Baja Detecting 2019

[Condor]

Dennis and I took a quick trip down to Baja MX for some detecting.  No problems crossing the border at Algodones and no hassles at the military checkpoints.  Day 1 is really just a travel day.  A lot of Baja Highway 5 is still under construction from San Felipe south.  The road got washed out from a storm 2 years ago and the repairs are slow going.  Day 2 we got a good start taking my Rokon and Dennis's Yamaha Fat Tire bike about 3 miles up some tricky technical ground of gravel and calcrete bedrock.  From there it's another 1.5 mile hike to some of the old placer workings.  These placers have been worked off and on for over 100 years so all the easy stuff has been drywashed and detected.  I concentrated on 100 yards of old black schist bedrock.  The nuggets originally worked down into small cracks and got filled up and over by years of weathering.  All of these nuggets had to be chipped out of the bedrock no more than 3 inches deep.  The bedrock is tricky because it has varying levels of mineralization and hot zones that hide the target signals.  I found that by running max Sensitivity and low threshold with the Patch Locate feature I could pick out faint whispers from the background of hot ground.   I picked up probably 10 or 12 nuggets the first day.

Day 3 was a lost day.  I got halfway up the wash when my back tire went flat.  Normally, we carry everything to fix flats, but this one had "chingered" the valve stem.  I had to disconnect the rear chain drive and limp it back to camp on the front drive.  I did a fair amount of walking and pushing through the steep rocky areas. Back at camp I pulled the wheel and drove 70 miles back to San Felipe for repairs.  20 minutes work and $10.00 got it going again.  My day was lost so I drank beer and had an early dinner.

Day 4 I intended to explore a zone about 5 miles from the end of the trail for the Rokon.  I had gotten close last year and although I didn't find any gold, there was a fair amount of old iron trash.  I thought that I just hadn't walked quite far enough to find some virgin ground.  My ideas were dampened a bit on the way up.  I discovered that my newly repaired rear tire couldn't handle the low tire pressure and kept breaking the bead.  We used the Mexican method of setting the bead by pouring some gas inside the tire and hitting it with a match.  Whooomph, bead set, but I still had to run 20lbs of air pressure to keep the bead from breaking down again.  I normally run about 4lbs of air in the Rokon tires since there are no shock absorbers as we know them.  That much tire pressure was making the ride hard as a rock and I hit a rough patch that bounced me high and hard enough that I came unhorsed, landing my ribs on the handlebar.  Ouch is an understatement.  I've got a bruise the size of a softball over 3 of my left ribs.  I gutted it out and still explored the new zone for no joy.  I found 4 small ones on my way back in the bedrock I had worked the day before.  Swinging that pick to break open the bedrock was a new experience with those banged up ribs. 

Day 5 was the travel day home.  You just never know how long the wait line at the border crossing will be.  Sometimes as much as 2 hrs, this time about 45 minutes. 

It's always a good trip when you can walk away from it.  Minor injuries and break downs are all part of the journey.  I'll be ready to do it all again in a week or 2, when these ribs quit hurting. 

 

[LuckyLundy]

Sweet!

Rick

[fredmason]

You two are tough 

[Lunk]

That is some hard won gold!

[matt]

You are a brave person and it paid off! Very nice finds. I don't think I could detect in Mexico with all the banditios and such. Especially with the cartel killings going on.

[Hard Prospector]

Prospecting/detecting in Mexico is and will always be a "high risk-high reward" kind of venue. 

For sure not for everyone

[alaskaseeker]

Very nice gold......