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Hi Steve, interesting on your discoveries with the hot rocks, my guess would be they present to the timings differently, so in Normal it hits a sweet spot and Sharp less so, just like that half ounce nugget we got in Meekatharra that time would not respond well in Normal compared to Enhance. Have you tried Ground balancing part way on them to cut back on their signal response but not throw the localized ground balance out too far? This might help cut back on some of them. I have a creek up in NQ that drives me nuts due to all the basalt floaters, they sound just likes deeply buried nuggets and would have to be masking gold underneath them, the local ground is actually pretty homogenous so you can easily detect in fixed GB in normal timings, but the basalts ruin the fun. Steve I just came back from a 3 1/2 week trip away prospecting and did reasonably well, got a couple of virgin patches one of which I have left biting (1 1/2 ounces of small nuggets scattered over a large area has come off it so far). I had two 3 ounce days during the trip which was really exciting especially when the reason I found those patches was due to working out the local geology and targeting areas that were likely to hold gold, there's nothing more satisfying that having a hunch/plan work out. :-) JP Pic of some of the gold I found one morning off one of the patches, the big bit weighed in at 2 ounces. The material attached is a coarse type of silicious sandstone.

Edit: I chronicled this trip to Alaska first, and then told the story of my earlier 2013 Alaska Trip after the fact. I did well enough in 2013 I did not want to tip anyone off to what I was up to until I had a chance to return in 2014. Therefore this story got told first, as if the other had not happened. And then the 2013 story was told at the link above. My history with the Fortymile Mining District of Alaska began in the 1970's and has continued off and on ever since. Last summer I spent considerable time in the area and have decided to return again this summer. Here is the basic plan. I leave Monday to drive from Reno to Alaska. I am stopping a day to visit family in Olympia then will continue to Anchorage, where I will pick up my brother Tom who is flying up from the Lower 48. Then we will backtrack to Chicken, Alaska and pitch a tent site at the Buzby's Chicken Gold Camp http://www.chickengold.com Main building at Chicken Creek Gold Camp Last year I mostly camped around but did spend a period of time at the Buzby's operation. When I was out and about I had to activate my satellite phone to stay in touch because there is no cell phone service in the Chicken area. The nearest cell phone access is a couple hours back along the road at Tok. There is WiFi access at several locations in Chicken however, one of them being at Chicken Gold Camp. The WiFi access is included in the price of staying there. I am getting a dry camp site for $14 a day (6 days get seventh day free) but it saves me $300 activating my satellite phone, and WiFi allows me to keep on the forum and stay in better touch with my wife than the sat phone. Bottom line not activating the sat phone ends up paying for nearly a month of staying at Chicken Gold Camp. Right now I am booked from June 15 until July 20 but may extend. Since I will have pretty much daily Internet access for the entire trip I am inviting you along via this thread to see how we are doing plus to perhaps answer questions for anyone planning to visit Alaska. The Internet access in Chicken is not the greatest even at its best, as the satellite dishes point straight at the horizon just trying to get a signal. That being the case plus I will be busy I will not be posting on other forums for the duration. If you know anyone who might be interested in following this point them this way. I will report in at least a couple times a week and probably more often as time allows or something interesting happens. My brother and I will be commuting to various locations from our base camp in Chicken, with a lot of attention paid to Jack Wade Creek about 20 minutes drive up the road. I have access to mining claims on this and other creeks in the area, but we will also spend considerable time on the public access area on the lower 2.5 miles of Jack Wade Creek. Visit this link for more information. This area is open to non-motorized mining and we will of course be metal detecting. I have detected on Jack Wade a lot, and I can tell you it is an exercise in hard work and patience. It is all tailing piles full of nails and bullets. The nuggets are very few and far between, with even a single nugget in a day a good days work. However, the nuggets are solid and can be large so can add up if you put in a lot of time. Or not as luck does have a bit to do with it. You could easily spend a week detecting Wade Creek and find nothing. So do not be surprised when I make lots of reports indicating nothing found on a given day. We fully expect that to be the case but hope we hope a month of detecting here and at other locations will pay off. I plan on relying mostly on my GPX 5000 but will also be using a Gold Bug Pro for trashy locations or for when I am tired from running the big gun and want to take it easy. I usually run my 18" mono coil on the GPX unless in steep terrain or brushy locations and dig everything. And that means a lot of digging! The Gold Bug Pro eliminates digging a lot of trash and is easy to handle in thick brush. My brother will mostly use my old GP 3000 he bought from me years ago. I am also bringing along the Garrett ATX kind of for backup and also to experiment around with. It also will be easier to use in brushy locations than the GPX. Finally, I hope to possibly have a new Minelab SDC 2300 get shipped to me somewhere along the way to use on some bedrock locations I know of that have been pretty well pounded to death. Chris Ralph will be arriving in Fairbanks on July 8th so I will drive in and pick him up. He will be staying with Tom and I until I return him to Fairbanks on July 21. High on the list is to visit with Dick Hammond (chickenminer) and other friends in the area. The road to Alaska is just another highway these days, with the only real issue being the lack of gas in northern Canada in the middle of the night. The pumps there still do not take credit cards so when the gas station closes you are stuck there until it opens in the morning. Do not try to get gas at Dot Lake at 2AM! I will drive to Olympia to spend a night and day with my mom (12 hours) then on to Dawson Creek/Fort St. John (16 hours), then to Whitehorse (15 hours), and then to Anchorage (12 hours). Four days driving, about $500 in gas for my Toyota 4-Runner. Pick up Tom and some supplies and then back to Chicken (about 8 hours). Anyway, you are all invited along at least via the internet to share in the adventure. You have any questions about Alaska in the process then fire away.

Finally, nice weather. At least forecast to be so until Chris arrives. A VLF is great when time is limited or I am tired or if I just feel like cherry picking. Many nuggets have been found here with VLF detectors, especially the Gold Bug 2 but also MXT and Gold Bug Pro to name a couple. I advised Chris a VLF might be his best bet for his more limited time frame and he is bringing his Teknetics T2. However, if I hunt a tailing pile with a VLF I don't feel like it is really hunted. So I still have to go back with a PI and hunt it. If I have a lot of time I just cut to the chase and hunt it with a PI. The ground here is oddly mild yet not. There is a type of iron mineralization in the rock that does not appear as a hot rock but which makes gold nuggets sitting on or near one of these rocks read as a ferrous target. Pretty scary stuff if you see it in person. Not a problem if you hunt in all metal, but then again you may as well be using a PI. I AM stubborn but in this case it is just doing what we want to do. Every morning my brother and I discuss our options, and every day we opt to go look for a big one. We both like getting over a certain volume of "good" targets and outright hunting is the best way to do that. Bottom line is we are having fun doing what we are doing and so keep on doing it. Tailing piles are just that way, quite different than patch hunting. While I am not happy with a long dry spell it really does not surprise me either. Usually I a luckier than this but just the way it goes. I know the gold is here. There are two hot rocks here JP. One is classic pure magnetite cobble - sticks with a thump onto your magnet. The other is an odd rock Chris can help identify. Looks kind of like basalt but not. Screams high tone at close range but luckily few enough to only be an annoyance. Weird part is Normal timing makes them scream and Sharp less so, therefore Sharp is the best timing here strictly from a mild ground with strange hot rock perspective. Do you have any idea why a hot rock would be milder in Sharp than in Normal? The other mode in common use here is Sensitive Extra with small coils. Hope your last couple weeks was profitable Jonathan! In praise of small coils. Some other prospectors in the area are using Sadie coils almost exclusively hunting previously hunted areas. One hard working fellow in particular got on piles quite a few people have hunted and scored some very nice gold nuggets. I know I was over the spot with my 18" mono, and the fact is when hunting tailing piles with larger coils I can get sloppy, especially if I am tired. The ground is steep and rough, and it is easy to swing too fast or not overlap enough. But in particular you have to swing the big coils over the rubble. The small coils force you to slow down, be more careful, and most important, get in close in tight quarters to pull gold larger coils miss. Anyway, impressive results and a reminder that slow careful hunting with small coils can be very beneficial with a GPX.

A shower at Chicken Gold Camp is quarter operated. $3 gets you 5 minutes and $4.25 gets you 7 minutes. Great water pressure so 5 minutes was good for me but you need a timer as shower has none. I was quick afraid water would quit, then had time to spare. Found out there are no laundry facilities in Chicken. If Mike had a washer and dryer I would be happy to pay $10 a load, but as it is we will wait until we go to pick Chris up in Fairbanks to wash clothes. Had to fill the truck up again in Chicken, both locations are now at $4.79 a gallon (diesel $4.99). We got a couple days of nice weather then back to rain last night and today. Gold luck continues to be very poor. Last year I averaged only a nugget a day but the size was much larger with pennyweight to half ounce nuggets to be had. Or bigger. This year I have 18 nuggets so far but only one hitting a pennyweight. Tom is doing exceptionally bad with only three small nuggets. In an act of desperation we tried tossing rocks off piles that produced nuggets previously. It seemed worth a try but trying to make detected piles produce more targets this way is lots of labor for few targets. Still, the SDC 2300 scared up a couple tiny pieces doing this. I also got a couple more nuggets with my GPX the old-fashioned way. Bottom line is it was worth a try but we decided we much prefer outright detecting as plenty of targets are to be had in potentially good locations. We just need to get over something with some size. We also could be going for sure thing small gold on bedrock and would have more gold now if we had done so from the start, but scraping up a couple pennyweight a day of small stuff is not why we are here. We are big game hunting and pounding shallow bedrock with the SDC and Gold Bug 2 is not going to do it for us. So we will continue to roll the big dice, win or lose. You may be surprised to hear we are in good spirits and having a good time. I just love wandering locations where I know a big nugget lurks digging targets. The number of trash targets I dig each day makes a good solid handful of nail, various bullet parts, and misc ferrous stuff. But each could be a nugget and every day could be the day. My brother is holding up very well and is therefore proving to be a good detecting partner. Speaking of which his SD2200v2 crapped out yesterday. Good thing we have the SDC 2300 along! We just finally isolated it down to a weak power wire on inside of box. No way to solder right now but a little wiggling made the connection and hopefully it holds until such time as a permanent fix can be applied. Otherwise he will use the SDC as we both have been doing off and on. I am very happy with that detector for multiple reasons but that can wait for my next Treasure Talk blog. Well, raining again. The internet goes from poor to bad when it is cloudy so I will post this now and then see if I can get a photo to post afterward. That turns into a battle even after I shrink them down for speedier upload. If you have not already go back to the first page and check out the couple photos I added there. Great grizzly photo in particular. Not much bear sign around here. A track here, and little scat there. Nothing to get excited about. Lots more moose than last year, most cows with calves. Well, new week, new month, new start.

The Taylor Highway to Chicken is paved but unpaved from there on over into Canada. They grade it regularly but it can be a mess during heavy rains and dangerously soft shoulders. Constant stream of tour buses, huge RVs, and motorcycles making the loop all summer. Our daily commute to Jack Wade will be on dirt roads. I've made the trip something like twelve times now but still look forward to the drive. Beautiful scenery and if you hit it right tons of wildlife; bears, bison, sheep, goats, deer, elk, etc. I promise you also if you ever get used to driving 16 hour days a two hour drive will never seem like anything but a short hop afterwards! Muncho Lake, British Columbia, Canada. I took this photo spring of 2010. The green color of the lake is attributed to the presence of copper oxide leached from the bedrock underneath. Yet the lake is home to lake trout, arctic grayling, bull trout and whitefish. What was that again about copper mineralization being deadly to fish?

Should be quite the adventure, and should be something to show most days. We will have three guys working when I am there and you will have two before I arrive, so each day will have more targets dug than if just one guy was working - more chances for gold finding. Right now I am leaning toward using my Fisher T2, but may do the GB Pro - they are so light, I may bring both with one to use as a back up. I will also bring my Whites TRX pinpointer - the faster the target is out of the hole, the sooner you are on to the next one. Most trash, bullets and nuggets of any size will be no problem to the pinpointer, though smaller stuff may be tougher.