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Golden Grams Of Goodness: Nugget Shooting Stories


Lanny

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Hydraulic Pit Gold

(I wrote this story a long time ago, but for the rookies, there might be a tip or two . . . )

I was detecting in a hydraulic pit one day, way back when I was using the Minelab 2100 full-time (still a solid gold-finding machine!).

I was finding little brass boot nails, copper wire, blasting caps, old square nails (of all sizes), mine tunnel rail spikes, dozer-blade shavings, cigarette package foil, bits of old tin can (AKA, can-slaw) . . . I was hitting everything but gold! 

I wandered over to a rise on the side of the pit where there were some white-barked quaking aspens. It was a sizzling summer day with the patented cobalt blue sky of the Rockies, and that shade in the aspens looked mighty inviting. 

From upslope, a cool breeze brought the fragrant scent of fresh, mountain pine.

Having been given the perfect recipe for some relaxation, I sat down and pondered what I'd been up to. The pit was huge, and I'd been hammering the exposed bedrock, and any places where there was any clay deposited tight on the bedrock. (I guess it was good that I'd been finding the junk, as it proved the area wasn't totally hunted out, but I wanted some gold, and I was tired of hitting only junk.) 

As I sat in the shade and took a break, I suddenly noticed lots of river rock around the base of the trees, a thing I'd failed to notice before. I looked at the rise above the aspens,  and I saw where river rocks were poking from the slope as well. Freshly inspired, I took my shovel and peeled off the surface material to expose even more water-rounded rock.

I fired up the detector and passed it over the rocks and worked my way along the edge of the rise. To my amazement, I got a signal! Of course, I automatically assumed it was another nail, as most of that hydraulic pit could have been refiled on a claim map as a nail mine! 

(To elaborate a bit about old nails, I've been fooled by the small tips of square nails before, sometimes they sound just like a nugget. )

Anyway, I dug down and cleared away some of that river rock. The dirt looked like original deposit, undisturbed virgin ground. Furthermore,  as I looked at the rise, it made sense. Where I was digging was obviously a small hump of intact old channel, a piece left by the hydraulic miners.  The only clue as to why it had been left was that perhaps due to all of the nails at the base of the hump, there must have been some sort of building there that they didn't want to take out with the water cannons. 

At any rate, I kept digging, and the signal got stronger. Pretty soon, about eight inches down, I saw bedrock. I passed the coil over the spot and the sound was nice and sweet. 

This was shale bedrock, with lots of fractures packed with clay, and lots of small river stones tight on as well as jammed down into it. I pinpointed the signal and carefully scraped down through the clay and small stones. There on the bedrock was a sassy nugget! It was very flat, but shaped just  like the sole of a shoe, about the size of a Barbie Doll boot, only thicker, and somewhat larger. 

Naturally, I decided to detect the area more, but I got blanked. 

But then came the thing that can stop a nugget hunter cold, the battle over whether to strip more overburden to expose the bedrock. (Was this a lone nugget, or could there be some pals somewhere?) 

I've faced this decision many times while throwing off hundreds of pounds of annoying rock, only to find nothing. But, the place had a good feel to it, plus the shade was a nice bonus, so I decided to tear into it. 

(As a side note, my buddy invented a slick rock fork that I had with me that day. He took a manure-fork and heated the tines and bent them about halfway down their length at a right angle. Then he cut the sharp tips off, leaving safe, blunt ends. This is a dream tool for raking off river rock from hillsides and bedrock, the long handle making the work easier. Plus, any heavies like gold will fall through the tines and stay put.)

Using the repurposed fork, I found that the overburden varied from about six inches to a foot, and the rocks varied from cobbles to watermelon-sized boulders. 

At last I'd cleared an area about the size of two half-ton truck beds. It took a lot of work, but I'd produced a nice patch of exposed bedrock that had the same covering of clay and small river stone as the previous spot that had given up a nugget. 

I ran the coil over the area and got no signal at all! I slowed down and ran it perpendicular to the way I'd detected it the first time. This time I got a whisper. I hauled out some sniping tools, went to work, and the signal was slightly louder.

I used a stiff-bristled brush and scrubbed the bedrock. I detected the spot again, and the signal was nice and repeatable. I got out a bent, slot screwdriver (end bent at 90 degrees), and I worked that bedrock hard. It started to break off in flakes, and small sheets,  and my efforts exposed a crevice! I dug down deeper and the crevice got a bit wider, then little stones packed in a wet, dark-stained sandy clay started popping out; this can be a very good sign, even with a crevice being narrow.

I ran the edge of the coil along the crevice and the sound was definitely crisper. I took out a small sledge from my pack and a wide, thin rock chisel. I cut down on either side of the signal in that bedrock crevice, then I slanted back toward the heart of the crevice itself, breaking out the rock and exposing the contents of the little pocket. I scraped all of the material out of the crevice and put it in a plastic scoop. I ran it under the coil and was rewarded with a nice smooth, crisp sound. 

I sorted the scoop's material under the coil to reveal a flat nugget, its body still wedged in between two pieces of bedrock. Moreover, because that little rascal had been standing on its edge, that was why it had been so stealthy in the crevice! 

I cleaned along the rest of the crevice and found two more nuggets, smaller than the first and second nuggets, but nice to have nonetheless. 

I went back to the same spot a couple of weeks later and really cleared off a large section of that hump. You'd have been proud to see the rocks fly that day; nonetheless, I found no more gold.

Isn't that the way it goes? 

All the best, 

Lanny
 
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  • 3 weeks later...

 

(NOTICE: No gold found on this outing. Read on only if you enjoy hearing about the adventure.)

Deep Canyon Ghost Camp

We’d heard rumours, but we’d never followed up on the information . . .

We were told to head down the logging road until we saw a large area off to the left side that had a designated winter pull-out for vehicle parking. After we’d found the spot, we were supposed to check the forest behind the pull-out for an old trail, and by following the trail, it would lead us down the mountain into a steep canyon where the Old Timers had taken out lots of chunky gold, and all of their work was done by hand as the gold was shallow to bedrock; shallow diggings, the Old Timer’s bread, butter, and cream. Furthermore, there was supposed to be an old cabin where a highly successful miner had been found dead. His body was discovered during the deep winter snows, and only located weeks after he’d died, but his cache had never been found. So, it seemed like a good spot to investigate.

We grabbed a couple of detectors, some bear spray, a flare gun with bear bangers, some sniping tools, a couple of pans, and off we went.

Not far into the trees we found an old cabin, but it wasn’t quite old enough for the stories we’d been told, but it did have some cool items in it; however, there were no other structures, and we’d been told there were “cabins”.

We carried on, picking up the thread of the trail, but we got crossed by some deadfall. Working our way through, we were soon on our way downslope. In short order, the steep trail dropped in pitch even more, and the surrounding forest was extremely quiet, which was unexpected.

We were in an area of dense growth, but no buildings were visible anywhere. As we rounded a bend in the trail, we saw a collapsed roof, and under the roof, the drooping remains of a log structure. Off to the right at about a 45-degree angle, there was a building that had obviously been a workshop at one time, as lots of cast off materials and machinery parts surrounded it.

In front of us, right off the trail to our left, was an old root cellar, and someone had been digging behind it, throwing out all of the old cans and bottles. To our immediate right was a building and part of the roof was beginning to collapse. What was interesting is that under an intact portion, there were still many cords of cut firewood.

As the steepness of the descent increased, we came upon a large, long log building, one that had been re-roofed in more modern times. To elaborate a bit, the cuts of the logs where they were fitted at the ends had been beautifully done by some master builder in the past. Those logs were securely locked; it was built to weather any kind of severe force. To the left of the long building, there was a house, the roof over the porch collapsing, and when we went inside for a peek, someone had done a lot of work to cover the rooms in every ceiling with tin, and that was curious.

After poking around the surrounding buildings for a while, and after snapping some pictures, we worked our way along the edge of the cliffs to get down to the creek.

One of the first things we noticed was a hand-stacked rock wall on the opposite side, one expertly crafted on the bedrock of the creek to rise up to then intersect the cliff face. Someone went to a lot of work to stabilize that spot.

Visible above the rock wall and the cliff were countless hand-stacks of cobbles, evidence of the gold rush where the miners were working the shallow diggings to get to the easy placer. (Later on, we met a modern-day miner, and he told us there were lots of nuggets recovered in the two to three-ounce range!) As the canyon was so steep, and due to the shallow deposits, it had never been worked by mechanized mining.

My son fired up his detector and set off to see what he could find.

While he was hunting for targets, I set up to provide over-watch: we were after all in the land of the grizzly and the black, as well as the territory of the cougar.

As luck would have it, there were no encounters with apex predators, and it was a beautiful afternoon with the forest lit by golden shafts of soft sunlight that filtered down from high overhead. However, the normal symphony of mountain songbirds was absent, as were any signs of hummingbirds or butterflies, all my normal companions while chasing placer. In addition, no mountain flowers were present, reflecting the scanty soil conditions of the canyon.

As I kept watch, I moved around and noticed that every place there was any kind of a gut or a draw the miners had tossed out the cobbles to reach the bedrock bottom. In fact, I couldn’t find one place where they hadn’t excavated any likely-looking spot. Furthermore, as I looped above the area where my son was working, I came across numerous trash pits with all kinds of interesting old cans and containers, rusted evidence of either former food or fuel needs.

My son called me down to the creek where he’d isolated a target underwater, but it turned out to be a small part of an old square nail, which for whatever reason always sounds off like a good find on the pulse machine. He kept digging the rest of the afternoon and recovered countless trash targets: square nail tips and sections; intact square nails of various sizes; bits of can-slaw; a chunk of punch-plate; various pieces of wire of differing compositions; as well as chunks of lead, etc.

What he didn’t find was any gold, but that’s the way it goes in the nugget hunting game; buckets of trash get dug before the gold gets found. In retrospect, I don’t even know how many buckets of trash I dug before I found my first nugget, and I think that’s what kills most beginning nugget shooters. They give up after the first palm-full of trash or sooner. Nugget hunting requires serious dedication and patience, but when that first sassy nugget is finally in the palm, there’s nothing like it, nothing.

We gathered up our gear, took a few more pictures of the cabins and buildings on our way out, and then hit the switchbacks as we slogged our way up out of that silent canyon.

We will go back, but with a different focus this time. We’ll move some hand-stacks from some likely looking spots to give the underlying, undetected bedrock a sniff. I mean, two to three-ounce nuggets? Something had to have been missed in a crack somewhere . . .

All the best,

Lanny

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I always love seeing the old cabins and outbuildings, you can almost always see something that leaves you in wonder.

Thanks Lanny,

Shane

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On 6/13/2019 at 1:04 PM, kiwijw said:

Always a pleasure Lanny. Thank you for a good start to my morning. ?

Good luck out there

JW ?

Thanks for leaving a note, and many thanks for being such a good buddy all of these years. Always good to hear from you, and I wish you all the best as you chase that sassy NZ gold.

Lanny

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On 6/13/2019 at 3:13 PM, OFS said:

I always love seeing the old cabins and outbuildings, you can almost always see something that leaves you in wonder.

Thanks Lanny,

Shane

I agree, and there's always something I haven't seen, which is amazing all by itself. In addition, the ingenuity of how they made things work out there in the middle of nowhere as necessity required it, truly remarkable.

All the best,

Lanny

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  • 5 months later...

Catch and Release Gold:

Did something the end of the summer season I haven't done before.

I went to visit a friend of mine that runs a large placer operation.They had made a cut 70 feet deep to bedrock, and they'd piled the dirt up near their huge wash-plant to be processed. After the large run was finished, there was a small pile of pay left on the big area they'd scraped to push up the remainder of the piled pay-dirt.

My friend told me to take my detector over to the pile to have a bit of fun. I was shocked by his offer, but of course, I giddy-upped to the site and started swinging my detector. Within minutes I had my first repeatable good signal that was pinning at 40 on the Bug Pro. Using my Garrett Carrot, I'd soon pinpointed a nice, flat nugget in the pile.

I kept working my way around the pile, up and over the pile, and worked my way carefully all the way around the bottom of the pay-pile. In this way, I recovered 5 sassy nuggets, which was much like shooting fish in a barrel, but way more fun.

However, my gold fever brain kept nudging me to try to the scraped area around the pile, a much larger undertaking, so I headed out into the wilderness of flatness . . .

About ten feet out from the pile, I got a good signal under a rock about twice the size of my fist. At least, that's what I thought. But, when I levered the rock out (which was a hot rock), the signal was more to the front of the rock (as it faced the direction of the pay pile). The hot rock had been distorting the signal.

I scanned the hole again where the rock had been, and sure enough, the signal was coming from the area described above, and its signal was pinning in the 60 range on the digital display of the Bug Pro. I used the Garrett Carrot to pinpoint the signal, and it sure came back nice and loud! Moreover, I could see the edge of the nugget.

I reached down at the tip of the Carrot and pulled out a flat and sassy nugget of just under six grams! (The flatness was likely why it read so high on the digital meter.)

I kept working the scraped area and recovered another three nuggets, so by the time the rain hit to stop the party, I'd pulled out nine sweet nuggets in total, weighing in at over a third of an ounce.

It was a fun way to spend a couple of hours.

Of course there were lots of bits of steel blade and track shavings, but the gold was consistent due to the loaded nature of the area I was working.

I made my way over to my friend's truck to show him what I'd found, and he was surprised that I'd found the biggest nuggets in the scraped area, and he assured me they would sure scrape deep before they were finished with the pay-pile area.

I decided to give him all nine of the nuggets, even though he wanted me to keep some of them, as he's been great to me over the years to let me detect on his claims wherever and whenever.

Fun, fun catch and release day.

All the best,

Lanny

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  • 1 month later...

Warning! Annual prospecting poetry!!

The Ballad of Shifty Eye and Curly Sue:

A handsome thing, named Shifty Eye,
Just never worked, nor would he try.
Yet he was always flush with dough.
Well, this set folks to wonder so

Just where that Shifty got his cash.
Was Shifty doin’ something brash?
Like robbin’ sluices in the dark?
At night the dogs would often bark . . .

Some clean-ups seemed a little thin.
Was this that Shifty’s sure-fire win?
So, guards was set at every claim
To see if this were Shifty’s aim.

In spite of this, they never found
If Shifty had been sniffin’ ‘round
That sluiced up gold of Montanny,
Fer Shifty, he was right canny.

All dressed in black on darkest night,
He’d rob a sluice and do it right.
He never took the total take,
As that would be a huge mistake.

A bit from here, a pinch from there,
He’d do his shopping everywhere!
Yes, equal opportunity
Described his actions perfectly.

He wasn’t dumb, nor was he thick
His brain was rather quick and slick
It helped him tune his robber’s game,
That is, till trouble one night came.

T’was New Year’s Eve, when he got caught,
Plumb lucky that he wasn’t shot.
A doe-eyed gal named Curly Sue
Drew down on Shifty, froze him true.

But Sue was lookin’ for some fun,
‘Cause shootin’ someone with a gun
Creates a sort of end to things,
And Sue was thinkin’ wedding things!


She’d loved that Shifty from the start;
The love got rooted in her heart
When first she’d spied him on the street.
Since then, Sue’d thought him mighty sweet.

She yelled fer Pa up in their shack
A ten-gauge shotgun he did pack!
“Now look-ee here” her pa declared,
“A sluice box robber, mighty scared.”

A miner’s court was called right quick
With Shifty lookin’ mighty sick.
They had that Shifty dead to rights
Fer robbin’ sluices all those nights.

A necktie party soon would be
The thing to stop his robbery.
But Sue declared, she loved the sot
The miner’s court devised a plot . . .

A shotgun wedding was the plan,
They all agreed, down to a man,
To hold a spree that New Year’s Eve.
(They had no will fer Sue to grieve.)

A priest was brung—some duds was found.
The miners gathered all around
While Shifty married up with Sue,
On New Year’s Eve of ’62.

A handsome thing named Shifty Eye
Learned how to work and even try.
And Curly Sue was sure happy
She’d found a way to wed Shifty.

Happy New Year, and all the best,

Lanny

 

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Warning! Annual Prospecting Poetry.

The New Year’s Shift

Now Blackjack Bill rode the outlaw trail
But he somehow dodged the marshal’s jail.

He’d rustle cows when his poke was slim,
Then rob a stage if the mood hit him.

He tried his hand at the minin’ game
Then dreamt up ways to improve his claim!

He’d salt it hard, and he’d salt it good.
Just to fleece big shots because he could.

But Blackjack Bill wasn’t rotten through
Deep down inside were his good points too.

With lines right clear in his brain defined,
They formed a gulf from his outlaw mind.

Now women folks was a point in case,
He’d see no harm nor cause disgrace.

Well, killin’ folks was a big no, no.
Would he rob the poor? That weren’t a go.

The rotten rich and the proud were game,
And anyone else of haughty fame.

***********************************

In the minin’ camp one winter’s day,
A gang of scum cast their lot to stay.

Some deeds were done in the dark of night
And the camp soon knew an awful plight.

A widowed gal who had lost her man
Got her nest egg stole from her coffee can!

A peg-legged man with a humble store
Had the windows smashed on his new front door.

The camp’s new church, with its copper spire
Was set ablaze by an arson’s fire.

Two guards was shot, at the mine payroll,
That gang of trash took a fearsome toll.

They roughshod rode every night and day;
The marshal shot when he made his play.

So, Blackjack Bill of the outlaw breed
Renounced his past with a brand-new deed.

The shiny star which the marshal’d wore,
Was pinned on Bill ‘cause he was sore!

 With Bill as boss, he could choose his crew,
At the mines he’d find the right type too.

His posse new was the perfect thing
To rout that gang, and to make them swing.

On New Year’s Eve, with his worthy men
He cleaned them out at their bandit den.

Well, Blackjack’s shift was a thing to stay.
It stuck with him to his dyin’ day.

All the best,

Lanny

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  • 2 weeks later...

Discouraged at not finding a nugget?

I've been doing some reflecting lately on the topic of finding that first nugget.

I've read many posts on this forum over the years of people that buy a nugget machine, but then they're quickly discouraged after a few trips to the gold fields, and then they get discouraged and either sell their machines or let them die a slow death in a dark, claustrophobic space somewhere.

I keenly remember how many targets I dug before I ever found my first nugget.

I started off chasing gold nuggets with a Garret Scorpion Gold Stinger way back when, and I actually got some good signals on a river bank way up north one day, but all I recovered were square nails. Now, the reason I bring this up is that the next year, I went back to the same spot, but Mother Nature had torn up that bank and exposed nuggets and square nails a plenty!

If I'd have stuck with the Stinger, I'd have likely found the nuggets among the square nails from the 1800's, but I simply got discouraged with digging so many square nails. However, now that I reflect back on that river bank, many things make a lot of sense today that made no sense then.

For instance, the square nails were there because they were heavies that were being drawn out of the current by a big suction eddy, the bedrock on that bank being shallow underneath the river run. The abundance of nails should have been my first clue that I should have slowed down and investigated throughly, but I didn't do so as I was a green rookie. Nevertheless, the next year when I returned, I was running a sluice and running the bank material through it, and that's when I hit the nuggets (along with lots of square nails). In fact, that bedrock was such a good trap, I actually found nuggets by eyeballing them as I cleared off the overburden!

However, I've wandered from my original topic, and I'll now address it by telling about all of the junk I dug before I ever found a nugget with my detector. That second year, as mentioned above, I went back to the gold country with a shiny new Minelab SD 2100. (The previous year, my prospecting buddy had found nuggets with his Minelab 1700 while all I found was trash. I actually put the trash I found in 4-litre ice cream pails, so I had a record of what I was recovering.)

In the pails I've mentioned, I had bits of copper wire, spent rifle and pistol cartridges (which always sound sweet), musket balls of various calibers (which also sound sweet), pistol rounds of various calibers (lead sure makes a sweet sound!), bits of blasting caps, many ends of square nails, lots of intact square nails of various sizes, lead sealing portions from tinned food, lead keys from meat tins, bits of rusted tin cans, steel wire of various gauges, lids from small tinned goods, bottle caps going back to the birth of bottled goods, bits of harmonica reeds, gears and parts of old watches, shotgun bb's and cartridge ends of various calibers and sizes, wire mesh bits, boot tacks (steel and non-ferrous), bits of aluminum, chunks of copper sheeting, as well as other junk I can't recall right now. The point is, I kept on digging and collecting because there was no discrimination on the SD 2100, so I dug everything, but with detectors that had discrimination (my buddy had the Gold Bug, the Minelab 1700, a friend had a Whites with discrimination), they would not handle the extreme mineralization where the best gold was. Therefore, I had to slug it out with the 2100 day after day.

The buckets kept filling up, but no nuggets . . . .

That is, until one day, when I'd been detecting a spot with lots of hand-mining test holes from the 1930's, my fortunes changed. As the spot was littered with round nails, I'd been digging a lot of them that day, plus I was recovering lots of bits of rusted tin from cans as well as bits of wire and screen. Nevertheless, on the rim of a test pit, I hit signals all the way around the top and sides of the excavation. I recovered round nail, round nail, round nail, round nail, but then something heavy hit my palm that was just under the moss. It didn't feel like a nail at all. It was my first nugget and a multi-pennyweight/multi-gram beauty. I still have it and will likely always have it for sentimental reasons as it represented when the dam broke, so to speak.

For after that find, on the same trip, I recovered a slew of multi-pennyweight/multi-gram nuggets. It was like there was some kind of invisible barrier that I'd finally breached, and the nuggets have kept on coming ever since.

So, to those of you that are discouraged, that are thinking of hanging up or banishing your detector after a few outings, you have the right to do so, but there seems to be an up-front price to pay for nugget hunting, one that can't be substituted with any other option.

On a related note, my son has found many nuggets, but right now he's been tuning his brain for finding coins and rings, and he's doing very well. I gave him a detector and told him to put in at least 200 hours to learn his detector, and he's done so, and is now finding silver and gold rings. For any of you that hunt rings, you know how challenging that can be, but the reason he really knows his detector is because he's invested the time, along with good techniques, to go find the kind of targets he wants to keep. Does he still find trash? Yes, lots. Do I still find trash, of course, all kinds.

The message I'm broadcasting is to go put in the time, to use proper techniques, to go to the places where gold has been found, and eventually you'll get your coil over a nugget.

Point in case, I have a nephew that's chased the gold for a few years with a detector I gave him. He's found a lot of trash, but he'd never found a nugget, that is, until last winter down in Arizona. He finally got his coil over a beauty. He's off to Arizona again to try his luck this winter, and I'm betting he'll get his coil over some gold again . . . .

All the best,

Lanny

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