the eddy I’d picked to prospect was exactly below that bedrock hump, I dropped into the spot, a truck-box sized hole high water had cut into the river bank. It was littered with bread-loaf sized cobbles.

I was in my own little enclave down there, and I couldn't be seen from the equipment-trail above, nor could I be seen from up or down the river on my side of the stream.

I had packed down my old VLF detector and a shovel with me. I fired up the detector and scanned the cobbled section. I immediately got a loud signal.

I chucked a load of bread-loaf cobbles into the river and scanned again. The target was still there. Moving the underlying loose stuff, I exposed a nice square nail. What the . . .? That wasn't what I wanted, but square nails were everywhere on that bank!

Well, being the dimwit that I was, I never made the connection this was a good sign (heavies dropping out during flood stage). So, I scanned more bank, got more signals, then gave up detecting because I KNEW every signal was a square nail. (Dumb yes, but I was quite a rookie back then.)

I cleared the rest of the loose stuff from under the cobbles and chucked the stream-run back into a hole (eight-foot deep) in the river. That hole lay downstream from a series of bedrock drops, it being the only calm water in a long stretch. This clue should also have lit up my gold-getting brain, but my rookie mind was a steel trap, and once shut, no helpful gold logic was getting in.

What I found after clearing the overburden was friable rock standing over a layer of soft decomposing bedrock. So, I scraped the shingle-like pieces off and panned it all out. Immediately I had coarse gold in my pan! What the . . .? My rookie brain began to make connections.

All along that eight-foot section of bedrock, there was fantastic, coarse and sassy gold!

Sitting down, I looked at that river eddy excavation. The bedrock, where the eddy had dumped the heavies, rose up into the bank. At that moment, my brain finally made another connection. (Part II to follow)

All the best,

Lanny

Good one,can,t wait for part 2.

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

A History of Mining on the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska - Grab it through Amazon!

[Lanny in AB]

Suction Eddy Gold, Part II

My brain at last connected that directly above me was the bedrock hump, and here was steeply rising bedrock trending in the same direction. Talk about a cross-wired brain (and one snapped shut, remember?)!

In hindsight, the eddy exposed a shelf that must have connected to the hump. Of course, there were tons and tons of overburden between me, the rest of that rising bedrock, and the hump. Anyway, my brain at last tuned in, and I scraped the exposed bedrock and sluiced the remaining material. (I had an aluminum river sluice in my vehicle up on the cat-trail. Freighting it down to the river, I had a near-death experience from the header I took while taking what I thought was a short-cut; however, I made it to the river in one piece.)

I started sluicing. The first shovel of dirt produced an instant nugget. It was around two grams, and L-shaped. It didn't even get into the first riffle. It just hit and sat in the header, sparking golden in the summer sunlight.

I sluiced the remaining dirt and recovered chunky gold throughout. It was getting dark, and I didn’t want to leave, but I’ve no love for mountain lions or grizzlies. So, I headed back to the safe, comfortable log cabin I called home in that northern land. (On a side note, I need to mention it had been raining for three days straight prior to my first find on the river. This helps explain upcoming details.)

When I floundered my way downslope through the much safer face-slapping route the next morning, I saw the river had dropped about four inches. Seeing a fresh, soft bedrock edge exposed by the lower waterline, I was suddenly stunned. There, winking in the morning sun, was a nugget! (A little sunbather taking advantage of the new beach so to speak.) My mind, now wide-open to prospecting lore, started calculating what had likely happened at the site.

I reflected that there was consistent gold right up to the boulder clay on the bank where the suction eddy had torn into it. Moreover, that gold was being drug down into the pool. So, I scraped with my shovel out into the pool as far as I could I could, but the bedrock dropped off quite sharply into that eight-feet of water. As well, for any that have scraped off river run, while fighting hydraulic pressure, it's tough-sledding indeed.

In spite of the challenge, the coarse gold that came up from the submerged river-run was spectacular! By the time I'd retrieved all the material I could, I had a quarter-ounce of nice rounded coarse gold, and several nice sassy nuggets to boot.

So, what’s the analysis of that suction eddy gold deposit? Well, those early square nail finds were everywhere because the suction eddy had plucked them from flood-level waters, and the bedrock held them fast. Cleary, the gold was yanked from the flood water along with the nails as well. But, the haunting reality to me now is that a whack of those “square nail signals” were feisty nuggets! This leaves me with the uncomfortable reality that what the heck did I throw into that eight-foot-deep pool as I cleared the overburden?

What the heck indeed. . . .

All the best,

Lanny in AB


[Author's note: I heard the next year that some dredgers went into that pool. One of the mine-workers had seen my truck parked on the trail, had walked down to the river to investigate after I'd left, had seen the suction eddy as well as my diggings, and he sent his buddies the next year to dredge the spot. Well, they had a field day in that hole and took out ounces of coarse gold! As I reflect now, It's clear to me that the suction eddy had cut into an old channel that trended up the river bank to that old drift mine. (Likely how the Oldtimers had found the higher deposit of gold in the 1800’s.) This gold tale is just one of my missed opportunities that still haunt me.]

 

[Lanny in AB]

An explanation on the nature of boulder clay, and glacial gold action

People have asked me what boulder clay is. Well, the only explanation I have comes from local knowledge shared with me by the placer miners in the northlands.

When the glaciers were running many miles deep, and countless miles wide during the ice age, they dragged unsized rock and soil with them. They packed along serious boulders mixed within stubborn clay. While parked and melting, or when melting and retreating, they dumped this nasty mess all over the lower areas, as well as the mountains and valleys. To understand this, it’s necessary to remember those huge glaciers were miles thick, covering many mountains completely.

With such titanic forces moving these glaciers, and when they dropped their loads, they often left forty feet and more of this boulder clay which smothered the existing stream beds. This protected any golden stream deposits for untold eons. Over countless thousands of years, successive glaciers and post-glacial streams chewed away at the boulder clay in the canyons, erosion working its way down to those hidden deposits. When they cut into that former river-run (freshly exposed), they started re-concentrating the gold in those existing streams.

Sometimes, the early prospectors got lucky enough to find a bedrock outcrop that was the rim protecting an ancient channel from glacial gouging along a river, and then they’d tunnel in, drifting along the bedrock to mine out the deposit under the huge deposits of adjacent boulder clay bordering the streams.

So, boulder clay (sometimes called armour clay), is a solid deposit of boulders and heavy clay that overlies old stream deposits and ancient channels. It is the bane of modern miners, as it has to be stripped away to get at the channels underneath, and it often requires ripper teeth on the back of huge bulldozers to break it up sufficiently so it can be bladed out of the way. Clearly, it takes a lot of time and money to strip it off.

But, once that overburden is stripped away, and if the Oldtimer's haven't beaten the modern miners to the deposits underneath, it is sometimes a glorious bonanza to behold! The nuggets in the sidewalls of the channel are easily seen (a foot or two off the bedrock). I’ll never forget that incredible sight twice seen: multi-gram nuggets spaced eight to ten inches apart, making it easy to finger-flip the nuggets out of the channel material into a pan. Too bad those nuggets weren't mine to keep!

All the best,

Lanny

 

[crashbandicoot]

Suction Eddy Gold, Part II

My brain at last connected that directly above me was the bedrock hump, and here was steeply rising bedrock trending in the same direction. Talk about a cross-wired brain (and one snapped shut, remember?)!

In hindsight, the eddy exposed a shelf that must have connected to the hump. Of course, there were tons and tons of overburden between me, the rest of that rising bedrock, and the hump. Anyway, my brain at last tuned in, and I scraped the exposed bedrock and sluiced the remaining material. (I had an aluminum river sluice in my vehicle up on the cat-trail. Freighting it down to the river, I had a near-death experience from the header I took while taking what I thought was a short-cut; however, I made it to the river in one piece.)

I started sluicing. The first shovel of dirt produced an instant nugget. It was around two grams, and L-shaped. It didn't even get into the first riffle. It just hit and sat in the header, sparking golden in the summer sunlight.

I sluiced the remaining dirt and recovered chunky gold throughout. It was getting dark, and I didn’t want to leave, but I’ve no love for mountain lions or grizzlies. So, I headed back to the safe, comfortable log cabin I called home in that northern land. (On a side note, I need to mention it had been raining for three days straight prior to my first find on the river. This helps explain upcoming details.)

When I floundered my way downslope through the much safer face-slapping route the next morning, I saw the river had dropped about four inches. Seeing a fresh, soft bedrock edge exposed by the lower waterline, I was suddenly stunned. There, winking in the morning sun, was a nugget! (A little sunbather taking advantage of the new beach so to speak.) My mind, now wide-open to prospecting lore, started calculating what had likely happened at the site.

I reflected that there was consistent gold right up to the boulder clay on the bank where the suction eddy had torn into it. Moreover, that gold was being drug down into the pool. So, I scraped with my shovel out into the pool as far as I could I could, but the bedrock dropped off quite sharply into that eight-feet of water. As well, for any that have scraped off river run, while fighting hydraulic pressure, it's tough-sledding indeed.

In spite of the challenge, the coarse gold that came up from the submerged river-run was spectacular! By the time I'd retrieved all the material I could, I had a quarter-ounce of nice rounded coarse gold, and several nice sassy nuggets to boot.

So, what’s the analysis of that suction eddy gold deposit? Well, those early square nail finds were everywhere because the suction eddy had plucked them from flood-level waters, and the bedrock held them fast. Cleary, the gold was yanked from the flood water along with the nails as well. But, the haunting reality to me now is that a whack of those “square nail signals” were feisty nuggets! This leaves me with the uncomfortable reality that what the heck did I throw into that eight-foot-deep pool as I cleared the overburden?

What the heck indeed. . . .

All the best,

Lanny in AB


[Author's note: I heard the next year that some dredgers went into that pool. One of the mine-workers had seen my truck parked on the trail, had walked down to the river to investigate after I'd left, had seen the suction eddy as well as my diggings, and he sent his buddies the next year to dredge the spot. Well, they had a field day in that hole and took out ounces of coarse gold! As I reflect now, It's clear to me that the suction eddy had cut into an old channel that trended up the river bank to that old drift mine. (Likely how the Oldtimers had found the higher deposit of gold in the 1800’s.) This gold tale is just one of my missed opportunities that still haunt me.]

Nicely done,Easy to visualize what you were seeing and good stuff to file away for future adventures.Thank you for sharing in such a style!

 

[crashbandicoot]

An explanation on the nature of boulder clay, and glacial gold action

People have asked me what boulder clay is. Well, the only explanation I have comes from local knowledge shared with me by the placer miners in the northlands.

When the glaciers were running many miles deep, and countless miles wide during the ice age, they dragged unsized rock and soil with them. They packed along serious boulders mixed within stubborn clay. While parked and melting, or when melting and retreating, they dumped this nasty mess all over the lower areas, as well as the mountains and valleys. To understand this, it’s necessary to remember those huge glaciers were miles thick, covering many mountains completely.

With such titanic forces moving these glaciers, and when they dropped their loads, they often left forty feet and more of this boulder clay which smothered the existing stream beds. This protected any golden stream deposits for untold eons. Over countless thousands of years, successive glaciers and post-glacial streams chewed away at the boulder clay in the canyons, erosion working its way down to those hidden deposits. When they cut into that former river-run (freshly exposed), they started re-concentrating the gold in those existing streams.

Sometimes, the early prospectors got lucky enough to find a bedrock outcrop that was the rim protecting an ancient channel from glacial gouging along a river, and then they’d tunnel in, drifting along the bedrock to mine out the deposit under the huge deposits of adjacent boulder clay bordering the streams.

So, boulder clay (sometimes called armour clay), is a solid deposit of boulders and heavy clay that overlies old stream deposits and ancient channels. It is the bane of modern miners, as it has to be stripped away to get at the channels underneath, and it often requires ripper teeth on the back of huge bulldozers to break it up sufficiently so it can be bladed out of the way. Clearly, it takes a lot of time and money to strip it off.

But, once that overburden is stripped away, and if the Oldtimer's haven't beaten the modern miners to the deposits underneath, it is sometimes a glorious bonanza to behold! The nuggets in the sidewalls of the channel are easily seen (a foot or two off the bedrock). I’ll never forget that incredible sight twice seen: multi-gram nuggets spaced eight to ten inches apart, making it easy to finger-flip the nuggets out of the channel material into a pan. Too bad those nuggets weren't mine to keep!

All the best,

Lanny

This too!!!

 

[Lanny in AB]

Local miners and exploration

Way up north where the wolverines roam, we were out one day cutting firewood, then took off to find drinking water. We found a local spring up the canyon with sweet water whose taste finished with a slight buzz on the tongue, strange, but great stuff.

The next morning, after starting a fire to kill the chill in the wall tent (water in the fire bucket covered in ice), and after a miners’ breakfast cooked on the wood-burning stove, we lathered up with bug-dope, hopped on the ATV, and bounced along the rough, twisting road through pines, fir, and stands of aspen and birch. Fresh yellow and purple mountain flowers grew thick along the road-side. Lazy bumblebees tumbled from flower to flower while butterflies and humming birds sipped nectar as the pleasing smell of new-growth pine filled the air.

The ATV climbed in elevation toward the active upstream placer claims. We stopped and introduced ourselves in every mining camp along the way. Two upstream operations bordered the main logging road, with a total of eight workers. Both operations had exposed old drift mines from the 1800’s and 1930’s.

Staring at those now open tunnels was fascinating, and one of the miners offered to lift me up in the bucket of the excavator if I wanted to poke around inside. But looking at the collapsed and rotting timbering, I passed on his generosity.

The larger of the two placer mines was working upper-strata dirt that ran six grams to the yard, but when they hit bedrock, it ran eight grams to the yard. The bedrock gold was coarse, with nuggets in the half-ounce to ounce-and-a-half range. That coarse gold had tons of character, bumpy and rough. The bedrock that held it was graphite schist and slate.

The other operation was smaller, their equipment much older, with lots of down-time to repair equipment. Moreover, both mines were located where several ancient channels intersected, and the smaller mine was getting the same gorgeous gold. At both locations, the friendly miners shut down their wash-plant and excavation machinery to chat with us.

Both groups of miners invited us to detect their claims whenever we wished. We just had to tell them what we found and where. Furthermore, they told us to keep all the gold we detected, great people! (We went home with some fantastic nuggets thanks to them.)

Leaving the two mines, we took a branch off the main logging road, exploring an inactive logging trail. Along the way, we noticed where old growth trees were cut long ago in the canyon, their massive, moss-covered stumps accompanying the new growth. To our surprise, we found a placer miner far up that trail, located downslope in an adjoining gulch. With an old WWII-era D-8 Cat, he was patiently working a small-scale operation with a pay layer that was six feet off the bedrock. Strangely, there was no gold on the bedrock (lots of pyrite though), yet the gold he was getting was magnificent—some of it was crystalline, and all of it was coarse.

He was a very trusting sort, and at the end of the day, when the cleanup was taken from the wash-plant, he gave us the concentrates and told us to pan them out! (They were loaded with coarse gold.) He left us to keep panning, then headed off to have a bath in his outdoor tub, heated by a clever invention he’d connected to the water-jacket of the engine block of his Gen-Set.

From him, we learned the gold deposits in that area required real detective work. The pay-layers had to found and worked wherever they were; they weren’t deposited in a normal way due to multiple glaciation events. It required forgetting former gold ideas, keeping the mind open so as to accept new techniques and strategies hard-earned by the locals. So, we threw out the idea that gold always concentrated on bedrock and accepted his new teachings.

We spent the entire day exploring, meeting people, and asking lots of questions. While cruising from mine to mine, we also oriented ourselves to our new surroundings. By the time we got back to camp, it was getting dusky (about 11:30 at night). We were both bone tired, not yet recovered from the sketchy trip in to our base camp.

So, back at camp, we were eager to drive the bugs out of the tent by firing up the wood-burning stove, as well as making sure the Winchester 30-30 was loaded for business and within easy reach, just in case an apex predator decided to call.

With the tent nice and warm, we crawled into our sleeping bags, and we drifted off accompanied by the solid heat, and lulling crackle of the logs burning in the stove.

We spent weeks in the area and had many adventures. It is a nugget-shooter’s paradise for sure, and I hope to return one day. But the trip is hard on vehicles and tires, and the air is filled with bugs. So, perhaps I’ll visit one year in the fall, after the frost has knocked the bugs down, and it has firmed the roads up a bit.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Bedrock Drain Gold

Back in March of 2011, I did some reading/research about a goldfield (rare, out-of-print book) that was worked in the 1890's, and found a couple of fascinating accounts.

In one of the references, a company of men was hired to cut a bedrock drain for a hydraulic operation; they cut a trench in solid rock to drain the water to stop the hydraulic wash from pooling, thus stopping the sluicing recovery.

(I've seen cuts like that before, anywhere from 3-4, all the way up to 8-9 feet deep. Deeper ones are rarer.) The cuts discussed in the book were in bedrock that was cleaned, with the pay shallow to bedrock (laying 3-4 feet above), with lots of coarse gold recovered.

The miners had to cut 300 feet of bedrock drain. While cutting the drain, they must have seen pay trapped deep in the bedrock (this has to be implied from the context of the narrative). Moreover, enough gold was found trapped in the bedrock to fund the entire project!

That fact is interesting enough, but later in the chapter, there’s a discussion about the Chinese claim holders and their workings. The Celestials (as they were called) were also working a bedrock area previously cleaned, and yet, with their bedrock drain completed, they recovered 625 ounces of gold!

While reading those stories, it struck me as odd how the Oldtimer's seemingly rushed to work bedrock yet left so much gold behind! That seemed to be the case. However, I reflected on bedrock I've broken and worked by hand, and unless there’s some surface indication of gold under solid bedrock (the Oldtimer's were limited to hand-tools, no electronic advantage), like an obvious crevice to break open, there’s no way I’d cut down into bedrock six to eight feet either!

After reading that out-of-print book, it really made me wonder what might still be buried under the stacked, washed rock and gravel that covers so many areas of bedrock once worked by hand.

Quite the thing to ponder, as the book really jarred me. (Some of you may have had success working such bedrock. I know I’ve chiseled nuggets from bedrock that had no indications of any crevices whatsoever—a perfectly smooth surface. The only indication of gold beneath was given by my metal detector, and the nuggets were sure there, multi-gram beauties to boot.)

All the best,

Lanny

 

[crashbandicoot]

Thank you Lanny.These stories are not only informative, but entertaining and enjoyable as stories in their own right. if you got more,keep em coming!

 

[Lanny in AB]

Rookie Bedrock Gold

Looking back at some earlier writing, I came across a note about a Greenie panning session one day. It illustrates how too many people don't respect bedrock's ability to hold gold.

I was helping a rookie one day who wanted to learn to chase the gold. He'd studied up on the basics of panning. He'd read a lot of books and articles on the subject. He'd seen some videos on techniques and practices, and he was ready to tear up the hills to get some gold.

He really ripped up the dirt. He dug holes on slopes packed with river-run, dug holes on the downstream side of boulders, dug holes in gravel bars, and he dug holes in the stream-bed as well. But, he only got little specks. He was one discouraged greenhorn. All of his book learning and knowledge, and all of his sweat equity produced almost no gold.

I took him back to a spot on the river I’d shown him earlier in the day, right before he set off to light the panning world on fire. While he was gone, I had stayed in that one spot. It was a place where the river had shifted course that spring, and in doing so it had exposed some nice bedrock.

The bedrock was now a foot or so above the water. It didn't look like much, as there was no gravel covering it, and that's why he'd left. He wanted to run a whack of dirt, so he did. But now his back was sore, along with lots of muscles he never knew he had.

As I was panning, he peeked over my shoulder, and I showed him about three tablespoons of material in my gold pan. I’d freed it all from cracks and crevices in the bedrock. I told him how It had taken patience and time to get that tiny pile of material. Still, I could tell by looking at his face he was unimpressed with my small sample of pay-dirt.

After all he'd read, listened to, and watched about prospecting, his head was filled with the grand idea that a good spot had to be a place where you could dig, sort, screen, work and wash volume to find gold.

So, I asked him if wanted to wait while I panned my little bit of paydirt. And, with a pessimistic shrug, he waited.

It took hardly any time before things, beautiful golden things, started peeking through the black sand. And what do you know, lots of fines, nice flake gold and pickers to boot!

In fairness to him, I knew what to look for. This wasn't ordinary bedrock. It had been under the water for ten years at least (the river channel had shifted). However, just being under water wasn't what made it so sweet. Its structure was engineered with hundreds of perpendicular plates, from two to three inches high, bedded on top of more solid bedrock. I knew that these little plates had been sluicing and holding heavies for many years. All I did was clean those riffles out.

There was no movement of volume to get gold that day, just patience, past knowledge, and the understanding to recognize a likely spot.

So, guess what the rookie did the rest of the day? He staked his spot then and there on the bedrock and worked until the sun went to bed. When he stumbled back to camp that night, he had a nice catch of sassy gold, and his very first picker! You'd have thought he'd found the Hand of Faith nugget the way he carried on around the fire, and I was proud of him for what he’d learned and earned.

The lesson in this tale is with bedrock, rookies don't give it the respect it’s due. Most prospecting books don't give it due respect either. Yet, it's one of the most productive places to check to catch a nice little pile of gold, and often enough, a nugget or two.

Too many rookies head off to dig holes, move big rocks, strain muscles, sweat and swear to find a speck or two of gold. But, for a solid shot at getting nice gold in a small area with a small amount of volume, good bedrock can’t be beat.


All the best,

Lanny

 

[delnorter]

Very good bedrock information Lanny. You must keep a small sledge hammer and hard chisel with you for breaking open smooth, seamless, bedrock?
Mike

 

[Lanny in AB]

Very good bedrock information Lanny. You must keep a small sledge hammer and hard chisel with you for breaking open smooth, seamless, bedrock?
Mike

Great to hear from you Mike, and yes I do, along with a variety of recovery tools (various sizes of spoons, scoops, bristle-brush, scrapers, etc.) and a big bar, as often enough, once I get below the seamless surface, and after locating a crack with the detector, the cracks sometimes widen which gives me other options. As for the chisel and small sledge, I've recovered nuggets from a quarter of and inch to inches down trapped in cracks that somehow snapped shut while obviously open during an earlier titanic event.

Thanks for dropping in, and all the best,

Lanny

 

[crashbandicoot]

I,m picking up a lot of stuff here Lanny. Though what I,m going to be hunting isn,t exactly what you have,I can see where the basic principles will apply. Thank you profusely.

 

[Lanny in AB]

Gold Field Invasion

Well, it’s time for another story about the land of bedrock and gold. However, I have to give a backstory before I get into my gold tale (that will be the next story after this one).

I had a chance to head to the goldfields one day. The problem was, I would only be there part of a day, spend the night, and then come right back out.

The main reason for the trip was to head to camp and see how everything had wintered. (I’d tried, but failed to get to camp earlier, due to the ice and snow of the high elevation.) When I arrived, everything looked fine on the outside of the two living quarters. To check the inside, I opened the first one. All was tight and dry, nothing damaged after six months of snowy isolation, high in the cedar and pine covered mountains of the Rockies.

I checked the other outfit to see how it had wintered. As soon as I opened the door, disaster! There were bits of foam all over the floor, and a large corner of the table cushion was torn open, with chunks of foam on the other cushions as well.

Stepping farther inside to look at the sleeping area, the curtains above the windows, on all three sides, had holes torn all along the tops! Some had smaller holes in their mid-sections too. The bed cushions had fragments of the fabric torn loose as well. Yet, there was no strong rodent stench that accompanies a packrat invasion. That stumped me, as the place sure looked like the packrats had hit it.

Stumped, I searched the entire trailer. I found that one of the curtain rods over a side window was knocked loose from its brackets, but that was it.

To see what had happened in invisible places, I removed all the cushions, opened all the forward storage, but found nothing. Even the stash of toilet paper was unmolested, as were all of the other items stored up front.

I checked out the bathroom, but no ratty guests had been there. It was exactly the way I’d left it in the fall.

I opened the drawers by the sink and stove next, a true scene of mayhem. All kinds of organic things were stuffed into them that weren’t there in the fall, with regular items rearranged, all shoved into different drawers. Searching further, I found a nest on the shelf under the sink, a nest the size of a basketball! It was round, made of soft ferns and moss, and the vegetation was fresh and moist.

After, I removed the nest and cleaned the drawers, I opened every space and searched every spot with a powerful flashlight, but no intruders. This only deepened the mystery.

Determined to solve it, I went outside and crawled under the RV with my eye-ball melting flashlight and searched from stem to stern. The bottom was covered in solid metal, no entry points anywhere.

I went back inside to see if I’d missed something. While searching the compartments under the bed, I heard the sound of little running feet above my head. “Oh rats”, I thought. “The home-wrecker must be in the ceiling!” But, as I listened to it running around, it moved far too fast for something plowing through ceiling insulation. So, I hopped outside and quickly climbed to the roof of the other unit to look back to see what was going on.

There on the roof was a squirrel with a pinecone clutched in its paws, all frantic and stressed out, while continually looking over the far edge of the outfit. I hopped down and ran to that far side, and there I saw something I’d completely missed while pulling in to camp. A small spruce was bent over (most likely by heavy snowfall), and it was leaning against the small vent window of the sleeping area. A hole had been torn in the window screen that allowed year-round ventilation. All at once it made sense to me; the break-in mystery was solved.

I had been the victim of a squirrel home invasion, and it had only happened a few days before I’d hit camp or the unit would have been torn to bits. Thank heavens there was no nest of babies to deal with, or worse still, an entire family of squirrels partying inside.

Regardless, it was clear that mama had loads of fun tearing around on my curtains, her fabric amusement ride for a few days. I was so lucky it hadn’t been a packrat, or I’d have had to set fire to the whole outfit. Nothing gets rid of the disgusting smell of packrat.

After I’d secured camp, I only a few hours of daylight left to play with my GPX 5000. But that story will have to wait for another day.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

I posted the following response to a question asked by Bcfromfl about some issues he was having with his VLF on hot bedrock, and on his current purchase of a Minelab PI (4500), so I thought I'd paste it here on my thread as well as a lot of this thread is dedicated to finding gold on/around bedrock:

"I've chased hot signals in the bedrock with my BugPro and found native iron as well as other iron-inclusion hotspots, disappointing after all that hammer and chisel work, especially when on the digital ID it falls in the range of a gold target, but I've also found nuggets that way. When I ran the 5000 over the same spots, most (not all) of the signals disappeared.

If there's enough iron in the bedrock, a detector will signal its presence.

It sure sounds like you were in some streaky-hot bedrock, not much fun to hunt with a VLF when the mineralization is extreme, better to have a PI for sure. Downside to a PI is the limited discrimination, so if you head back and there's lots of trash/metal splinters on/in the bedrock or in the surrounding soil, you'll be doing lots of work recovering and ID'ng those targets (get a magnet on a wand, as it will save TONS of time in trash rich areas), but you have to sort through the trash to get to the gold.

Ignoring the iron/steel targets in such areas is the great strength of a VLF, but if the ground is too hot, make sure you get in all the groundwork possible with that 4500 well before you head to the goldfields so you can learn (as much as is possible) what iron/steel sounds like vs. the generally softer sound of gold or lead.

You'll still get fooled sometimes, but if you work hard at getting hundreds of hours in on your 4500, your brain will remember quite a few things to help you out when you get to gold country. And, having a super-magnet on a wand to quickly fish through the dirt/scrub the bedrock is an amazing time saver for ID'ing iron/steel trash targets.

In addition, watch as many YouTube videos/online posts on how to run that 4500 in gold country.

All the best, and go get some sassy gold!"

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

A little tip about chasing gold signals in the dirt.

Because gold is so heavy, when you're trying to chase a nugget in a pile of loose ground on bedrock or packed clay (with a scoop or by hand), as soon as you disturb the soil, the target drops quickly or hugs the bottom as it slides around. When you're moving the dirt trying to pinpoint the target (with a pin-pointer or coil), any searching movement, and the target slides around, hugging the ground.

You can reproduce similar results by getting chunks of lead (flattened BB's or spent 22 caliber lead) and get a very close result as you try to capture the lead targets in loose soil. Iron or steel pieces and other lighter metals, by comparison, seem to "ride higher" in the dirt, making them easier to capture. They won't have that sluggish slow slide along the bottom that gold does.

I don't know how many times I've experienced this peculiar to gold and heavy metals quirk, it's happened a lot, but I just thought I'd share it, as for me, when I get a sluggish target in the dirt, it can be a good sign.

All the best, and hope you get some nice gold,

Lanny

 

[russau]

Well Lanny , when is your book going to be out? You've got a million stories that people would love to read about , in addition to here on T Net !

 

[Lanny in AB]

Well Lanny , when is your book going to be out? You've got a million stories that people would love to read about , in addition to here on T Net !

Thanks, so kind of you to say that. I really appreciate it.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Vance in AK]

I will GLADLY preorder my copy of the book!

 

[Lanny in AB]

I will GLADLY preorder my copy of the book!

Thanks Vance!

 

[Lanny in AB]

Pesky Black Objects

Having solved the squirrel mystery, I went off to hunt some exposed bedrock nearby. It was beside the main trail in an open spot. There was lots of trash and lots of hot rocks. As well, the bedrock itself was hot, too hot for the VLF’s others had used in the past.

I’d taken out a nice catch of nuggets with my 2100 from that spot in the past. To recap, after I got the first mellow tone, my buddy and chiseled the nuggets out of tight contact-zone crevices. The crevices weren’t cemented shut like other areas where I’d chiseled nuggets out, but they were so tightly pinched together there was no other way to free the nuggets. However, chiseling was a challenge due to the bedrock’s hardness, and sharp fragments flew everywhere while working beside the target signals. I had to block the flying bits (with a tilted gold pan) in case a nugget also went flying.

Armed with my 5000 this time, I wanted to test to see how it handled this spot. I tried different settings, timings, sweep speeds, and various amounts of gain. Sometimes I ran it so noisy it reminded me of the 2100’s screeches on steroids! Other times it ran so smooth, I wondered if it was even working. But, I took my time and scanned every part of the exposed bedrock sheet. I got some very faint signals while experimenting, which were only tiny fragments of steel (and I do mean tiny).

After my fruitless search, I wandered off to a small gulch where the large-scale placer miners had trenched to get a bulk sample, one tight on the bedrock. The material was ancient, all orange and red-stained, good looking stuff. Regardless, working the virgin dirt was a huge frustration.

The frustration came from small pieces of native iron, ones encased in concretions of small rocks and sand, all heavily oxidized and completely black. They gave off good positive signals that drove me crazy. I adjusted the discrimination, fiddled with the tuning, but it was useless. I knew I didn't know the machine well enough. The tones remained as positive dig signals, and I couldn’t blank them out.

After that outing, I wanted to get deep into the contents of my owner’s manual by reading and rereading specific sections in order to fine tune my brain’s interaction with the machine. So, over the next week, I did just that.

Luckily, the following weekend, it paid off.

But, that’s a story for another day.

All the best,

Lanny