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Steve's 2013 Alaska Gold Adventure


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I met you there at Chicken in 2013 i think Steve.... I was working at the VA in Anchorage and got 2 weeks off to come and play.

I was staying a Chicken trying to highbank without a whole lot of results....just picked the wrong spot.

Well one day when I had already put in my day at Chicken and after taking a shower I hit the road to explore.....

I drove on up to Walker Creek Campground and was very impressed. It is a beautiful setting there on the river.

I went up the road a bit to a turnout and decided walk over and see what Jack Wade was all about.

That turned out to be a BIG mistake!! ---

After taking that shower with the flowery smelling shampoo the mossies made a beeline to me!!!

I literally HAD to keep moving...i broke a branch out of a bushy tree for a mosquito swatter, went to the creek, swatting the whole time and couldnt even set the swat down long enough to get a panful of river gravel. Hahahaha...

It would have been a funny video and I am sure i made the fastest recon of the mouth of Jack Wade Creek that has ever been done!

Beautiful, beautiful country.....

If i ever go back I will stay at Walker Fork Campground.

(Althought the food is pretty good at Chicken Gold Camp)

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It was the end of June and since I was camping out there was only so much I could get done with my satellite phone. I went and saw the owners of the claims on upper Jack Wade Creek and cut a percentage deal with them for detecting on their claims. Then I loaded up my camp and hit the road for Anchorage on July 1st. The house was still on the market and I had access so I put a cot in a room and spent a couple days checking with the realtors, paying bills, and getting a few supplies. Then back to Chicken on the 4th of July for a quick visit at the annual 4th of July party. My friend George White was there, so we headed in up to Jack Wade and set up camp.

The weather had cooled down a bit which was just fine. There was a huge fire in the Tok area and if the wind was right the smoke could get pretty thick in the area but that also seemed to be getting under control. I took George to a place where I had found a large flake of gold previously and where I thought there had to be more gold. I got this classic double blip signal with the Minelab, the kind nails make when you run over them length-wise. I told myself "nail" but I was in dig it all mode and went ahead and dug it up. Much to my surprise a 3/4 ounce round nugget with a bit of rock in it popped out of the ground! The double blip? There was a piece of steel a couple inches away. Yet another lesson in how trash signals can turn out to be anything but.

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The Long Road To Chicken, Alaska - Taylor Highway on Way From Tok To Chicken

That area seemed to give up at that point so we wandered down the creek hitting different spots. I found a small pile of rubble, not big enough to call a tailing pile. More like a big pile of dirt set aside from digging out a channel. Right on top I get a real nice piece weighing almost a half ounce. There are several types of gold on Jack Wade and this one was a distinctly deeper gold color that the more common lighter colored stuff. And then another nice nugget, about three pennyweight from a little pile of dirt right next to the road. It was one of the days that makes up for the days of finding nothing with 1-1/3 oz in my pocket.

George had wandered off and when I ran into him he pulled out a pill bottle and shook it. It was full of small nuggets, about 1/8 ounce of gold. I was puzzled and asked him if he had brought those with him from town to show me. He said no, he had just dug them all! He had got bored running the Minelab digging nails so grabbed the Gold Bug 2 and hit the bedrock. All those nuggets came out of one little pocket in the bedrock he had found. It was a good day for both of us.

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End of Week Three, Almost 5 Ounces of Gold

By the end of the third week I was sneaking up on 5 ounces of gold total. I found out my wife was flying up to Anchorage to finish up some business so on the 13th I headed back to town to see her and take a break.

There were very few people in the area metal detecting but there were various dredging and other operations on the creeks. Here are a few photos of them to finish up this episode. You can see how low water conditions in the area were that summer.

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Chris & Bernie Run Their 4" Dredge

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Gold Dredge on the Fortymile River

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Mining Gear Stashed on Bank of Fortymile River

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Commercial Operation Next To Road on Jack Wade Creek

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In theory I had no deadlines on this adventure. It could go on for as long as I wanted to have at it. So far it actually had been a near perfect trip. The weather overall was fabulous, and I already had more gold than I had been hoping for. The gold however got harder to find as the middle of July came and went. Two solid days of detecting July 14th and 15th put not a single nugget in my pocket. The 16th was headed the same way it seemed when I got on a pile in the middle of many that had been hunted, only to see no dig holes of any other signs of detecting. I went to work on it and was happy to finally have a quarter sized 6.87 pennyweight nugget pop out of the hill and not long after that, a 1.3 pennyweight piece.

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6.87 Pennyweight of Jack Wade "Pale Gold"

Jack Wade is known for is solid, rounded, heavy gold. Yet I had already found one particularly ugly chunk of gold and rock weighing over two ounces. The big nugget or specimen also had a very pale gold and the rock in it was very dark. It almost looked like it had been in a fire, but after cleaning that was just the way it looked from the rock itself.

Now I had another nugget about one third ounce that looked to be from the same source. Dark rock, very pale gold. Actually it looks like it has two types of gold in it, some a bit purer than the other. I had a couple more nuggets with rock in them. Even the solid gold is different, some very, very rounded, and other nuggets relatively unworn. There does appear to be quite a few sources for the gold in Jack Wade Creek, some from ancient stream channel deposits, and some from more recent local sources. A knowledgeable prospector told me that the low purity "ugly gold" I had found was more common on and possibly had a source somewhere up Gilliland Creek, and upper tributary of Jack Wade Creek. Just before I sold the big ugly chunk I had the opportunity to have a quick assay done on it with an X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) analyzer. The results are very interesting. The metal is almost half gold and half silver with a smattering of platinum group metals. This and the dark rock point to an unusual source of gold indeed.

What is weird about it though is all the other people that eventually ended up detecting and finding gold here over a period of years, was that I seemed to be the only one with this magical ability to find ugly gold! I have done it other places also so it is getting to be a specialty of mine.

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X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) Assay of 2.37 oz "Ugly Nugget"

Word came that I had another interested party for the house sale. That and rain in the forecast had me once again pack up and return to Anchorage for a few days .The good news is that while I was there we got the house under contract for what turned out to be the final time. Yay! I returned to Chicken and this time settled into a stay at Chicken Gold Camp which allowed me to stay in a bit better touch with things. These days you can sign most documents via the internet and I had internet access in Chicken.

The weather was nice again but the gold was hard coming. The 22nd and 23rd saw no finds, but then a new area turned up a nice 5.7 pennyweight nugget right at the water's edge on the creek and a little 1 gram nugget. The 25th was a rainy day so I went and scraped bedrock where George had hit his little bedrock pocket. I ended up panning about 30 little pieces of gold, which I put in a bottle and gave to Pat and Sandy, the hosts at Walker Fork Campground, as thanks for their hospitality.

While panning I kept getting little round rocks that looked like small quartz pebbles but were just a bit too heavy. They kept hanging up with the black sand, so I started collecting them. It was not until later when I checked the Jack Wade ARDF file that I figured out they were little pebbles of barite, which is common in Jack Wade concentrates. Barite (or baryte) is a heavy non-metallic mineral commonly used for drilling mud but it has a wide range of interesting uses. It is used for everything from a pigment in paint to that milkshake they make you drink at the hospital before taking X-rays of your guts. More information on barite here.

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Barite Pebbles From Jack Wade Creek

The 26th I hit this huge pile on a corner that just looked fabulous but dug nothing but shell casings and bullet fragments along with the obligatory ferrous junk. My entries for the next couple days:

Sat 7/27 - Hunt big pile rest of way (no gold) then hit piles along road below corner crossing. Been digging hundreds of targets for five days now, and only two nuggets? Sunny but not too hot.

Sun 7/28 - Hunted piles down the creek. Did not realize how much ground there was there. Three big piles. Looked great, hunted six hours in hot sun sidehilling, for trash. Starting to get burned out, then get 1.5 dwt nugget. Even then interest flagging. B&C still dredging and sniping.

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Finding Lots Of This - Not Much Gold!

No doubt about it. Still a great trip, but I was getting burned out and homesick and feeling like it was time to wrap this expedition up. Next up, the final chapter of the story - and a surprise!

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Well, here we go, the grand finale!

From July 22 to July 28 six days of metal detecting had netted me only three gold nuggets. That is a lot of detecting and digging for just three happy moments! I was getting burned out plus missing my wife and new home. My wife had also let me know one of my dogs was not doing well. It all just added up to time to go home. Besides, I had about 5.5 ounces of gold, not bad at all and better than I had hoped for. Good weather, good gold, good times with friends, it really had been a near perfect trip.

Therefore on the morning of the 29th of July I wandered up to Chris and Bernie's camp and told them I was done. I was paid up at Chicken Gold Camp through the 31st so my plan was to be packed up and hit the road for Nevada early on August 1st. I had just a few days left so had to decide what to do.

There is an area on upper Jack Wade known to have produced big gold in the past. Like nuggets weighing pounds, and a 10 ounce nugget had been found there by a dredger the previous season. It was on the ground owned by the miner I had a deal with. I had of course hunted it previously but only found a few small nuggets and lots of little ferrous trash. It was a gorgeous sunny day and the area was relatively open and level so easy hunting. I fired up the Minelab GPX 5000 with Nugget Finder 14" x 9" mono and crossed over the creek to give it a go. I was really relaxed because mentally I was done working and just happy to be out beeping a couple more days. It was really a nice feeling knowing I would soon be heading home.

I barely had got started when I crested the top of a small ridge of tailings and got a massive boomer signal. Just a huge descending low tone, the type you might get if you buried a huge bolt or some other large ferrous target not too far down. There was a recent dig hole on the target, and I thought "well, let's see what he left in the hole" and gave just a couple big scoops. It was sandy easy digging stuff, and as it slid down the hill I glimpsed gold. I thought "no way!" and as I grabbed it could feel the weight. I stood there looking at 6.5 ounces of solid gold in my hand!

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The Selfie We All Want To Take - Steve With 6.5 Ounce Gold Nugget

There is no doubt in my mind about the addictive nature of nugget detecting. It is not easy to do and the gold is not easy to find. There can be lots of false starts and disappointments along the way. It is all that however that makes it so sweet when gold is finally found, when all the hard work and effort is rewarded. I get a thrill out of every nugget I find, no matter how small, because I work hard for every one of them. The really big finds are much rarer yet, so much so that few people ever get to say they found a nugget weighing one ounce or more. The feeling of accomplishment is indescribable because it verges on feeling like a miracle has occurred. Once you get a taste of that feeling you want to feel it again, and it is that quest that powers me and others through days, months, and years of effort. The thrill of finding gold!

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Just Out Of the Ground, Unwashed, And On The Scale

After an hour of photos and just plain soaking up the moment I proceeded to hunt that area extra well, because as you can imagine after a find like that visions of piles of nuggets enters your mind. If one got lost, might there not be others? Unfortunately it does not seem to work like that, and continued careful hunting of the location only produced one more nugget, a clean little 1 gram piece. No surprise there. How even one nugget like this gets lost is something we all wonder about. How does a half pound of solid gold end up in a tailing pile? Who knows, I am just happy it did. For a combination of size and the solid gold content it is the best nugget I have ever found.

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Minelab GPX 5000 With 6.5 Ounce Nugget At Dig Location

The biggest question of course is who started to dig that nugget and then quit? The material was easy digging, about as easy as you could ask for. I surmise it had to be a Minelab operator. If you run a Minelab long enough you get huge boomer signals very often, and they are almost always a can or bolt or some other shallow, large junk target. They can also be very large gold nugget but if you get that signal enough times and dig it up, only to find junk, your brain gets trained to think that is all it could be. "Too big to be gold" - have you ever thought that? I wonder how many people have done like this unknown person, got a target, and then decided nope, it has to be junk, and walked away? I know I have done it and I am pretty certain it has cost me. It may be that a small percentage of the very biggest nugget signals are still out there, having been detected and left for junk. In fact, I am willing to bet that is the case, though there are a couple less now.

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View Of Both Sides, Just Rinsed In Creek

I first went and showed the nugget to the claim owner and then Bernie and Chris. However, I asked them to keep quiet about it. The trip had been so enjoyable, and finding something like that right at the end, well, it was obvious I was going to be back in 2014. There was a lot of public area left to hunt on the creek still, and I saw no reason to possibly start a little gold rush to the area before I got the chance to come back and give it another go. That trip has now come and gone at Steve's 2014 Alaska Gold Adventure and so now finally you get to hear the rest of the story.

Speaking of the public area, Bernie and I went and hit it the very next day. We had mostly taken advantage of our access to areas not available to the general public while we could and had been leaving the public area for later. There is information about it at the 2104 tale. We both started out with our GPX units but I could tell Bernie was less thrilled than I to be digging junk, so I suggested we go back to the truck and grab our VLF detectors. We did just that, and I no more than got my Gold Bug Pro swinging when it made a loud beep, and up pops a 5.9 dwt nugget practically off the surface! It was just another over the top easy nugget after all the days of digging nothing but junk. Even wilder is that fact that in 2014 several days detecting by several people including myself in this same location produced no gold at all. It is liked I walked up and banged the only nugget there.

The next day and a half produced no other nuggets but I am certainly not complaining about that. My trip had gone from great to off the charts fantastic with just over a Troy pound (12 Troy ounces) of gold found. 12.3 ounces actually found in exactly 30 days of time spent actually nugget detecting. Not a get rich quick scenario by any means but not bad at all either. Overall the time spent in the Chicken area during the summer of 2013 will go down in my memory as one of my best times ever.

There are many, many more photos from this trip in the Photo Gallery.

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Troy Pound Of Gold Nuggets From Jack Wade Creek, Alaska 2013

 

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Steve, that is a heck of a chunk of gold! I knew you had at least one more secret. Now that I am retired I hope to have more time for the search for the yellow stuff.

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