Exploration And Windy Rocky Mtn Nuggets

[nebulanoodle]

Man, this is a motivating post. I’m working in Northern Colorado for the summer and I brought my detector just in case I get the right motivation. Those little flat nuggets you’re finding are EXACTLY what I’m finding back home on some sort of residual patch on top of a mountain out in the desert SW. Reading about your boulders that are split rough, in addition to the flatties, and your theory on an old sedimentary deposit that did some geologic press activity really harmonizes with my own theories about my patch. Hope you’re still having luck out there, maybe we’ll run into each other if I go hunting some ancient placers. Respectfully.

[jasong]

Cool, glad I motivated someone. Usually I can't even motivate myself. 🙂

There are quite a few sort of oddball gold occurences out here worthy of investigation. Often history is slim on details, they aren't in easy to find books, even in the cases some paragraph was written somewhere about them. Often there are no modern geologic maps. And few to zero people are detecting the areas so its kinda like being the first with a detector back in the 70s or whenever for those early guys, no old 2 tracks leading to dusty forgotten patches to find on aerials though, like in NV and AZ. Takes patience, but can be rewarding.

I find it's best to leave the detector at first, and take lots of pan samples. Then come back and run the detector specifically where the panning showed color to narrow down the area, concentrating on shallow ground and bedrock. Otherwise it can be a lot of detecting with no results!

After finding a new patch, then it can pay to take the big guns in and detect deeper. Hope you find success!

 

[nebulanoodle]

Thanks again! Real prospecting. I’ll plan on backpacking then 👌 😂 I’m excited and very curious to see if placer indicators I’m familiar with correlate out here. Just bought a nox the other day, so I’m excited to have a lightweight detector now. We’re headed to Oregon for the next couple weeks, I’ll be researching if I get the chance and dreaming of nuggets.

[Lanny]

Jasong, great write-ups about your adventures and your reflections on whether or not the glaciers flattened your gold.

We get a lot of glacial-stream flattened gold up here, as a good portion of the boulders that hammered the gold were car size to small house size--that'll get the job done.

Not sure about your area, but you've given a lot of interesting theories and also added in some geological meat and potatoes about your area.

Thanks for your efforts, and all the best,

Lanny