Reporting back on my trip:
I did go out to Nevada for the weekend. It was great weather. A little windy and cool on Friday actually but Saturday was very pleasant if not a little warm. The night was absolutely still, and the stars were beautiful as a camped out in the back of my truck watching the lights pass on I-80 and the moon reflect on Rye Patch Reservoir.
I got to meet Rail Dawg at the Saloon in the evening to chat a bit. Looks like they have real operation going on up there. Seems exciting! I spent Friday evening and Saturday morning trying different spots around the Majuba Placers zone but only dug a few pieces of trash. For the rest of the day, I drove out to the Rosebud district didn't see anything really promising, and then headed over to the Sawtooth knob area, somewhere I've tried twice in the past with no luck. Once again, I left empty-handed.
On the bright side, the drive from Rye Patch to Rosebud was pretty cool, with some green grass in the valleys. It's a very nice wild west feeling out there, and not many people. I saw one motorcyclist heading down from the Jungo rd towards Rosebud and one other detectorist near Sawtooth. I hope he was luckier than I. Seeing old mines and cabins is always a special feeling.
While I have dug one piece of gold found with my detector, Ray Mills put me on the target when I visited him in Redding so I don't really count it as my find. Still hoping for that first piece but it's hard to keep hopeful. Driving all over the mining districts made me realize that I could use some more experienced eyes to give me a clue on where the most likely spots are when detecting. I'm good at finding old workings and doing research, but when it comes to getting on the ground and deciding whether to look at this pile or that or such trench or pit, etc., I have a hard time reconstructing what the mining story was because I'm not that familiar with the equipment and methods. I'm not really confident on telling what was pay vs waste. I tend to assume all my prospecting hunches up to this point have been wrong until I find some gold to confirm them for me.
Owen, glad to see you're still out there swinging your detector.
Biggest piece of advice I can give you is not to quit. If you keep looking in the places where gold's been found in the past, you'll eventually get your coil over a nugget.
As well, it's invaluable to find a local prospector skilled at finding gold in the area you'd like to hunt. If you find one, hang on every word, absorb and record every single tip given, and best of all, get out in the field with them and pound that ground.
I remember many years ago when a buddy of mine, skilled in finding Arizona desert gold, took me on a hunt. He kept showing me spots he felt might hold nuggets (old dry-washing piles). But I kept wandering off to hunt shallow-to-bedrock gulches, which looked to me like better nugget traps.
At the end of the day, I had a pocket full of trash, and he had a beautiful multi-gram nugget he'd pulled from a dry-wash pile!
That was the day I learned a hard lesson that when a local tips you off to where to find the gold, you'd better follow those tips.
I had a similar experience last November hunting nuggets with a local in the desert of Nevada. We were in a historic nugget gulch worked heavily by dry-washers a long time ago. Those discard piles had been hammered with detectors. And, looking upslope of the gulch, the right-hand side was covered by trumpet plants, which often indicate ground with heavies (magnetite). The other side of the gulch had hardly any trumpet plants.
So, I started to hammer the right-hand side, but then my buddy walked by me heading up the gut of the gulch and said, "You know, lots of nuggets have been found on the other side of the gulch." And then, it hit me--I needed to detect the other side and forget about the trumpet plants! Being with a local, I needed to listen, not make another gold-getting mistake.
Not ten minutes later, I'd found a nugget!
All the best,
Lanny
