A Month In Western Usa, 5 Of 5 Reports Posted -- Complete (updated)

[GB_Amateur]

Been home a month already, and as you all know things don't stop happening just because you're away.  Besides catching up from falling behind domestic tasks, it also takes a while to get back in the habit of reading and posting.  But I need to write my experiences down before I forget even more of what happened.  I'll break it into a few posts to hopefully minimize the yawns (yours and mine).

In summary I spent 27 days (26 nights) away from home, leaving on the 31st of May.  Here's the Outline of the trip (not including days spent merely driving):

0) 3 days in Colorado at my sister's home, with one day spent hunting an early 20th Century homestead permission of hers (unfortunately my nemesis -- regraded/backfilled property -- led to zero finds), and one morning with Denver's Eureka Treasure Hunting Club in a city park (that was already reported by Jeff McClendon and me here).

1) 4.5 days in NW Nevada, first 3 with Steve (the one person here I don't need to specify last name nor site username 😄) and Steve (Condor).  For those familiar with that area we were near the Stone House and Sawtooth.  After they left I spent one night alone and then was surprised when another DP member poster drove up in his VW Beetle(!) -- Andy (Abenson) for the last day or so.

2) 7 days in NE Nevada at Monte Berry's "Welcome to the Hunt Outing" (WTHO) #14 ghost town detecting get-together with 12-14 like-minded people.

3) 3.5 days at 10.5 kft (3.2 km) altitude in the Colorado Rockies at an 1860's ghost town site with my sister and her partner.

I don't know which is more satisfying -- actual detecting or spending the evenings around the fire discussing our pasttime with such great people whose company I was fortunate enough to share.  No less than four of my comrades has 45 or more years of detecting experience (and accompanying stories) and you can count on me to ask questions on that until the fire was low and we needed to get some shuteye for the next day's efforts.  Several more had their silver anniversary (25 year) pins as well.

A few stats for those who may be curious:  4325 miles (29.9 mpg and $658 of petrol), 13 nights sleeping in my vehicle and 7 nights in motels (other 6 at my sister's house), ~$1600 for the entire trip, including food and lodging (but not counting cost of batteries 😁).  Only needed to put the Jeep Compass Trailhawk into 4WD twice and one of those was following Condor's pickup through a deep gully/wash.  (Was he trying to lose me?  )  I should say how many hours I spent actually swinging a detector but I haven't added it up.  Mostly because of my age but also dependent upon the heat, 8 hours is a long day and sometimes (when I'm arriving or packing up to leave) it's less than half that.  BTW, on the way home I stopped at a couple roadside rest areas (the old kind on 2 lane roads, not the modern Interstate kind) to finish of the detecting time fix for the trip.

I'm really bad at remembering to take photos, but here are a couple.  The first is in NW Nevada which was meant as a joke to a friend who predicted I would be abducted by aliens (you know, Skinwalker Ranch, Blind Flog Ranch,... although those are in NE Utah).  Second one some of you will recognize because of the aspen trees, tree line,... from high in the Rockies.  You may notice I try not to show enough detail that you'll figure out our secret locations. 

I'll stop for now and go into more detail on the detecting sites (and finds) in the next installment.

[jim tn]

Sounds like a fun trip! HH jim tn

[Cal_Cobra]

Wow you covered a lot of ground!  Monte's WTHO trips are fun and some good finds are usually made.  

I love these epic multi week long detecting trips, I really need to retire 🙂

[Valens Legacy]

Looking forward to reading about your trip.

Hope you had fun and plenty of finds.

[kac]

That is awesome!

Where's the finds??

[GB_Amateur]

2 hours ago, kac said:

Where's the finds??

Patience, Grasshopper.  I'll post the goodies at the end (to add suspense) and the trash in post increments -- probably 3 more posts.  I'll make one today, one Thursday, and finish up this weekend.

[GB_Amateur]

This is the second installment of about four in this thread.  Most of this first part (not counting intro and couple days in Denver) was spent searching for native gold.  This isn't the optimal sub-forum for that but as you'll see, this experience probably doesn't qualify for a post on the main forum (where gold electronic prospecting posts are most appropriate).

As mentioned, I spent 4.5 days in NW Nevada, the first 2.5 with Steve and Steve, about a day on my own, and the last day with Andy.  The altitude for the area we were hunting is around 4.0 to 4.5 kft (1.2 to 1.4 km), is rather flat, and all dry desert with scrufty vegetation interspersed with bare ground.  The temps were in the high 80's (low 30's C) during the afternoon and dropped into the low 50's (low teens C.) before dawn.  There tends to be a breeze/wind all day long which helps with evaporative cooling, but the day I spent mostly alone was the exception -- quite still and uncomfortable.  Given we were there a handful of days before summer solstice the sunlight was pretty direct midday meaning nowhere to hide from it during the hottest time of the day (6-8 hours worth).  I drank 7 1/2 gallons of water in the 4 1/2 days I was there.

I'm far from an expert on the geology, but basically the gold is aeolian, exposed by wind, not water, and its primary source has been gone for a million+(?) years.  It's often on the hillsides, can be in the gullys but not so concentrated there as in locations with more rainfall.  (It would be a lucky year to get 10 inches of precip, even pre-climate-change.)  I would make a WAG that 90% of the nuggets I've seen come from this area are less than 0.1 g size.  (Others could give better estimates, and I haven't seen that many which makes my estimate have a large uncertainty.)

To understand historically gold recovery in the NW Nevada area, ignoring very early mining (possibly by natives and possibly a bit by the Spanish), think 1.5 centuries from a bit after the California Gold Rush to present.  Gold mining activity in general has wild swings which track the gold price.  There have been spikes in the early 1930's continuing to WWII, late 70's for about a decade, early 2000's and then in the last few years.  Thus when you are in these areas you will often find (a few) coins, a moderate amount of relics, and a lot of trash which has its origins in those time windows, and often multiple age indicators in the same spot.

Another thing which has majorly impacted artisinal/hobby gold recovery is the evolution of detectors.  Prior to the 60's one had to use gravity recovery.  When metal detectors (induction balance or 'IB' designs as well as BFO's) became light enough and inexpensive enough, at first they could only find the large pieces (which, of course, are at the extreme rarest in occurrence) and only in low mineralized areas.  When ground balancing VLF's (special case of IB) were introduced in the mid-70s, smaller gold became detectable (still not what can be found electronically today) and the field of electronic prospecting took a foothold.  The 90's saw both a significant improvement in IB detectors using higher (~50 kHz and higher), but also with the commercial introduction of Pulse Induction (PI) detectors which went deeper but not for the small stuff (so IB's still had their place).  The latest quantum leap has been the Minelab GPX6000 PI which has pushed aside pretty much all IB/VLF's in that it can find gold just as small as those but now deeper.

So why is all this relevent?  I hunted this same area for 3 days in May of 2019, just three short years ago.  In that time I found six or seven small (around 0.1 g) nuggets with the Minelab Equinox 800 and its 6" coil.  That's the exact same setup I used this time, but for an extra day, and got nothing -- Nada, Zippo, a true skunk.  Am I a worse detectorist today than 3 years ago?  Probably not.  Same area, 4 days instead of 3, zero nuggets instead of 6-7.  Only one thing explains this -- its been hit hard, and IMO the GPX6000 has played a big part in that.  And it's not just me.  The three guys mentioned above are all experienced gold hunters, as in some of the best in the business (90%-ile at a minimum).  I won't go into specifics other than to say that all three expressed disappointment (they weren't whining or snarling -- with their experience they've seen bad days before), and they've all detected (successfully) in this area on multiple occasions.  There's still gold out there but it's getting very difficult to find, particularly in the easily accessible public land in the Western USA.

Enough about native gold.  I spent about 2-3 hours detecting around an old dwelling (from the 30's, I think) and about that same amount of time on my last day driving back to Winnemucca at a railroad ghost town.  Although a bit of the stuff in the photo below was from the time I was searching for gold (and I have a bottle of tiny metal pieces which isn't shown), most of what you see is from those two historical domesticated(?) areas and not from the wide open desert.  I was using the Equinox with both coils, two tones, Field 1, recovery speed 4.  (I think at that time I had Iron Bias F2=0).  I'm saving the best finds for a later post, but none of them were from these days in NW Nevada.

Maybe the only interesting thing here is the auto/truck gasoline cap which I'm thinking is from a 1950's to (maybe) 1970's vehicle.  That disc at the top center is not a coin.  😞  It's brass, slightly convex, quite thin (~1/32" or just under 0.8 mm) and has no identifying marks.  There's an interesting(?) mineral crystal just to the right of the brass disc which I haven't yet identified.  Thankfully the finds improved when I got to Eastern Nevada, but they still weren't just jumping into my pouch.  (I'll post some of that in a couple days.)

[GB_Amateur]

On to NE Nevada.  Monte Berry (yes, the guy who created the Nail Board Performance Test) has been hosting a group hunt of ghost towns for a few years.  I've been on the last two -- June 2021 and now June 2022 -- this latter one I'm covering in this thread.  BTW, he's having another this year, basecamp in Wells, NV, during Labor Day week (early September).  I relay you to his website which includes an active forum, if you are interested.

In this thread I have been and will continue to take a conservative action in reporting some details of these hunts.  In some cases I don't feel it is my place to reveal information which may be sensitive (e.g. locations) and which were reported or shown to me by others, in some cases in confidence.  So I will be a bit secretive in naming the ghost towns I visited on this trip.

I arrived in Wells (on I-80 about an hour's drive west the Utah border and about the same distance south of the Idaho border.  I began my week (spending 1.5 days detecting there) at a ghost town south of Wells which was a railroad town established in first decade of 1900's.  Like many western ghost towns, it hit its peak population in about 5 years and either slowly or quickly declined from there.  This one still had a train station and maybe a couple homes during WWII, but I don't think much longer.  Another thing western ghost towns have in common is trash, metal (mostly iron trash), and lots of it.  Food and other items, stored in cans, became popular late in the 19th century and without modern trash removal services, they ended up tossed out back of buildings, at best.  Plus any time a building was erected and especially when it came down, nails, sheet metal, etc. was typically strewn nearby.  There is also lots of (now broken 😞) glass and pottery.  All of this trash gives clues as to the age of the settlement.

I took a non-standard (but certainly non-unique) approach.  Inital step was to clear out the large iron -- mostly rusted cans -- using a super magnet attached to the end of a walking stick.  I have a rake which has two functions -- standard mechanical removal of surface debris (metal or otherwise) -- and with an internal series of magnets it will pick up small to medium size surface iron, especially nails.  Over these 1.5 days I cleared three areas (approximate sizes 10 square meters) before breaking out a detector.  The first two I spent about 2.5 hours each clearing debris and the last about 1-1.5 hours.  Detecting time was about equal to the sweeping time over each patch.  On the first patch (which was smallest of the three), with the help of two detectors, I chose to clear out every piece of detectable metal.  So after 'sweeping' with the rake I covered the area detecting with the Tesoro Vaquero and 6" concentric, graduated to that detector with the 8"x9" concentric, and finished with the Minelab Equinox and 11" DD.  This was as much an educational experience as it was search for goodies, and a good thing because I found nothing I consider valuable.  😁  The Equinox detected less than a dozen items, all deeper iron.  For the other two patches I searched, I only swept and then detected (with the Tesoro and 6" coil), leaving the non-surface trash in the ground.

For the most part I didn't keep the raked trash although some of the nails in the photo were among that.  Another iron trash not shown were a dozen ladies' bobby pins.  (Was I searching next to a brothel?)

Pretty typical trash found at these sites.  Note the nails are modern round cross-section type -- a fair indicator of site age or at least a threshold date.  Many of the 22 casings (chrome plated ones in particular) are likely recent drops, but not all.  I'll show the decorative stocking clasp (next to the small buckle in middle right) in the 'goodies' photo in an upcoming post.  (Yes, sometimes the finds are so sparse that we stretch the definition of 'goodie'.  )  At the very center top edge of the photo is a broken container which seemed interesting.  It's frosted glass, embossed C. de Koning Tilly, and is some kind of medicine bottle.  The internet is ripe with unverifiable claims (IMO) on this, especially the auction listings.  The original Dutch company can be traced back to late 17th Century when some kind of magic elixir(?) -- haarlem oil -- was distributed.  Clearly something was still being marketed with that founder's name in the first half of the 20th Century, but exactly what and by whom??

(End of another long winded post, with more to come)

[F350Platinum]

So far a really interesting post, GB. Seems like the detecting road trip of a lifetime! I'm sure you have many photos and great memories of this trip. Looking forward to future installments.

Thus far my trips this year have been less than stellar, so I'm living vicariously. 🙂 This seems to be a pretty lean year for finds.

[jasong]

Did you see that massive old trash trench at the old Jungo townsite? That thing is pretty interesting to walk through, even though it's been picked over. Surprisingly a lot of people don't seem to know it's there even though it's almost in site of the road....like 1/4 mile long trench. 

It's like a time capsule, walking through all eras of trash up to 1960's - tricycles, fridges, old tables, and then bam! Nothing. I got some kinda cool 1950's bottles out of there, but that was like more than a decade back. You can tell looking at things that it was a happening place with families and stuff, and then everything just up and died one day and everyone walked away just like that.

The dirt hovels that people lived in in some of those old placer areas are pretty interesting too. Just holes in the ground with like candle stick holes in the wall and an old backseat from a Model T or something as a bed.