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Golden Grams Of Goodness: Nugget Shooting Stories


Lanny

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An explanation on the nature of boulder clay, and glacial gold action

People have asked me what boulder clay is. Well, the only explanation I have comes from local knowledge shared with me by the placer miners in the northlands.

When the glaciers were running many miles deep, and countless miles wide during the ice age, they dragged unsized rock and soil with them. They packed along serious boulders mixed within stubborn clay. While parked and melting, or when melting and retreating, they dumped this nasty mess all over the lower areas, as well as the mountains and valleys. To understand this, it’s necessary to remember those huge glaciers were miles thick, covering many mountains completely.

With such titanic forces moving these glaciers, and when they dropped their loads, they often left forty feet and more of this boulder clay which smothered the existing stream beds. This protected any golden stream deposits for untold eons. Over countless thousands of years, successive glaciers and post-glacial streams chewed away at the boulder clay in the canyons, erosion working its way down to those hidden deposits. When they cut into that former river-run (freshly exposed), they started re-concentrating the gold in those existing streams.

Sometimes, the early prospectors got lucky enough to find a bedrock outcrop that was the rim protecting an ancient channel from glacial gouging along a river, and then they’d tunnel in, drifting along the bedrock to mine out the deposit under the huge deposits of adjacent boulder clay bordering the streams.

So, boulder clay (sometimes called armour clay), is a solid deposit of boulders and heavy clay that overlies old stream deposits and ancient channels. It is the bane of modern miners, as it has to be stripped away to get at the channels underneath, and it often requires ripper teeth on the back of huge bulldozers to break it up sufficiently so it can be bladed out of the way. Clearly, it takes a lot of time and money to strip it off.

But, once that overburden is stripped away, and if the Oldtimer's haven't beaten the modern miners to the deposits underneath, it is sometimes a glorious bonanza to behold! The nuggets in the sidewalls of the channel are easily seen (a foot or two off the bedrock). I’ll never forget that incredible sight twice seen: multi-gram nuggets spaced eight to ten inches apart, making it easy to finger-flip the nuggets out of the channel material into a pan. Too bad those nuggets weren't mine to keep!

All the best,

Lanny

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Local miners and exploration

Way up north where the wolverines roam, we were out one day cutting firewood, then took off to find drinking water. We found a local spring up the canyon with sweet water whose taste finished with a slight buzz on the tongue, strange, but great stuff.

The next morning, after starting a fire to kill the chill in the wall tent (water in the fire bucket covered in ice), and after a miners’ breakfast cooked on the wood-burning stove, we lathered up with bug-dope, hopped on the ATV, and bounced along the rough, twisting road through pines, fir, and stands of aspen and birch. Fresh yellow and purple mountain flowers grew thick along the road-side. Lazy bumblebees tumbled from flower to flower while butterflies and humming birds sipped nectar as the pleasing smell of new-growth pine filled the air.

The ATV climbed in elevation toward the active upstream placer claims. We stopped and introduced ourselves in every mining camp along the way. Two upstream operations bordered the main logging road, with a total of eight workers. Both operations had exposed old drift mines from the 1800’s and 1930’s.

Staring at those now open tunnels was fascinating, and one of the miners offered to lift me up in the bucket of the excavator if I wanted to poke around inside. But looking at the collapsed and rotting timbering, I passed on his generosity.

The larger of the two placer mines was working upper-strata dirt that ran six grams to the yard, but when they hit bedrock, it ran eight grams to the yard. The bedrock gold was coarse, with nuggets in the half-ounce to ounce-and-a-half range. That coarse gold had tons of character, bumpy and rough. The bedrock that held it was graphite schist and slate.

The other operation was smaller, their equipment much older, with lots of down-time to repair equipment. Moreover, both mines were located where several ancient channels intersected, and the smaller mine was getting the same gorgeous gold. At both locations, the friendly miners shut down their wash-plant and excavation machinery to chat with us.

Both groups of miners invited us to detect their claims whenever we wished. We just had to tell them what we found and where. Furthermore, they told us to keep all the gold we detected, great people! (We went home with some fantastic nuggets thanks to them.)

Leaving the two mines, we took a branch off the main logging road, exploring an inactive logging trail. Along the way, we noticed where old growth trees were cut long ago in the canyon, their massive, moss-covered stumps accompanying the new growth. To our surprise, we found a placer miner far up that trail, located downslope in an adjoining gulch. With an old WWII-era D-8 Cat, he was patiently working a small-scale operation with a pay layer that was six feet off the bedrock. Strangely, there was no gold on the bedrock (lots of pyrite though), yet the gold he was getting was magnificent—some of it was crystalline, and all of it was coarse.

He was a very trusting sort, and at the end of the day, when the cleanup was taken from the wash-plant, he gave us the concentrates and told us to pan them out! (They were loaded with coarse gold.) He left us to keep panning, then headed off to have a bath in his outdoor tub, heated by a clever invention he’d connected to the water-jacket of the engine block of his Gen-Set.

From him, we learned the gold deposits in that area required real detective work. The pay-layers had to found and worked wherever they were; they weren’t deposited in a normal way due to multiple glaciation events. It required forgetting former gold ideas, keeping the mind open so as to accept new techniques and strategies hard-earned by the locals. So, we threw out the idea that gold always concentrated on bedrock and accepted his new teachings.

We spent the entire day exploring, meeting people, and asking lots of questions. While cruising from mine to mine, we also oriented ourselves to our new surroundings. By the time we got back to camp, it was getting dusky (about 11:30 at night). We were both bone tired, not yet recovered from the sketchy trip in to our base camp.

So, back at camp, we were eager to drive the bugs out of the tent by firing up the wood-burning stove, as well as making sure the Winchester 30-30 was loaded for business and within easy reach, just in case an apex predator decided to call.

With the tent nice and warm, we crawled into our sleeping bags, and we drifted off accompanied by the solid heat, and lulling crackle of the logs burning in the stove.

We spent weeks in the area and had many adventures. It is a nugget-shooter’s paradise for sure, and I hope to return one day. But the trip is hard on vehicles and tires, and the air is filled with bugs. So, perhaps I’ll visit one year in the fall, after the frost has knocked the bugs down, and it has firmed the roads up a bit.

All the best,

Lanny

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Love these stories! Sounds like a great time and some great conversations. I’m sitting here wishing I could join you one day in those far northern reaches!

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13 hours ago, nebulanoodle said:

Love these stories! Sounds like a great time and some great conversations. I’m sitting here wishing I could join you one day in those far northern reaches!

Thanks for leaving a kind compliment, appreciate it.

Lots of fun, always some unknown in the North, sometimes rewarding, sometimes scary, oftentimes a grand adventure. You'll have to do it someday, something you'll always remember, glad you enjoy the stories.

All the best,

Lanny

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Local miners and exploration

  I had to give you a HaHa as your use of adjectives and description is well beyond my abilities. You brought back many smiling memories that I have experienced on the gold fields. So keep up posting yours for me and other to enjoy. Thank you.

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Bedrock Drain Gold

Back in March of 2011, I did some reading/research about a goldfield (rare, out-of-print book) that was worked in the 1890's, and found a couple of fascinating accounts.

In one of the references, a company of men was hired to cut a bedrock drain for a hydraulic operation; they cut a trench in solid rock to drain the water to stop the hydraulic wash from pooling, thus stopping the sluicing recovery.

(I've seen cuts like that before, anywhere from 3-4, all the way up to 8-9 feet deep. Deeper ones are rarer.) The cuts discussed in the book were in bedrock that was cleaned, with the pay shallow to bedrock (laying 3-4 feet above), with lots of coarse gold recovered.

The miners had to cut 300 feet of bedrock drain. While cutting the drain, they must have seen pay trapped deep in the bedrock (this has to be implied from the context of the narrative). Moreover, enough gold was found trapped in the bedrock to fund the entire project!

That fact is interesting enough, but later in the chapter, there’s a discussion about the Chinese claim holders and their workings. The Celestials (as they were called) were also working a bedrock area previously cleaned, and yet, with their bedrock drain completed, they recovered 625 ounces of gold!

While reading those stories, it struck me as odd how the Oldtimer's seemingly rushed to work bedrock yet left so much gold behind! That seemed to be the case. However, I reflected on bedrock I've broken and worked by hand, and unless there’s some surface indication of gold under solid bedrock (the Oldtimer's were limited to hand-tools, no electronic advantage), like an obvious crevice to break open, there’s no way I’d cut down into bedrock six to eight feet either!

After reading that out-of-print book, it really made me wonder what might still be buried under the stacked, washed rock and gravel that covers so many areas of bedrock once worked by hand.

Quite the thing to ponder, as the book really jarred me. (Some of you may have had success working such bedrock. I know I’ve chiseled nuggets from bedrock that had no indications of any crevices whatsoever—a perfectly smooth surface. The only indication of gold beneath was given by my metal detector, and the nuggets were sure there, multi-gram beauties to boot.)

All the best,

Lanny

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45 minutes ago, geof_junk said:

Local miners and exploration

  I had to give you a HaHa as your use of adjectives and description is well beyond my abilities. You brought back many smiling memories that I have experienced on the gold fields. So keep up posting yours for me and other to enjoy. Thank you.

Glad you were able to relate, and thanks for your feedback, much appreciated.

All the best,

Lanny

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Rookie Bedrock Gold

Looking back at some earlier writing, I came across a note about a Greenie panning session one day. It illustrates how too many people don't respect bedrock's ability to hold gold.

I was helping a rookie one day who wanted to learn to chase the gold. He'd studied up on the basics of panning. He'd read a lot of books and articles on the subject. He'd seen some videos on techniques and practices, and he was ready to tear up the hills to get some gold.

He really ripped up the dirt. He dug holes on slopes packed with river-run, dug holes on the downstream side of boulders, dug holes in gravel bars, and he dug holes in the stream-bed as well. But, he only got little specks. He was one discouraged greenhorn. All of his book learning and knowledge, and all of his sweat equity produced almost no gold.

I took him back to a spot on the river I’d shown him earlier in the day, right before he set off to light the panning world on fire. While he was gone, I had stayed in that one spot. It was a place where the river had shifted course that spring, and in doing so it had exposed some nice bedrock.

The bedrock was now a foot or so above the water. It didn't look like much, as there was no gravel covering it, and that's why he'd left. He wanted to run a whack of dirt, so he did. But now his back was sore, along with lots of muscles he never knew he had.

As I was panning, he peeked over my shoulder, and I showed him about three tablespoons of material in my gold pan. I’d freed it all from cracks and crevices in the bedrock. I told him how It had taken patience and time to get that tiny pile of material. Still, I could tell by looking at his face he was unimpressed with my small sample of pay-dirt.

After all he'd read, listened to, and watched about prospecting, his head was filled with the grand idea that a good spot had to be a place where you could dig, sort, screen, work and wash volume to find gold.

So, I asked him if wanted to wait while I panned my little bit of pay-dirt. And, with a pessimistic shrug, he waited.

It took hardly any time before things, beautiful golden things, started peeking through the black sand. And what do you know, lots of fines, nice flake gold and pickers to boot!

In fairness to him, I knew what to look for. This wasn't ordinary bedrock. It had been under the water for ten years at least (the river channel had shifted). However, just being under water wasn't what made it so sweet. Its structure was engineered with hundreds of perpendicular plates, from two to three inches high, bedded on top of more solid bedrock. I knew that these little plates had been sluicing and holding heavies for many years. All I did was clean those riffles out.

There was no movement of volume to get gold that day, just patience, past knowledge, and the understanding to recognize a likely spot.

So, guess what the rookie did the rest of the day? He staked his spot then and there on the bedrock and worked until the sun went to bed. When he stumbled back to camp that night, he had a nice catch of sassy gold, and his very first picker! You'd have thought he'd found the Hand of Faith nugget the way he carried on around the fire, and I was proud of him for what he’d learned and earned.

The lesson in this tale is with bedrock, rookies don't give it the respect it’s due. Most prospecting books don't give it due respect either. Yet, it's one of the most productive places to check to catch a nice little pile of gold, and often enough, a nugget or two.

Too many rookies head off to dig holes, move big rocks, strain muscles, sweat and swear to find a speck or two of gold. But, for a solid shot at getting nice gold in a small area with a small amount of volume, good bedrock can’t be beat.

All the best,

Lanny

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