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Golden Grams Of Goodness: Nugget Shooting Stories


Lanny

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A Blazing-Fast Bear Encounter

In the 1990’s, I was in the northern mountains of British Columbia searching an area known for coarse gold. My brother-in-law and his brother were with us as visitors in the gold camp. They’d made a thirty-hour trip to join us, and the next morning, we headed out for a river, one known to hold pickers and even nuggets in areas of exposed bedrock.

We worked some nice bedrock where the river had cut back on itself to produce a big suction eddy, large iron spikes and nails were cast up on the bank at that spot. The two rookies worked the bedrock, hit some nice crevices, and soon had not only pickers, but a couple of nice multi-gram nuggets. (You couldn’t pry the smiles off their faces with a crowbar.)

Having hot gold fever now, they wanted to work a fresh bedrock outcrop, so we headed upriver. The river forked, and they went left a short distance, and my mining partner and I went right, working our way upstream where we discovered a large area of brush growing on a flat. It was a nice spot to unload gear. We were just lowering our equipment to the cobbles when we heard a crashing sound. Looking up the opposite mountainside, we spotted a mother moose tearing madly through the trees. Crossing the river, she hit the flat and blew through the brush like a freight train, just missing us!

We had no idea what was going on but sure were happy to still be alive. (Getting smoked by a charging moose, pretty much fatal.)

The crashing up the mountainside continued, but this time there was as bawling sound. We looked upslope again and saw a juvenile moose (of the mother moose) ripping down the mountainside, a grizzly bear gripping the youngster’s rump in its claws. The trouble was, the slope was so steep, and the moose so terrified, nothing was stopping that moose, not even the grizzly bear’s claw-assisted brakes.

The young moose hurtled down the mountain, straight at us, following its mother’s path. My partner, far smarter than I in a moose, near-death, bear crisis, slammed his shovel against a boulder. The loud clang startled the bear so much he let go! The terrified moose raced onward. We dove out of the way. The bear, lightning fast, swapped ends and tore back up the mountain.

Our rookie gold camp guests heard the noise of the mother moose smashing through the brush and arrived just in time to see the bear’s fumbled attempt at stopping the moose.

Not the kind of excitement they were looking for when they left camp that day, but a blazing-fast bear encounter they’ll never forget.

All the best,


Lanny

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Some serious luck involved that day but I catch your drift.😀

As for the calf, it never slowed down enough to thank us, and I'm glad the mother didn't come back with vengeance on her mind as a cranky moose is no respecter of persons. (I've dealt with them before, and they're some of the most dangerous animals in the bush.)

All the best,

Lanny

 

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Thirsty Bear Invasion

While spending the summer with some full-time gold miners in the Omineca mining division of north-central British Columbia (an area known for chunky nuggets), they told me a true story about a rowdy bear.

One of the miners lived in a trailer parked near the site they were placer mining. In the trailer he had a 24-can flat of cola and 24 cans of beer.

A nosy bear came along while the crew was out mining and decided he wanted a personal tour of the trailer. (I guess he was upset he hadn't been given one earlier.)

He busted through the window and got inside. Then, he took every can, all 48, punched holes in them with his teeth and drained them dry.

At this point, extremely hammered and very sleepy, the bear crawled onto the bed and slept it off.

When he woke up, he just couldn't remember how he’d gotten in, so he smashed through the door and let himself out.

When the thirsty miners got home that night, it was to a dry camp!

All the best,

Lanny

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  • 2 weeks later...
3 hours ago, Cascade Steven said:

Lanny:  Thanks again for all of the information that you are sharing here.

Thanks for dropping in to leave such a nice note, truly appreciated.

All the best,

Lanny

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Sniping Black Bedrock
(Taken from my notes, summer of 1997)

Prospecting has been a hobby of mine for many years. My son and I spent the past two summers working with some large-scale placer miners (we help them, they help us) on their claims in the far Boreal forests. Two summers ago, I located an ancient channel for them. In gratitude last summer, they left a small area of the mined Tertiary channel’s bedrock open for my son and I to snipe (the overburden of heavy, clay peppered with boulders, ran about 20 feet in depth).

Sniping virgin bedrock was new to both my son and I, and I’d only sniped existing stream bedrock before, with limited success. So, we tried to remember all the pointers we had read or heard from others about trying to find a virgin crack or crevice, one filled with tightly packed, intact material, often darkly stained (red/orange/purple) The intact crevice would then need to be cleaned out, then broken open for a deeper cleaning. Then, looking carefully, we saw a bedrock fold that ran perpendicular to the ancient stream’s flow.

I told my son to sample it, and he returned with material scraped from the fold and once panned, he had some nice, small, rounded pieces of gold. I told him to check the base of the fold to see if it hid a crevice. After some more scraping and cleaning, he called me over and showed me a narrow crack about half an inch wide, by about a foot long. That crack was filled with tightly packed material, little stones, clay etc., and it was hard to see because the covering surface material was black, just like the bedrock).

I told him to get the pry bars, a small sledge hammer, screwdrivers (one bent with an L-shaped end), and an old stainless-steel tablespoon to work the crevice, and a whisk broom and dust pan to use to carefully gather all of the material.

Leaving him to it, I worked the bedrock downslope, and about twenty minutes later, I heard someone hoofing it over the stones to where I was. I turned and saw my son, carefully carrying his green gold pan. To my surprise, his mouth moved, but the only sounds he made were like he was having trouble breathing, and every step closer, he kept pointing at his pan and breathing harder. So, I sprinted over to have a look.

There in the bottom of his pan were six nuggets (all multi-gram-nuggets), along with a pile of smaller chunks. No wonder he couldn't breathe!

My goodness was he happy, and boy was I proud! Needless to say, that electrified me to keep looking, and after a lot of hard searching, I found a crevice about half as long as his, and it held two smaller multi-gram nuggets along with some nice pickers.

What amazed my son and I about this gold experience was how little material came out of those cracks and yet how much gold they held (that’s the beauty of sniping). Moreover, we found two other nuggets with our detectors and added more chunks (close to half an ounce gold take for the day) by sweeping and cleaning the surface of the bedrock.

All the best,

Lanny

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Bedrock Tips, Part 1

How many of you have had the chance to work virgin bedrock?

By virgin, I mean bedrock exposed by modern mining, bedrock not seen since the dinosaurs ruled the earth or perhaps even earlier.

Furthermore, a chance to detect bedrock like this is a rare one as it needs previous, special connections with the large-scale placer miners to get access to such bedrock and claims, or knowledge acquired of former placer mined areas that now lie abandoned.

Moreover, it's downright expensive to remove forty to sixty feet of overburden from bedrock which financial output stops some miners from granting access. In addition, some miners simply won’t allow others on their virgin bedrock. Added to this are insurance and mining regulations which might result in a hard no even if there’s a personal relationship with the miners.

This makes the chances quite slim to none for access, unless a nugget shooter is lucky enough to find abandoned sites through research or word-of -mouth. But if such an opportunity pops up, for either scenario, there's a few things that will help find that bedrock gold.

First and foremost, ask lots of questions.

Find out where the heaviest run of gold was in the excavation. For example, was the gold deposit heavier in a dip in the bedrock, on at the start of a rise in the rock, heavier on a shelf, or at the bottom of a long drop before a steep rise, etc. As well, find out if there were certain colors in the dirt that indicated better pay: oranges, reds, grays, purples, blacks, etc.

With the answers to a few questions like these, you can improve your odds of checking the most-likely places in an open-pit excavation. For instance, you'll find areas that were barren by asking the right questions (areas of loose wash, glacial striations where gold was gouged out, smooth bedrock, heavy sand, sloping rock, etc.), and you'll locate areas that were hot spots for nuggets by asking enough questions to get some tips.

All the best,

Lanny

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From an old news paper.

HOW TO RECOGNISE BEDROCK.

A very brief inspection of old workings will toon enable the "new-chum" to recognise the bedrock of a river when he reaches it in sinking a shaft. It Is usually soft and decomposed just where the alluvial deposits rest on it, and in that condition is often known as "pipeclay" on account of its whiteness. A few feet further down, however, the slaty structure become visible, the rock gets harder, and the colour changes to yellow, grey, and other darker tints.
Down to this bottom the prospector sinks and takes up the stuff immediately resting on it with a few inches of the bottom Itself, as gold often lodges down in the crevices. In very shallow ground open trenches in various directions, or a number of holes at short intervals, are sufficient to enable the ground to be tested, but in deeper ground it is necessary to open drives from the bottom of the prospecting hole so as to try the stuff along the bottom in any direction desired. The object is to test the gravel resting on bedrock, as that is the most likely to contain gold. In some ground not a foot should be passed over without panning it, as it is not at all uncommon for gold to occur in certain narrow "runs," while promising looking stuff on either side is valueless.
While the Importance of working the gravel on the river bottom is greatly stressed, It is always advisable to pan any layer of gravel passed through In sinking a hole.

Old, abandoned ground, If it has not been too often reworked, will frequently be found to afford a living, or an occasional patch or nugget, if again carefully worked.

The Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday 28 February 1931
http://newspapers.nla.gov.au/

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