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Golden Grams Of Goodness: Nugget Shooting Stories


Lanny

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On 2/21/2019 at 6:22 AM, GB_Amateur said:

Quite the skill you have with that pen, Lanny!  And you keep us hanging in anticipation of the next installment.  Thanks.

Many thanks for your kind words!

All the best,

Lanny

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Thanks for the journey Lanny.... you should write some articles for ICMJ, or other prospecting magazines....

 Get one of these to scrub that bedrock ?

New-GapVax-RamRodder.jpg

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1 hour ago, DolanDave said:

Thanks for the journey Lanny.... you should write some articles for ICMJ, or other prospecting magazines....

 Get one of these to scrub that bedrock ?

New-GapVax-RamRodder.jpg

We've talked about it as well as a small excavator with a knuckle-bucket or flooding the bedrock and using a dredge . . .

Great idea by the way.

All the best,

Lanny

 

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On 2/23/2019 at 12:24 PM, kiwijw said:

Oh..... how I have many places where I have dreamed of wanting do that......? I bet we all have :biggrin:

Good luck out there

JW :smile:

The balance comes down to the expense for either renting a Vac-truck to do the job, buying a used one for that purpose, or buying a small excavator with the pivoting bucket. As the bedrock is not consistently rich, and as the bedrock is many times soft enough to allow the excavators and Cats with rippers to take sufficient bedrock, at which point does the cash outlay outstrip the potential income for the cost involved for alternative methods of bedrock recovery? Always a thing to ponder for good reason . . .

All the best,

Lanny

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Golden Bonanza Days, Part 2:

In the meantime, I’d finished all of my adjustments on the Racer, and I went off to investigate a different spot, some way off in the excavation from the area my son was detecting, as I had seen some little pockets of intact channel that had some spidery cracks in the bedrock running outward from them on my initial walkthrough. After a few swings (no kidding), I had the coil over a soft sound. A bit of scraping later, and I’d trapped the signal in my scoop. Into the pan it went. (Now, please remember that I use a super-magnet on an extendable wand whenever I detect bedrock [worked recently or anciently], so it really helps eliminate ferrous trash, and this means that any target that goes into the scoop is non-ferrous.) After a few more swings, I’d hit on two more targets that went into the pans for my wife’s speed-panning operation. Then, a slew of targets went into the pans.

Meanwhile, as I was collecting signals, my son was busy adding more targets to his pans. (I had two pans to fill, and he had two pans for target material as well.)

During our nugget hunting, my wife set up her panning station in a convenient bedrock pool of crystal water, water about the temperature of glacial meltwater by the way, and she was ready to get her panning gloves wet (she uses those little gardening gloves that have rubber palms and fingers with a canvas back as they insulate well enough to take the sting out of the coldness), so she wandered over to my son to gather a pan of possible goodness, and she swung by me to grab one of my pans too.

(To describe the site in more detail, there was a sloped ramp that led down into the excavation where the rock trucks had run back and forth to be filled by the excavator. There were the remnants of a pad by the ramp where the excavator had sat during the last scraping of the dirt for the last cleanup, the pad having been moved up above the level of the excavation so the last of the pay could be scraped from the bedrock.

In opposition to this, the far end of the excavation had been worked first, the work proceeding backward in the direction of the exit ramp until the cleanup reached that location. What remained in the excavation or open-pit site were ridges of rising bedrock, deeper excavated low-lying areas where the bedrock was soft [or areas of contact zones where soft bedrock met hard] or where ancient channel material had gathered in natural gutters or larger crevices, and there were pools of standing water [I always check these with a waterproof coil] where seepage had found a way to fill depressions or where runoff from springs on the margins of the excavation had filled low spots. On a related note, some of the bedrock had been bent and warped by tremendous geological forces in the past, and these places held little concentrations of material left over from when the bedrock was super-hard enough to resist the might of the excavator’s bucket.

In a few places there were small sections of friable rock [in this case slate] that when found, I always detect first, then later pan as those plates of perpendicular placement [in 90-degree opposition to the underlying bedrock] act as excellent gold traps, traps that were working in earnest as the dinosaurs plodded across the ancient streambed when large sections of the planet were in a more tropical state.

As well, there were those aforementioned contact zones, always excellent places to detect as small slices of the softer rock were sometimes in place against the harder rock, or there were ledges, sometimes terraced, with bits of material intact, and these traps often produce some nice gold. [On a related note, I learned a long time ago to trust my detector, not my eyes when scouring bedrock. What I mean by this is that oftentimes bedrock appears to be solid, especially when is is of uniform color, so it seems a better use of time to detect areas where visible intact material is concentrated, but this is one of Mother Nature’s grand deceptions, whether the bedrock has been worked by recent miners or mother rock worked by the Sourdoughs.

Mining tip for the rookies: always, always, always take the time to go slow to let the detector read the bedrock contours and surfaces, to check the little invisible gutters and pockets, and yes, to find the hidden crevices that snapped shut when some monstrous dinosaur tromped on it while crossing, or more likely, when some massive boulders tossed along those streambeds, by some titanic hydraulic event, forced their will upon the yielding bedrock.

To be continued . . .

All the best,

Lanny

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Where are the Pictures???

Cost versus benefit , that is the question. When I occasionally watch one of the gold shows I have to wonder...how much did it cost to get that gold? Would they be using that equipment and moving all that dirt if there was no tv show?

I really would love to know...

Anyway, it appears you are doing very well, Lanny!

fred

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Hi Fred, 

I've got to dive into my photos to grab some pictures for sure as I spent all of the free time I had writing the sections of the stories so far. It's just a time thing, but I have so many pictures (one of the curses [or benefits] of the computer/cell phone age).

All the best,

Lanny

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19 hours ago, kiwijw said:

Awesome Lanny :wub:, A picture tells a thousand words? Oh....beautiful gold too...:laugh: Sure is chunky. Come on Simon....we have to find some like that. :biggrin:

Good luck out there

JW :smile:

Thanks JW, so many pictures filed away and so many stories yet to tell, but it seems that perhaps more people enjoy pictures rather than reading stories, but I can see their point as pictures can quickly tell a story as well.

As for the chunky gold, some of it is bigger than some of yours, but I recall other pictures you've posted of finds you've made of meatier gold, so I wish you and Simon nothing but the best in your quest to beef-up with bigger gold.

All the best, and thanks for your comments, and your friendship,

Lanny

P.S. There's a guy here in my town that's a NZ WWII veteran, not a lot of those great men around these days, and fewer veterans worldwide every minute, tremendous sacrifice they made for all of us.

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