Golden Grams Of Goodness: Nugget Shooting Stories

[Lanny]

Lake Placers #2

To get back on track with my lake placers stories, we fired up our detectors and asked the miners where we could start hunting. They laughed, and they laughed--loudly! They told us to have at it, but we’d get nothing but grief. They'd seen too many people get skunked in that goldfield over the years while trying to even get their detectors to operate at all, or to have it “squeak” on some gold (as they put it). Anyone who’d ever tried to detect had always been shut down by their severe ground.

The reason for the failure of nugget shooters was the insanely hot bedrock. It ate detectors for lunch. (As they told us this, their comments were heavily dosed with colourful language. In fact there’s most likely a tapestry of profanity still floating over that lake!)

Knowing I had a premium PI with me, and that they’d likely never seen one in action, I thought of trying to explain the good points of the Minelab, but I stopped myself and went hunting gold instead.

In an earlier story in these placer tales, I mentioned the decomposed bedrock pockets peppering the big sheets. When I went to look at one closer, I found it was very wet. I wasn't sure how that would affect the detector, but I scanned a patch of it anyway, and right quick I got a nice mellow tone. One quick scoop and I had the target.

I quartered the sharp little chunks of bedrock out of the scoop and soon had a sassy, 1.5-gram nugget. That find got the claim owner's attention! They said, “Come over here with that machine.” They then walked me over to another similar area and told me to try that spot. So, I tried it and got a signal right away. However, this time I never found a nugget but only one maddening false signal after another. They soon tired of watching, and shaking their heads in a “we told you so way”, they started mining again. Their body language said that the first find was nothing but a fluke. To them, the rest of my time would be wasted digging, as their black graphite schist bedrock was, once again, too hot for detectors.

So, the miners left us to our detecting on the bedrock. Nonetheless, my mining buddy was frustrated with how useless his broken wrist was. It depressed him to be on virgin detecting ground while equipped with a machine that could handle the ground, but he could do almost nothing about it! Yes, he could swing the detector, but no digging, running the pick or sorting material in the scoop by himself.

So, we worked together, he worked the coil, and I did the rest. By working together, we could help each other have some fun.

We headed back to that loose bedrock where I’d found the gold. I’ve found through the years that if a trap worked well enough to grab and hold one piece of gold, some extra dedication on the same spot could produce another chunk as well.

To describe the spot a bit more, the excavator had left a crumbled rise of about two feet. I started detecting up and down that little hump. Pretty soon, right near the top, I got a nice signal! It was that telltale Minelab, low-high-low tone. Although not as strong as the first signal, it was nice and sweet. With the signal close to the surface, it made it easy to get the target in the scoop. A nice, bumpy one-gram nugget was in the scoop.

As I continue my lake placers series, I’ll reveal the beautiful things hidden in those solid sheets of red-hot bedrock, and later I’ll let you in on what we found in the miners’ test piles as well.

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

Return to the Gold Fields.

It couldn't have been almost nine months since we'd hit the goldfields, but that's what it turned out to be. Yes, Co-Virus has made for one crazy year, with various places requesting outsiders not to travel due to health concerns and worries about hospital beds in small communities, so we respected those concerns.

Not long ago however, we got the green light to return, so we packed up the detectors (my wife and I), the gold pans, some grub and camping essentials, and headed off for the mountains.

It was an overcast day, with the threat of rain, and the closer we got to the mountains, the darker the clouds. The heavens opened briefly; it rained enough to use the windshield wipers, which turned out to be a great way to clean the bugs off the glass.

We went through the high mountain pass, and the rain stopped as we headed down the other side. The sun came out, the sky turned a welcome cobalt blue as a few puffy clouds floated across that clean ocean of air.

When we got to camp, I didn't know what condition I'd find our trailers in, but as it turned out, they were all tight and dry after our long absence, no insects or mice, no bears had broken any windows or flattened any tires, all was well. With the camp in great shape, and with the beautiful weather, it was shaping up to be a fine day.

We went to visit some friends that have a large mining concession (think of any of the large reality show mining operations you've watched on TV). After years of working with them, they call me their mining consultant. (I always get a laugh out of that.) They have me check the bedrock in their placer mining cuts with my detectors to see how effective their recovery methods are. However, we were told the previous week there wouldn't be any open bedrock to check, so we were planning on doing some general prospecting where there was a large gold rush in the 1860's.

We returned to camp that night after a great visit, but with no expectations of any gold chasing other than what I've described above.

Early the next morning, everything changed.

I looked at my messages, and there was one from the mine owner. He told us to get our butts out of camp quick and get to the mine site as soon as we could. He had some bedrock open, and he needed a test done to see if it would be worth using a new piece of equipment he'd recently bought.

My wife and I flew around camp gathering all of the items we'd need to check bedrock: pry-bars, sniping tools, buckets, gold pans, sucker bottles and metal detectors. We loaded up a lunch, as well as lots of liquids to stay hydrated in the summer sun.

We fired up the Cummins diesel, and we headed off for the seventy minute trip to the mine. We had to be careful on the road as the logging trucks have made quite a mess with several bad spots where the ground has turned to a soft mess that will drop the front of your truck deep and fast into a nose dive if you're not careful, so slow and careful driving got us through safely.

Summer here in the north is beautiful, with green growth everywhere, large forest animals in abundance, as well as a profusion of songbirds, hawks and eagles, with the whole scene punctuated with a riot of colourful wildflowers.

We got to gold camp, looked at their morning cleanup and saw a beautiful collection of nice nuggets, the largest two were both over an ounce and a half, with a 27 gram nugget being the next biggest. Lots of nuggets in the six to seven gram range, and a whole collection of meaty pickers as well.

We idled the diesel along the mining road down into the excavation, then parked in a deep ravine and unpacked our gear.

I set my wife up with the Gold Bug Pro which is an excellent detector for shallow gold on bedrock, and I set up my Equinox 800 with the small sniper coil.

I sent my wife to one end of the finished excavation, and I went to the other end.

A geologist was also there. He's retired now, but he'd just bought a shiny new Minelab 2300, and I helped him ground balance it and gave him a few solid detecting tips for how to work such a spot. However, he didn't have a super-magnet with him on a pick or a wand, and I knew that would be trouble as the bedrock was iron-hard, and there were bits of bucket and blade everywhere because of that.

He only detected for about half an hour, and then he quit as he'd had enough. The 2300 is supersensitive. Moreover, it doesn't have discrimination, so he was hearing every tiny sliver and piece of waste steel, and he had no way to remove them from his target zones.

My wife and I were detecting with discrimination, a necessity on the first sweeps of the bedrock due to the countless bits of steel, and not long after we started, my wife gave a shout and asked me to hurry up to her end of the cut.

She had two small nuggets she'd found with the Bug Pro, her first ever nuggets with that detector! I decided to poke around a bit in her area and soon I'd recovered seven small pieces in the half gram to gram range. My wife abandoned the detector and decided she'd do some panning as there were little gutters of dirt in the low spots where the excavator buckets could not scrape due to the hardness of the bedrock. From her first pan on, she had gold in every pan. It seemed impossible, but she just kept hitting the gold.

One of the miners came along then, grabbed a pan, and he joined her. He got the same results as she did. (He and several other mine workers had tried all of the bedrock up to where my wife was working with their pans, but they hadn't been able to find the gold.)

I went back to detecting the remainder of the bedrock away from my wife's lucky strike, but I could only find hot-rocks and countless slivers of steel, no gold whatsoever.

After three hours of careful scanning with the detectors, I went back to where my wife was working. The miner was still there panning as well. He wasn't quitting! They were still on the gold. There was a sticky, yellow clay that was holding the gold in small cracks in the bedrock, from the top of the cracks all the way to the bottom.

I took over the Gold Bug Pro and went to work. Steel, steel, gold. Steel, steel, gold. I soon had a nice rattle of nuggets in the bottle. My poor super-magnet kept growing a thick beard of steel shavings that I had to keep cleaning off, but once I'd quieted an area, I could hear the soft, sweet sounds of the gold underneath.

I hit a spot that had a broad sound, not the spiked signal of a single target. I've experienced this before as the detector is responding to a collection of flakes and small pickers all nestled together. So, I dug down into the V's in the bedrock where I hit those broad responses, and sure enough, when I panned the material, lots of small flakes and little pickers of sassy gold!!

We pulled out 13.7 grams, the miner panned out another 4 grams himself, so it was a fun day.

The next morning, the mine owner moved in a vacuum truck, a pressure washer, a 1.5 inch pump to create a slurry, and they went to work on that bedrock in all of those little gutters because of the test results we'd provided. We'd found the sweet spot for them, and they made a nice haul that they otherwise would have missed.

It was a great day, and we came home with some nice gold.

All the best,

Lanny

[geof_junk]

Lanny I wish I could express myself like you. Language is the only thing that has disappointed me in life, or should I say spelling and grammar. I have a lot of story that people miss out on because of it, but at least they can enjoy yours.👍  

[Jim_Alaska]

Another wonderful story Lanny. Sounds like you had a lot of fun and may have even made up for not being able to get out for so long.

[Lanny]

On 8/12/2020 at 4:07 AM, geof_junk said:

Lanny I wish I could express myself like you. Language is the only thing that has disappointed me in life, or should I say spelling and grammar. I have a lot of story that people miss out on because of it, but at least they can enjoy yours.👍  

Thanks for the compliment, and I really would love to ready your stories some day!

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

On 8/12/2020 at 11:01 AM, Jim_Alaska said:

Another wonderful story Lanny. Sounds like you had a lot of fun and may have even made up for not being able to get out for so long.

Thanks Jim, and it was great to get out again, and it did start to make up a bit for not being out for so long.

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

A Few Hours To Hunt

On Saturday, my son and I headed to the mine in the mountains with only a few hours to hunt the gold.

We arrived at the placer cut, and we could hear an excavator working somewhere on the placer lease.

We looked over the bank and saw the mine owner working at stripping off the bottom fifteen or so feet of the sixty feet of overburden to get to the virgin bedrock underneath.

As soon as I looked at his machine, I noticed something was wrong, so I got the operator's attention, and he shut his machine down. He opened the door to see what was up, and I told him he'd thrown a track! He was just about to turn his machine which would have caused a lot more trouble. He thanked us for flagging him down, then he made the long walk up the haulage road to have a chat with us.

He was happy we'd come along when we did, and he yakked with us for a while. We learned that the motor on their largest excavator had seized the day before, and that they were busily searching for a replacement, but they were having a hard time as the diesel motor was a specific design with a special high horsepower build.

We asked how the vacuum truck had worked at suctioning the bedrock my wife and I had tested for them last week, and he said their test had worked out much better than they'd even expected. In fact, from now on whenever they hit super-hard bedrock, they'll use the suction retrieval system to clean the bedrock.

He told us we could go play in a spot they were no longer working where there was a small hump of bedrock protruding from an old haulage road.

My son and I only had several hours to play as my granddaughters were at our mining camp that weekend and we needed to get back for a family cookout, so we unlimbered the detectors as well as the panning and sniping equipment and headed for the bedrock hump.

My son took one end, and I took the other.

It was a typical August day, hot, hot with perfectly clear skies, the blazing sunshine pounding the bottom of the cut. A brown and orange butterfly gently pumped its body up and down in front of us as we started to snipe likely looking spots. The gentle chuckle of an ice-cold spring flowing from the side of the cut was the only natural sound on that calm day.

I tested a small area first with my gold pan; there was some friable rock exposed, but it held not gold. So, I dug around until I found a v-shaped crevice that held more material. The top part was gooey clay and rock hauled in to cover the bedrock to make the road; however, digging deeper, I soon uncovered intact ancient channel material that was instantly recognizable by its composition.

I blanked on the first pan, but prying apart some bedrock and exposing seams of orange-stained clay, the second pan produced a nice piece of gold half the size of an oatmeal flake. That got my son's attention!

He wasn't having any luck on his end of the hump, so I told him to hit my spot hard while I took out the detector to scan what I'd already cleaned. Sure enough, I found two nice pickers that were stuck to the clay on the sides of the crevice. I worked along behind him as he pulled out channel material, and when I'd get a broad signal, he'd pan the material out, and it usually held nice flakes of gold.

I had my hooked bedrock scraper (spoon-shaped on the other end), and I scraped all of the material from the crack at the bottom of the crevice.

My son headed off to pan it, and when he came back, he had two large flakes in the pan. Then I heard a whack and looked back at the pan, and he'd dropped a nugget in!

The two gram nugget made the flakes look small, but the smile on his face was huge.

We had to finish chasing the gold as it was time to start the seventy minute trip back to camp, but we'd rescued 3.62 grams of gold from an ancient channel, a stream bed that was last disturbed millions of years ago when the dinosaurs tip-toed through them.

All the best,

Lanny

P.S. My son also panned out 2.5 grams of gold from some virgin dirt we brought back from the outing my wife and I had last weekend.

[Lanny]

Lake Placers #3

As part of this ongoing series of gold tales, I’ll explain the channel depositions of this area. From what the geologists and the miners out-lined, the glaciers were masters of that northern kingdom for eons. There were glacial stream concentrations of six or seven channels laid down from different directions of deposition. This reflects the continual glaciation and resultant upheavals of watersheds in the area. Moreover, as the glacial streams were constantly re-oriented at varying angles, they dropped their material in those new runs, some being heavy with gold, others barren

The ongoing detective work, from the Sourdoughs of the 1800’s on down to today, went into determining which runs carried coarse gold. Furthermore, a super glacier had clearly bulldozed through this narrow choke point, scooping out most of the overlying channels as it worked its way down-slope and burrowed toward the bedrock. Evidently Mother Nature had been quite a help at stripping overburden. Nevertheless, with mysterious motives I'll never understand, she then burrowed deeper, hauling the rest of the coarse gold deposit off to banishment in an unknown location, leaving only the telltale bedrock gouges of that robber glacier, clearly evident at the end of the gold run.

However, the beauty of the gold run left in place was that the face was only about six feet from the standing forest with its green and yellow carpet of moss, the depth of the channel shallow to bedrock. Clearly, this lowest run of the remaining overlapping channels had been packing a considerable amount of coarse, nuggetty gold, likely the result of much higher than average stream velocity which had propelled large boulders along with the big gold.

I detected and recovered one smaller piece, match-head sized, from the crumbling rock, and then the ground went silent. So, we wandered back to the fierce zone of insane bedrock but only encountered a hot mess of false signals, no gold (I’d love to hit that spot today with the newest generation of Minelabs to tease more black nuggets from the bedrock!). Regardless, after finding only bits of blade on the surface, we wandered down-slope to where there was a four to six-foot wall of virgin rock and dirt. It was the spot where the bedrock dove under the forest floor and moss I mentioned earlier, and it marked the farthest advance of the mining cut.

There was a slump of dirt, maybe a foot or two in front of the aforementioned wall, and then there was an exposed sheet of that red hot bedrock. The detector could only function at about half of its capacity, losing a lot of sensitivity as to depth. So, I hunted with far less power, but at least I was still in the game. (The new generation of Minelabs and coils deal with ridiculous bedrock much better.)

I kept detecting, but the screeches from the detector sounded like a cat fight crossed with the squeals of train brakes gone wild! Regardless, I kept at it. As my buddy didn’t know how to run the detector, let alone deal with the hot bedrock racket in the headphones, he waited there like a bird-dog on point, ready for any game to flush. However, he didn’t have to be on point for long, as emerging from that tortured electronic noise there came the unmistakable low-high-low sound of gold!

So, I tried to isolate the target signal from the background racket, and all at once I heard this series of terrible high-pitched wails, followed by screeching sounds I’d never heard while detecting. I thought the bedrock minerals had finally conquered the detector until I realized the noise was coming from my partner! A complete squadron of black-flies had crawled down the front of his shirt leaving a bright red patch of raw skin in the middle of his chest!! (If you know nothing of blackflies, you know nothing about the weeks of pain, the scratching, the possible madness from misery.) After hosing my buddy down with a bug dope shower, I got back to detecting.

I was rewarded with the unmistakable sound of a good response. My partner scraped the bedrock as well as he could with one hand, and I used the flat side of my pick to clear the rest of the small stones and clay to expose the shallow pockets in the bedrock.

My dim brain remembered that the DD coil might be much quieter than the little 8-inch mono-loop, so I made the switch, but before I got down on my knees to investigate, I swung the DD in a wider arc just to test its operation and heard several quiet signals—things were rapidly getting interesting. However, the continuous racket of feedback was still there, even with the DD! Putting the detector aside, I knelt down to have a look. However, what I saw was a visual mystery. I was looking at solid bedrock. I mean there were no crevices at all. I couldn’t fit a knife blade into any visible spaces.

I’ll post Lake Placers #4 later.

All the best,

Lanny

 

Nothin' quite as fun as chasin' sassy nugge

[Lanny]

Lake Placers #4

I knew there were signals in the bedrock, and they sounded sweet, so I headed off to gather tools. We had a small sledge back in the truck, an assortment of rock chisels, and the Estwing pry-bar, the one that has the pointed chisel end on the bottom, and the flat L-shaped head on the top. Moreover, the “L” can be used to scrape or be used as a chisel as well to hammer into a crevice—absolutely beautiful little tool.

Having rounded up the tools, I hustled back to the site. The most amazing part was that once I started to chisel out bedrock chunks, the original bedrock was indeed solid, but there was a natural cement of fine-grained, crushed black slate that had been running with the gold in the stream channel that created a perfectly camouflaged matrix, the matrix rock hard as well. In this way, Nature had hidden the original crevices perfectly.

Using hammer and chisel, I worked my way down well outside the edge of the signal’s midpoint. I usually had to go down two to four inches to get below the signal, but then I’d insert a longer chisel and reef on it until the piece of bedrock and matrix popped out. Sometimes the piece would flush up in the air just like a game bird! (It makes sense now why my partner was on point like a bird dog.) After the first nugget flew, we made sure to block the flight path with a large gold pan. We couldn’t risk losing any nuggets in adjacent cobble piles.

After recovering the nugget-rich matrix, I took the chunks and carefully tapped on them until they started to fracture and crumble. (As the matrix and the bedrock were of the same hardness, I never knew where the piece was going to fracture.) Having reduced everything to small pieces, I passed them under the coil to pinpoint the gold-bearing ones.

After tapping away to remove the remaining residue, the gleam of gold was unmistakeable. Moreover, all of the nuggets had wonderful character, nothing flat, featureless or hammered. It was incredible fun liberating a dozen of those long hidden multi-gram nuggets.

Did I smash any fingers while reducing the chunks? Absolutely. Did it hurt? If a fingernail goes black and falls off later, would that qualify? Regardless, the gold adventure was well worth the effort.

In another instalment, I’ll talk about detecting the test-piles farther up that same placer claim and what I found in them.

All the best,

Lanny

[geof_junk]

Lanny you make it sound hard over there in USA 😉 Over in WA Australia I found about 40 nuggets one afternoon,  about half were sitting in the sun having a tan.😎 Most were about 2 or 3 grams in weight.....LINK...... I guess us Ozzie's are a bit blessed or maybe lazy. 😁 Thanks again for your detailed description of your adventure.     👍