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First Foray At The Tailings Piles


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Well, I made it out to the tailings piles yesterday for a couple of hours.  I didn't find any gold, but I am convinced there is some out there.  There is a LOT of trash, and it was extremely challenging for a beginning detectorist.  I found a ball peen hammer head, and some iron hanger/bracket thingy.  I also found my first bona fide "hot rock".  I really thought I had a nugget, as the Nox was singing with a solid 1 on the VDI.  However, the little pointy rock below was the culprit.  I also found the larger rock just laying on the surface. It doesn't register any kind of signal, but it is really, REALLY heavy, and looks like it has, to my untrained eye, a lot of iron in it. Any ideas?

I'm starting to understand the coin and relic aspect of detecting, but I am completely clueless on the gold front.  Should I dig all the signals that don't obviously show as ferrous when in all metal mode? 

Think I'm gonna need to take some lessons!  Gerry,  I think I'll be calling you when I finally get back to Idaho.

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You did just fine. My last trip to a hydraulic pit with too many tailings piles to detect in one day, I came back with one tiny piece of gold and over 100 other targets. Over 60 were square nails, modern nails, bits of tin, wire, boot tacks, bottle caps and fragments from the 12" diameter piping from the hydraulic canon. 30 or so were modern aluminum, lead and brass with just a few older lead bullets, bird shot, and two buttons. Long day needless to say but next time those 100+ targets won't be possibly masking some faint gold signals. 

Jeff

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Bashing, get ahold of me from my website goldseekerbooks.com  I'll give you some lessons. And some lessons on what to look for.

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Thanks Reese! I'll be in touch in a few days.

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Steve is very right about tailing piles. Hard rock tailings and hydraulic pits are much easier and layering can keep you finding gold. Dredge tailings are much more difficult and require a lot of patience as you can go a long time getting skunked. I like to stick with hydraulic, hard rock, and ground sluice operations.

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Good to hear your report of success on the tailing piles.  Yes I said "success" as you learned from this trip and will continue to learn as you go.  My Field Staff gurus and I are still learning bits of info, little tricks and such each time we're in the field.  Just yesterday one of my guys emailed me his weekend Success with his new NOX-800.  He was doing pretty good with the Monster and did not know why I kept telling him to use his NOX instead.  He likes the NOX for our water hunts, but could not fathom it being a real gold detector.  He kicked butt with over a 1/4 in small pickers.

Does the heavy dark rock stick to or have a good tug from a rare earth super magnet?

Keep at it and if you still feel you are not getting the finer details, let me know.

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  • 1 month later...
On 5/13/2020 at 12:27 PM, Gerry in Idaho said:

Does the heavy dark rock stick to or have a good tug from a rare earth super magnet?

Sorry it took me a while to check this out.  Yes indeed it does!  Rare earth magnets stick strongly to it.  And one section of it appears almost melted.

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7 hours ago, Bash said:

Sorry it took me a while to check this out.  Yes indeed it does!  Rare earth magnets stick strongly to it.  And one section of it appears almost melted.

That should answer how much iron is in the rock.  The harder the pull, the more iron in it and the louder it will sound on a detector.

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