I'm one of the luckiest people in the world to have been born where I was and to be doing what I am. This last weekend was truly fantastic. Great country, great people...great gold!

I decided to take advantage of the long weekend and my new Bombardier Traxter ATV to make a run up to the Fortymile country in search of gold. The plan was to head up Friday, get in a couple days of detecting, and get back to town on Monday. The drive up was uneventful though long at 400 miles. I saw a few moose along the way and stopped in Chicken to visit a bit. There were still patches of snow in the high country between Tok and Chicken but the snow was gone in the Chicken area.

My travel rig is a Toyota 4-Runner with Bombardier Traxter behind on single place trailer. The trailer is neat because I can also pull it behind the ATV on good trails. The second picture is the Traxter off the trailer ready to go. I have an oversized suitcase that believe it or not has my GP Extreme with 18" and 14" coils, Infinium with three coils, Shadow X5, and all sorts of detecting accessories, plus extra clothes all in it. I just strap it on back and everything is protected. The Traxter has a large storage box up front and all my food/canned goods are there. A couple picks and my 12 gauge shotgun are strapped on front. I carry a rucksack with things like GPS, camera, binoculars, first aid kit, etc. One reason I chose the Traxter was that I have heard too many tales of people losing ATV's crossing streams, and as a larger, heavier unit it is better than most in that regard. I had a winch installed for this trip as visions of having this rig stuck in a mud hole miles from help and by myself haunted me before I left.

Toyota 4Runner towing new Bombardier Traxter ATV

As I got ready to head out I turned around and there was a black bear watching me. For all the bears I see I have yet to get a decent photo of one since they always run off too soon. I managed to get a picture of this one at least before he took off. Then off I went down the trail to the river crossing. Despite the snow melt the water was low so no problem at all driving the Traxter across. I got to the claims where I had permission to hunt a bench deposit high above the creek itself. The owner was curious as to what was there, so the plan was for me to flag the locations where I found any nuggets. If it looked good enough he was considering doing some mining on the site.

Black bear watching, and Fortymile River crossing

I played around with the Shadow X5 and Infinium a bit, but really there was no point in having brought them along. I had the Minelab GP Extreme outfitted with an 18" coil and I knew it was the machine to use to get the gold. And get the gold it did. Despite having detected this location in the past I immediately started popping nice, fat nuggets out of the ground.  While I am at it, a fierce little snow squall blew in and plastered me with sloppy wet snowflakes for awhile. Luckily it did not last long. I dug a bit of junk but mostly gold. The picture below has a half dozen locations flagged where I pulled up nuggets. The size of the gold and the fairly small area I found them in made it look like this spot might be worth mining. 2011 Update: The miner later did just that and the location paid off fairly well.

Steve hunts with Minelab GP Extreme

The weekend went too quickly and soon it was time to head back out. The weather had taken a turn for the worse and when I got back to the river crossing the water was so high I just stopped and stared for a very long time. I could not bring myself to attempt the crossing and turned back. Luckily there was an alternative trail out to the road, although much longer, which allowed me to avoid the river crossing. Better safe than sorry and so after a much longer ATV ride than I had planned I made it back to my truck. A bit of time to load up and make the long drive back to town.

2.32 ounces of Fortymile gold!

It was all worth it of course. Not only was it a great adventure, but I did very well on the gold. Not so many nuggets but they are all solid slugs which add up fast. The results above are 2.32 ounces of nice, solid Fortymile gold, the largest nugget weighing in at 8.7 pennyweight. Hard to beat that for a couple days of detecting!

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright 2003 Herschbach Enterprises

I visited Ganes Creek, Alaska in 2011 for two weeks of gold nugget detecting. I have been there many times before and have other stories about Ganes Creek on Steve's Mining Journal. So this is intended more as an update with latest tidbits than a full-blown story. For that, see the Steve's Mining Journal contents page. I took two detectors, a Fisher F75 Special Edition and Minelab GPX 5000. I used the F75 SE most of the time since detecting at Ganes Creek is very much like a competitive hunt. I wanted something light and fast for the bulldozer pushes. The Minelab I brought along for off push hunting in the evening or between weeks.

First off, the theory that the richest material mined on the bottom ends up on the tops of the tailing piles is proving out. Most of the larger bucketline cobble piles and dragline piles have been bulldozed, and the biggest and easiest to find large nuggets were in the top layers. Bulldozing deeper into the same piles is producing gold but on the whole the nuggets are smaller. Like 1 pennyweight and 2 pennyweight in size. Larger nuggets do turn up but time and again piles that once produced many large nuggets are now seeing slimmer pickings appear.

I found the most nuggets in both of the weeks I was at Ganes, but they were smaller than what I have found in the past. I got about two nuggets a day average, and my first week only added up to .86 oz. Nice stuff, but no big ones. Only by heading out on my own and hunting an old dozed pile got me a 2.6 oz nugget on the day between weeks. I got a 1.25 oz nugget soon after during the second week on a push on a pile that still was near the top. Piles that used to produce big nuggets do not seem to be producing the big ones any more. Makes sense when you think about it.

My buddy Bernie got a 5.04 oz chunk out of the cobbles. Now Bernie my friend, if you are reading this I am not trying to put your find down. The fact is though it was a 5 oz rock with maybe a half oz of gold sprinkled in it. Many people would have passed over it for a hot rock, so Bernie did well in getting it. But it puffed up numbers in week two beyond what it really was. I'm just trying to be realistic here in my report.

Week One had 9.38 oz for 13 people. Week Two had 19.65 oz for thirteen people but that included my off-push 2.61 oz find and Bernie's 5.04 oz find. Knock them out and you have about 12 oz for thirteen people. Almost an ounce per person is not bad, but unfortunately it does not spread out evenly like that. These photos show how the finds went for weeks one and two. as you can see a few people found only a few or no nuggets. The nuggets in parentheses in the second picture were found in between weeks by those staying over from the first week.

Ganes Creek Nugget Results Weeks One & Two 2011

Some details on my 2.61 oz nugget find. The nice thing about booking consecutive weeks at Ganes is you get an extra day for free. People leave Saturday morning and new group arrives Sunday morning. You are on your own to hunt where you will on Saturday.

The six of us staying over wandered up the creek. I had my eye on a dragline pile near where we had hunted the previous day, so stopped there while the rest went on up the creek. The pile was a big one that had been dozed a time or two with basically just the top knocked off. It looked like easy digging so I wanted to attack it with my GPX 5000. I had been using my Fisher F75 all week and wanted to give the Minelab a go for the day.

I dug steel for an hour on top, then started to side hill the pile. The second target was just over the edge, about two feet below the lip. Dig, dig, dig, and out pops a large nugget! It looked like about 3 ounces. The good thing about Ganes is you can have many poor days and make it all up in one nugget. All the sudden I had most nuggets, biggest nugget, and most weight in the group. I hunted the rest of the hill but just dug junk. When I met up with the rest of the boys they also had found gold in an old push but nothing like mine. Still, it perked up the group with the feeling that our cold streak was broken.

2.61 oz gold nugget fresh out of the ground, found with Minelab GPX 5000

The nugget weighed in at 2.61 ounces, at today's prices possibly a $4000 find. It is solid gold with a bit of quartz, rather flat, would make a great pendant for a football player.

I think overall I got the best results for the total of the two weeks, and at 5.65 oz the only thing I can say is the increase in gold prices has let me able to say I broke even plus a few bucks for two weeks. I think I am the only one who can say that. Ganes is now a place where if you have not ever found a gold nugget you can go and have a good chance of saying you found your first gold nuggets. But they will be smaller than what we would have expected in the past, and the chances of coming out ahead dollar wise is now slim.

Steve's Ganes Creek Finds 2011, Largest Nugget 2.61 ounces
All nuggets except largest found with Fisher F75 SE

If you do not worry about getting back your investment and simply want to detect gold, Ganes is still one of the best things going. My worry is they (Doug & Company) do not recognize that and so the whole thing may shut down soon. The crew is not inclined to continue unless people are getting very good results but they may think people need more results than they do. I went to the UK last October hoping to find one gold coin and got none. I found gold almost every day at Ganes. Getting gold at Ganes Creek is easy compared to anywhere else. That is not to say it is easy. Just easier than elsewhere.

I tried to jump start a situation where mining claims in Alaska would be easily available to the public in the way of pay-to-mine operations. It worked for a time but unfortunately only a few places became available. The process is just too difficult for most miners. We had a glory day with Ganes Creek and Moore Creek whereby significant finds became common. I sold Moore Creek and in one season it went offline. Ganes is near the end. I just hope they give it a go again next summer. I remember when nobody ever found a big nugget with a metal detector in Alaska and sad to say I think the best days are behind us. Not for me or others with an "in" but for the general public looking for a place to detect and have a shot at large gold.

Old bucket line dredge on lower Ganes Creek property

If Ganes is open in 2012, and it may take some lobbying, just sign up and do it. An era is passing and do not wait and wish you had done it. Great people, the best in the world as far as I am concerned, and getting to rub elbows with the crew at a real operating family oriented placer mine in Alaska is something only a few now reading will ever enjoy.

Many thanks to the crew at Ganes Creek for giving me some of the best weeks of my life!

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2011 Herschbach Enterprises

I have done well in Hawaii with my Garrett ATX as told in my previous story at my previous story here. Most of the details of where and what I am doing, detector settings, etc. are all covered there so I will not repeat it all here.

My wife only had a week off for spring break so I had half the time to work with this go round. Still, I think I did all right. Now that I have my system down less time was wasted figuring things out. I used the Garrett ATX exclusively with the 8" mono coil. Discrimination was 3 and Sensitivity 7-8 with unit ground balanced underwater over basalt rocks.

I only worked in the water with mask and snorkel. I work right in the trough at the base of the beach slope a lot in 2'-4' waves and so I use 40 lbs of lead weight to help stay in place. Working overweighted in surf like this can be very dangerous if you do not have a very high comfort level. I have multiple SCUBA certifications up to and including my instructors certificate. Official disclaimer - I do not recommend working like this unless you are trained and know what you are doing.

Just swimming trunks with shirt. I use cheap knee brace pullovers you get in the pharmacy area in a general store as knee pads. Cheap rubber coated work gloves to protect my hands while digging. Surf shoes to protect my feet, and a good mask and snorkel. I hook the velcro strap on the ATX armrest around the handle of a clasp closure mesh goodie bag to hold stuff as I recover it. I bend bobby pins before dropping them in the bag or they slip through the mesh.

I hunt with mask and snorkel until I get a target. I look around for surfers and boogie boarders, evaluate the wave situation, and do a breath hold and duck to the bottom. I generally fan the bottom with my hand or excavate by hand to find the target, then stuff it in a goodie back hanging off my ATX armrest. Scoops are just one thing too many for me to handle in the surf and no good on hard surfaces anyway. I focus on the area where the sand is tapering into a hard coral or rock bottom that will catch and hold targets from sinking too deep.

Steve with Garrett ATX geared up to metal detect in the surf

My main change of strategy this trip was to not dig everything. The ATX makes a hi-lo tone or a lo-hi tone on targets. Lo-hi is high conductive stuff like copper pennies, dimes, quarters, and large iron junk. Or silver rings or very large mens gold rings. Hi-lo is almost all gold or platinum jewelry, zinc pennies, nickels, aluminum stuff, and small steel stuff like bobby pins and rusted bottle caps. I was getting lots of copper pennies, dimes and quarters plus some large junk the first couple days. Dimes and quarters may sound nice but when recovering them in surf at risk to life and limb they are a definite trash target as far as I am concerned, though I did get a large silver ring also. I decided that gold rings were the main goal and with the short week I had no time to waste, so switched to digging hi-lo tones only. I was happy with the results and would recommend this to anyone using an ATX who for similar reasons what to improve the dig to ring ratio. Be aware though certain high value targets like very large mens rings will be missed.

I recovered a couple earrings and that impressed me very much in an underwater scenario. The ATX hits gold about as small as is possible in salt water. There was one well made fake diamond ring in particular that would have been my best ever had it turned out real. I recover them underwater, can't really tell but they sure look good underwater, and do not know until I get back to my room and empty the goodie pouch if I have made a big find. I hope the whole rest of the hunt, only to be let down back at the room. Gold rings on the other hand I know immediately are good finds. I also found a couple more old Sheraton hotel big brass keys to add to my collection. These are rare now at the beach as they are large easy finds, but if the sand scours out one will still turn up now and then.

Coins, jewelry, and keys found by Steve detecting Hawaii surf

All the quarters, dimes, and copper pennies were recovered in the first two days. After that it was nickels and zinc pennies only and I toss the zincs in the garbage. Unless only a day or two old the salt water rots them away to junk. I had a nice pile of lead fishing weights I donated to the dive shop where I rented my weight belts. There was the usual junk as seen on the other page linked at the start of this post but this year I discarded it daily as I have done enough "here it all is" pictures.

All in all given that I had half the time to hunt my finds were on par with the last trip though the beach is depleting out. I considered going to other locations but by the time I drive somewhere else and back that is another hour or more that I could have been in the water. I do not hunt just Poipu beach but the next several beaches in a row so there is a large area I can walk to. There are always newer rings lost but it is the combination of many years of old rings and new rings that make it good, and as the old stuff depletes out then all there is to find is recent drops and the pickings get slimmer. Still, the location is far from worked out.

I only saw one other person with a detector, a local I saw last trip, who walks the beach at waters edge at low tide. He seems as concerned with being out for a walk as detecting as he covers ground real fast.

I like the ATX ability to easily adjust the rod length on the fly from very long to extra short. I did experience a little sand binding in the rods but took care to work the rods and flush them out before leaving the water each time and everything worked fine. I only charged batteries twice on the trip. The 8" mono with rod assembly is now my dedicated water coil, with the 12" x 10" used above water. The water use is rough on the rod and internal cable assembly and so I figure having a coil and rod just for that keeps the stock coil in better shape for normal use. I came away very happy once again with the Garrett ATX. It suits me very well for my style of water hunting.

The rings Steve found on this trip with the Garrett ATX

The four 14K rings weighed in at 21.9 grams total. The silver colored 10K white gold ring with five small diamonds weighed 4.1 grams. The excellent gold smelt calculator at http://coinapps.com/gold/scrap/calculator/ reveals that to add up to 14.47 grams or nearly 1/2 oz of pure gold or about $500 bucks if sent to a smelter. I plan on refinishing and selling the rings in the future instead of having them smelted as I have in the past though so they should bring a bit better value that way.

This article originated as a thread on the DetectorProspector Forum. Extra details may be found there in follow up posts.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2015 Herschbach Enterprises

Well, here is a report on my last visit to Ganes Creek, Alaska for the year. I set myself up for this visit this spring by saying I would go to the mine after everyone had been there this year and find gold, just to prove there was still some left to detect. To show that it just can't all be found... no matter how thorough the hunters. I also wanted an opportunity to work with some new machines, and so in addition to my White's GMT I brought along a new White's MXT and Garrett Infinium LS.

Brian, Jeff, and I left Thursday morning for a five day visit. We got to Ganes and settled in, then decided what to do. Brian was set on doing some prospecting with the 5" dredge Doug had purchased for visitors to use, so he was off in search of places to use it. I grabbed my new Garrett Infinium LS detector to try out, and Jeff used my White's GMT. Jeff and I headed upstream to where most of the large nuggets have been found this summer, on the theory that more were waiting to be found in the area.

We scanned an area that has been heavily hunted. Three nuggets over 5 ounces were detected in the area this year, and I found out it is the same area where the 122 ounce nugget and a 62 ounce nugget were found. Definitely the center of big gold on the creek.

The Infinium ran smooth and clear, so much so that I found myself waving my ring over the coil to make sure it was really working. Absolutely no signals from rocks in the tailing piles. Very odd when you are used to constant background sounds back from a VLF detector. The Infinium is a ground balancing pulse induction (PI) detector and as such it excels at canceling out ground mineralization. I got a signal now and then, and dug either a shell casing, or an iron trash target.

The discrimination on PI detectors is crude at best, and so iron targets that might be rejected with a VLF (Very Low Frequency) will often be signaled as "good" on a PI detector like the Infinium LS. The basic idea with PI detectors is to go ahead and dig everything, although this can be problematic at a place with so much junk as Ganes Creek. I found the shell casings encouraging however, as that meant that not everything had been detected. I figure if non-ferrous items like bullets and shell casings are being missed, then some gold has also been left behind.

Still, the area had been well searched, and the finds were few. I finally located a 13.8 dwt (dwt = pennyweight) nugget, and then a 3.8 dwt nugget (20 pennyweight per ounce). Two very nice, relatively solid gold nuggets. The Infinium had done its job. Jeff, although he tried his darndest, came up with no nuggets. The area has been hammered pretty good. We also tried some old tailings upstream farther, but found no more gold that day.

Gold nuggets found with Garrett Infinium at Ganes Creek

Day Two dawned under rainy skies. We decided to stay near camp, and see if there were more nuggets waiting to found around the cabins. I grabbed the new White's MXT, while Jeff stuck with the GMT. The rain got going pretty good, but we stuck with it. Lots of bullets and shell casings were dug, again, a good sign. But by the end of the day we had no nuggets. We headed up to the bench deposits above camp and found some small nuggets, just so we could say we did not get skunked. Jeff found a nice little nugget over a pennyweight with the GMT, and I got a few tiny bits.

The MXT is a brand new detector from White's Electronics. Steve Houston from White's had a prototype MXT along on his visit to Ganes Creek in the spring and I had a chance to use it then. We both agreed then it had all the right stuff for finding gold at Ganes Creek. We did not use it much, however, as time was limited and we stuck with more familiar detectors.

I have to note that I was very impressed with the MXT around camp. I used the 6" elliptical coil, and ran the unit in the relic mode. This mode, when set up a certain way, gives a high tone on non-ferrous targets, and low tone on iron targets. A setting right at "2" seemed to be the point where ferrous and non-ferrous sorted out with low and high tones. It was easy and efficient around camp, and all I dug were non-ferrous items. It has very good trash separation with the small coil, and easy id with the dual tone system. Great for places where trash is literally inches apart.

Brian had set up in the ditch near the big nugget area, but was plagued with start-up problems with the gear, especially a leaky pump intake hose. He spent most of his day just getting set up and getting the dredge operating.

Brian running suction dredge at Ganes Creek

The weather cleared up the third day. Jeff again ran the White's GMT, and I the MXT with small coil as I had been impressed with it the day before. We started in camp, and I found a small nugget just behind the cabins. Then we tried some of the dragline piles above camp near where I found my 4.95 ounce nugget last year. I switched the MXT to the 950 9.5" coil. Both Jeff and I came up with nuggets weighing several pennyweights each.

So far we were not exactly knocking down the nuggets. Frankly, we were both both a bit puzzled, as our constant digging of bullets indicated nuggets were still to be found. You simply can't dig all the gold while leaving the bullets in the ground. But results were lean, and our enthusiasm was flagging.

I'm a big fan of aerial photos, and had some new ones showing an area downstream opposite the old bucket line dredge machine shop. Long rows of old bucketline tailings ran far back away from the road, and so I suggested we go down and check them for a change of pace. Jeff was running the White's GMT with the Sierra Max 14" coil, and I ran the MXT with stock 950 coil.

The more I used the MXT the more I liked it. On the cobble piles I ran in prospect mode, with full gain, minimum V/SAT setting, and in automatic ground balance. The 14 kHz frequency ran smoother on the mixed rocks of the the cobble piles than a higher frequency detector like the White's GMT or Fisher Gold Bug 2. They tend to get weak signals of rocks because of their higher operating frequencies. The MXT was definitely smoother in the cobble piles than the GMT.

We followed an old trail we had followed last year. I concentrated on the edges, off the main trail in the edges of the cobble piles near and in the brush. I got a good, clean signal, and gave a couple digs with my pick. The moss and rocks flipped back, and there lay a large gold nugget!

I did not get as excited over this one as my 4.95 ounce nugget last year, as I was not sure exactly how large it was. Jeff, however, knew immediately it was something to jump up and down over. And he was right, as upon weighing it came in at 6.85 ounces. My largest nugget ever, and the largest found at Ganes Creek by visitors with metal detectors this summer. Sorry guys, but you left a big one for me to find!

6.85 ounce "Ugly Nugget" gold specimen from Ganes Creek - found by Steve H with White's MXT

The nugget is strange, with very dark, lustrous quartz encasing a solid gold core. The quartz is almost like agate. Fingers of dendritic (leaf) gold reach up from the gold core into the quartz shell. It's a very unique nugget, but I'm hard-pressed to say if I like the looks of it. It has more quartz showing than gold. Some people say it really looks good, others say it's ugly. Oh well, all I know is it weighs more than any other found this summer. And that's remarkable considering the number of people over the ground, proving you just can't get them all.

Side view of "Ugly Nugget" showing wispy dendritic gold

Brian's initial dredge hole in the ditch near the big nugget area did not get him excited. A bit of small gold, but no bedrock, and no large nuggets. So he decided to move to a point of bedrock sticking out into the current location of Ganes Creek. The creek has been moved to the north side of the valley, which is reputed to have poor gold, but Brian wanted to check it out. At least there was bedrock showing he could get at.

The next day (Day Four) Jeff took the MXT, and I went back to the Garrett Infinium LS. I wanted to put its ground canceling capabilities to use on the cobble piles, and Jeff wanted to see why I had grown so infatuated with the MXT. What's not to like about a machine that had found me my largest nugget ever? We searched far into the edges of the cobble piles along the creek. Our search led us way out on the dredge cobbles as far from the road as we could get, opposite the old dredge machine shop. There were no signals for some time, as many of these old cobble piles are relatively trash free. I was ahead of Jeff a bit, and so sat down to wait while he scanned up to me. Then he gets a signal in the middle of the cobble piles.

The MXT said only 10% chance it was iron. VDI number of 55, exactly what it called my large nugget. No signal for some time, in big cobble pile... man, this looked good.

He dug and dug. Got to over a foot. All indications were still good. I was getting excited, and came up to take pictures of the big find. And literally cheer him on, as he was getting a bit grumpy about the depth of the hole. The cobbles kept caving in, which can be very frustrating. And I'd exclaim "But Jeff, this is just how digging the two-pounder will be"!

Jeff excavating large "gold nugget" that turned out to be a rusty can

So at two feet, there is the quart paint can. Oh well, such is nugget detecting. Those large steel targets at depth really baffle discrimination systems. What is interesting, however, is I tried the Infinium out on the can, and it did call it an iron target! It seems the PI discrimination system does work well on some items that have problems on the VLF systems. The thing about VLF discrimination is it will sometimes call ferrous items non-ferrous so you dig some junk. With PI discrimination the problem is more serious - a gold nugget can easily be identified as iron, especially the large nuggets, so it is dangerous to use PI discrimination where large nuggets lurk.

In any case, I sure like to see other people find gold. I always get excited when anyone finds gold, because it tells me there is more for me to find also. It's when nobody is finding gold that I get worried, and today was turning into one of those days. One the other hand, if I go out with Jeff one more time and find a big nugget, I'd best not turn my back on him. I'm likely to get hit over the head with a detector!

Since we were having no luck for the day so far we decided to switch gears. Back to the old reliable airstrip to find nuggets. I've found if I'm just patient, dig lots of bullets, I can always find gold on the airstrip or around camp. But since the Infinium has minimal discrimination, and digging the compacted airstrip material is a lot of work, I switched to the GMT. Jeff stuck with the MXT.

Before an hour was up Jeff found a 12.2 dwt nugget. Shortly after I found a 2.7 dwt nugget with the GMT. We both had nuggets for the day. Jeff's was a very nice, nearly solid gold piece. Mine was a broken, very quartzy nugget. Still, that seemed to be it, although we dug a small pile of bullets and shell casings. We headed up to the bench deposits above camp once again to look for smaller gold.

The MXT is a great detector, but the difference in operating frequencies was obvious. We scraped areas free of overburden over the bedrock, and checked them with the detectors. The White's GMT with it's 48 kHz operating frequency had an obvious edge over the 14 kHz White's MXT, even considering the fact that the MXT was using the more sensitive 6" elliptical coil versus the 10" elliptical coil on the GMT. We dug a couple pennyweight of small nuggets, but the GMT clearly got better signals on the small gold.

Small gold nuggets found with White's GMT

Brian again found little gold with the dredge, and decided to wrap it up for this trip. He had his work cut out for him pulling the dredge out of the creek and getting all the gear put away.

Day Five dawned a bit cloudy and cool. The only real good thing about this time of then year is the lack of mosquitoes. The cool nights have driven them off, and so our days were relatively mosquito free. A few biting flies replaced them, but not so many that I ever had to use a head net this trip. Cold weather has it's advantages.

Since we were leaving that afternoon, we made a short day of it. I had pulled my left arm out of joint, and so was down to digging only targets that gave perfect id. We did a little detecting in the pile of material near the ditch in front of camp. This pile has produced several nice nuggets, and been heavily detected. But Brian is short order found a nice weighing several pennyweight with the White's GMT. It ended up weighing more than all the gold he got dredging on the trip.

The weather cleared as the day went on, and I decided to spend my last few hours up in the big nugget area near the ditch. I ran the GMT again while Jeff used the MXT. I hit the road itself real hard, as I saw no signs that it had been detected much. But Ganes had given us all the gold it was going to this trip, and we went in early to pack and clean up our cabins. It may be I missed out this last day simply because I passed up lots of targets I normally would have dug.

Well, it was a fun trip, with over 9 ounces of gold found. Even discounting the big nugget I found over an ounce of nuggets, with the largest being 13.8 dwt. Jeff found about an ounce with his largest at 12.2 dwt. Good-sized nuggets remain to be found, and even a few clunkers. Still, the easy pickings are gone, and it will take patient detecting to get results at Ganes Creek now.

There are actually many miles of undetected tailings running upstream above the more recent workings. The areas are generally lightly brushed over, with some large open areas. A few brief exploratory runs into these upper areas have produced no real finds, but the area is vast in extent, and worth attention in the future.

A talk with Doug revealed that next season there will be a lot more work done with bulldozers to make areas "fresh" again. The good news is many worked areas will be rejuvenated in this way. The bad news is you guys that did not dispose of your trash properly... well, it's just going to be there to dig up again. The future at Ganes creek is more likely to be a mixture of working material freshly turned over, and then wandering off searching for those missed areas.

Finally, the detectors themselves. I like the Garrett Infinium LS. It has great bang-for-the-buck in the PI department. Its current lack of accessory coils is the only thing really holding it back at the moment. I see the Infinium as being the machine I will turn to when my normal VLF detectors won't do the trick. Ganes Creek is really not the best area for PI detectors, as the low mineralization and lack of hot rocks means the PI units have no real edge over VLF detectors.

The White's GMT is slowly becoming my primary nugget detector. I've favored the Fisher Gold Bug 2 the last few years, but the extra versatility of the GMT is causing me to use it more and more. The extra depth on large gold versus the Gold Bug 2 is the big plus at Ganes Creek.

The machine that really wowed both Jeff and I was the White's MXT. It's the first detector I've ever used that I really think "does it all". Now, while it bench tests well on small gold, frankly it does not hold a candle to the GMT when it comes to very small gold under actual field conditions. If small gold is your bread and butter, the GMT or Gold Bug 2 are still the way to go. Not only do the higher frequency detectors have an innate edge, but the manual ground balance offers better control for small gold. The MXT must be auto ground balanced, then "locked". The GB point is then fixed, but it cannot be manually adjusted. The GMT has automatic and manual ground balance, while the Gold Bug 2 is manual only.

Steve's Gold - 8.15 Ounces Total

But the MXT does do very well on nuggets weighing a few grains or more, and the bigger the gold gets, the less difference there is between the MXT and GMT. Frankly, for nuggets weighing in pennyweights or more, I actually prefer the MXT. It operates smoother than the GMT in mineralized ground, and has depth as good as, and maybe under some circumstances better than, the GMT. It's a great machine for large nugget hunting.

Combine that with the fact that it has a vastly superior id system, with both iron readout and conductivity measurement, and you can actually do things like tell most gold nuggets from a .22 shell casing. I actually used the relic mode with the small coil on the MXT to work extreme trash areas to good effect. This machine has lots of potential to explore, and yet is very easy to use. Add in the the fact that it has a 6.5" x 4" elliptical DD, 5.3" round concentric, and 10" x 5.5" elliptical DD coils available as options, and I think the MXT is now the machine to beat for all-around use. And despite it's wealth of features, it's list price is only $799.95. I think we will be hearing a lot more about the MXT in coming years.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright 2002 Herschbach Enterprises

It's now the middle of winter as I write these words. It has been one of the busiest years of my life, and so I've fallen off on keeping up with my Journal entries. Time to do some catch-up.

My father Bud Herschbach and partner John Pulling and I took the time to make a few final visits to Moore Creek in September and October before the snow set in. We spent quite a bit of our time on claims work, staking additional ground and readying the property for winter. We now have a total of ten 160 acre claims and three forty acre claims covering what we believe to be the ground with the best potential. Although there is gold on all these claims, only more testing will determine which claims will be worth further development and possible mining.

The weather ranged from cold, dreary, rainy fall days to beautiful, clear blue days. Freezing temperatures at night have a bonus in that the mosquito population drops of to levels that are actually bearable in the late fall. Some of the best times to be in Interior Alaska are early spring and late fall because of this. I've always enjoyed fall, with all the colors, and that cool air in the morning seems to add a little extra zest to the days. It's just too bad that falls are usually so short in Alaska, although this year it did extend out later than normal. We really did not get winter weather until November.

John was particularly anxious to do some sampling with his highbanker that we flew in to use for test work. We set it up at the edge of the large tailing pond just above camp where we have previously found gold metal detecting and panning. The area has been mining, but the miners did not excavate far enough into the decomposed bedrock, and so digging the rotten bedrock up with shovels was showing some nice gold with pans. We decided running a little more volume through a highbanker would be instructive. There is a fairly large unmined bench deposit at this location that has good potential.

Moore Creek claim marker

We ran a couple yards of material through the highbanker, with good results. Since the cream of the crop has already been skimmed off here, however, more work remains to be done to determine the potential of the site. A larger volume of virgin material from the bench needs to be tested, but that will have to wait for 2004 after we get all our permits in order. For now, it was certainly encouraging to see some gold. More sampling in the immediate area of the cabin at camp returned similar results where the old miners did not excavate enough bedrock to get all the gold.

We also made time to do some metal detecting, of course. My father used his Tesoro Lobo SuperTRAQ, plus tried my Minelab GP 3000 and Garrett Infinium. John experimented with the Troy Shadow X5, Fisher Impulse, and Fisher Gold Bug 2. This trip I favored my Garrett Infinium. I did use my Minelab GP 3000 also but I wanted to give the Infinium a good try at Moore Creek. Although I believe the GP 3000 with its large coils has superior depth on large nuggets, I like the Garrett for working in the rain (it's totally waterproof) and in thick brush. It does not get the depth of the Minelab but is better than the VLFs so it falls in the middle performance wise. In any case, while I knew I would do well using the Minelab, I decided to just stick with the Infinium the majority of the time just to see what it could do.

Testing the bench deposits with a highbanker

As you can see I usually hip mount the unit so there is less weight on my arm. About the only time I would use the unit in one piece would be if I were doing some sort of work where I was constantly picking the detector up and setting it back down again. Sometimes I'll work a likely location by spending quite a bit of time removing rubble or scraping off surface material with a rake, then taking a few minutes to scan the area with the detector. Then back to digging or scraping. In situations like this it is nice to have a unit you can pick up, use a few minutes, and set back down again, without having to strap on a control box or battery pack. But for normal use the hip mount is the way to go, as the waterproof control box with it's included batteries is a bit heavy for long hours of use.

Garrett has released a coil cover for the 14" coil which came in handy, as the open coil design would normally like to hang up on low lying brush. I also used the new 10" x 5" DD elliptical coil which is very light in weight, and more pleasant to use than the epoxy filled stock coil. The 14" coil balances well with the unit assembled in one piece, but it is "nose heavy" when the control box is hip mounted as you no longer have the control box to balance out the weight of the coil. I really wish Garrett or a third party would produce a large coil for the Infinium that is not epoxy filled. A coil like the Coiltek UFO 24" x 12" open-spoke design I use with my GP 3000 would be ideal.

Steve with Garrett Infinium at Moore Creek

The smaller coil worked great around the base of bushes and around rocks. In general I favored the larger coil though as it covers more ground and I'm certain it hits larger nuggets a bit deeper than the smaller coil. The smaller coil is a little "hotter" than the stock coil but this means it also tends to give a weak signal on some hot rocks that the larger coil ignores. Still, it is a great little coil, and is the one to use for tight areas and for slightly smaller nuggets than the 14" coil may be good for.

The Infinium ran quiet in the mixed hot rocks at Moore Creek, with only a couple that gave a signal with the 14" coil. Hi-lo tones were either gold or slivers of steel. Larger pieces of steel and iron, including nails, gave a lo-hi tone. Theoretically a large enough nugget might give a lo-hi tone but all mine have been steel so far or aluminum cans. I pretty much dug everything but as I do so I'm finding my faith in the dual tone id is growing. If trash was thick I'd ignore lo-hi tones and be pretty confident of not missing gold. But always remember, that no discrimination system is 100% accurate, and so if the amount of trash is acceptable, digging it all is the only sure way not to leave a nugget behind.

The results with the Infinium were seven nuggets totaling 4.11 ounces of gold. The largest nugget is 1.5 oz and the second largest 1 oz. I did find one nugget with the GP 3000 that weighed 1.26 oz. By the way, although I'm calling these nuggets, they are really more properly termed gold quartz specimens (in my opinion). These have been cleaned to remove the rust staining they pick up from sitting in the soil for ????? years and so reflect the actual color of the quartz better than my previous pictures. The enclosing rock is grayish quartz and sometimes bits of the quartz monzonite that the quartz veins are eroding out of. Quartz monzonite is a "salt & pepper" looking type of igneous rock, much like granite in appearance. I did better than I expected, as looking for gold was secondary to claim staking and winterizing the camp. But my hot streak from my previous visit continued, and I ended up with some nice nuggets. One nice thing about larger nuggets is that I actually only found eight nuggets total... but they added up to 5.37 ounces.

5.37 ounce gold specimens found at Moore Creek with Garrett Infinium

Results with the other detectors helped confirm this is an area for ground balancing pulse induction (PI) detectors like the Minelab SD/GP detectors or the Infinium. The Troy X5 was not happy at all with the hot rocks. I was most interested in Johns use of the Fisher Impulse. The Impulse is similar to the many PI detectors on the market for diving use. In theory they can be used for prospecting, and many people ask about them for just that reason. But the lack of ground balance means they actually do not do well for prospecting mineralized areas, and the Impulse hit the rocks at Moore Creek nearly as much as the VLF detectors. The Lobo and Gold Bug 2 were useable primarily due to their iron discrimination modes. In all-metal they were extremely noisy, but set with iron rejection cranked in they worked fairly well, although with lots of pops and snaps of hot rocks breaking through the discrimination. Luckily the noises are discernable from the clean sound of a gold nugget. The biggest problem is that any nuggets near or under hot rocks are just plain going to get missed with VLF detectors at Moore Creek.

My father scored a couple nuggets totaling 0.65 oz with his Tesoro Lobo and John got about 2.5 oz with his Fisher Gold Bug 2. Both are now looking to get the Infinium for next year. The Minelab is a fine machine, but they are more comfortable with the price/performance ratio of the Infinium. Lots of bang for under $1000 and simple to operate. So it looks like there will be lots of Infinium gold to report from Moore Creek next summer. I'm sure I'll be using my GP 3000 as my primary unit, with the Infinium filling in the niches. It's the machine for sure for rainy days, and I think I'll even jump in some tailing ponds with mask and snorkel and nugget hunt underwater. For me the GP 3000 and Infinium are a great match for Moore Creek, each excelling where the other is weak.

We finally had to give up on detecting in September and get all our final claim staking done. It is a lot of work but compared to the old days it is easy due to the ability to use GPS while staking state mining claims. Our final days in early October were really nice. I like those crisp fall mornings, color on all the leaves, and the bugs basically all gone. We staked up new claims plus re-filed on the original prospecting sites that we purchased to convert them to mining claims. These prospecting sites constitute the core property at Moore Creek and since prospecting sites are only valid for a short time it was time to get them converted to claim status. Then it finally came time to wrap up the camp for winter and go home one last time.

As I noted at the start of this entry, it's now the middle of winter. All I can do now is work on permits and wait for spring to come to Alaska... and dream about the gold yet to be found!

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2003 Herschbach Enterprises

Our first trip of 2004 to Moore Creek got a lot accomplished, but the big jobs remained ahead. I was contacted by my friend George, better known on the internet forums as seeker. He has a background with heavy equipment and offered to help out with the generator and bulldozer. George is a very accomplished and well traveled detectorist and this trip would give him a chance to try out his brand new Minelab GP 3000. And so we scheduled a another trip up to the mine.

Our first attempt was aborted at Rainy Pass due to bad weather. It was some of the poorest flying conditions I have experienced in some time. We sat and drank coffee in Skwentna hoping for the weather to lift, but it never did. This is one of the frustrations of flying in Alaska that one faces from time to time. There is nothing much to be done about it but try again in the future. But the false starts are disappointing and you never get back the lost time.

Yet another trip was scheduled for a couple weeks later, and this time we made it. My brother Tom was able to break away from work for this short weekend trip, and so it was my father, George, Tom, and I. This time the weather was better and so we made it into the mine with no problem. Then came the usual task of hauling our gear to camp and opening the place up. Every time we leave we have to try and “bear-proof” the place by covering all the doors and windows with steel. Every time we return we have to open everything back up. I want to make some heavy-duty hinged steel doors for covers to speed this process up. For now it is lots of work with hammer and nails.

George took a look at the generator and after a bit of work with the fuel system got it going. The previous owners had rigged it to auto feed with a fuel pump out of a barrel. George hooked the original fuel tank back up and bled the fuel system and it finally fired up. We now had electricity to add to our propane stove and propane refrigerator/freezer amenities. Suddenly Moore Creek was starting to feel civilized; the microwave even worked!

Aerial view of Alaska Range on way from Anchorage to Moore Creek

Arrival days are always short days. We decided to look for a little gold. I gave Tom my Minelab GP 3000 and I tried the White’s MXT I had brought along just to see how it worked in the hot rocks. George had his new GP 3000 and my father his Tesoro Lobo. It was a bit of fun at the end of the day, but only Tom came up with gold, a nice 0.55 oz specimen. Tom has always had a knack for detecting although he has done relatively little detecting over the years. It must run in the family.

The next day we got more serious. George wanted to try and start the old D9-18A bulldozer that we have sitting in camp. This unit had been sitting next to the trail going from the airstrip to the cabins during all those early years when we had made visits to Moore Creek. It apparently was abandoned as dead but in the last couple years the previous owner had finally got it running. A piston was replaced and they got a little trail work done before the unit started shaking badly again. They thought it might have a bent crankshaft, which would be bad news. Still, it was running when it was parked, so we figured we might as well try and get it started to see how bad it was. The fact that it is parked in camp makes it easier to work on than the one located over four miles by trail out of camp.

These old bulldozers have a small gasoline engine referred to as a “pony motor” that acts as a starter for the main diesel engine. The first thing to be done is to get the pony motor running. They use a six volt battery instead of a twelve volt to run their own little electric starter motor. We hooked up a battery with a charge and determined the starter worked. We then checked for fuel… and there was none to the carburetor. It turned out the fuel line from the little gas tank to the pony motor was plugged up with rust particles. The line was so well plugged it was hard to believe they had used the pony motor to start the dozer. Nothing all that hard to fix but time consuming taking all the lines apart, cleaning them out, and reassembling everything, especially since many of the fittings were stripped or otherwise in poor condition.

D9-18A bulldozer in camp

The throttle controls were disconnected from the pony motor, so George sat up top and ran the starter while I worked the choke and throttle manually. The pony motor started and I immediately wished I had hearing protection on. That little motor was loud. It also became immediately apparent we had a coolant leak in the head. But it did not look too bad for a short try, and so George kicked in the clutch and turned over the big diesel. It cranked and my brother shot some starter fluid in the air intakes while I kept working the pony motor throttle. The big motor turned and we got some smoke puffing. It looked ready to start. So we backed off.

We wanted to let the pony motor cool down as the short effort had it pretty hot. We also looked the big motor over and checked for coolant and found none. Off to the creek with buckets we went. We dumped the water into the system, and it promptly ran right back out of the bottom of the radiator. Well, we looked but the radiator is fairly well enclosed. We think there is a drain open or hose pulled. We sure hope so, and that the radiator is not cracked. I have to believe they drained it before walking away.

We were tired of fighting with the unit, and decided a set of manuals would be very helpful at this point. The dozer seemed like we could start it, but I had no desire to hurt things more by running the unit without better information about the recommended oils, coolants, etc. We decided to round up manuals before making another try at starting the dozer so we could run the unit through a full pre-start checklist. And find out where that drain is.

My father and I figured to start trail work up to the other bulldozer outside of camp and it was decided that George and Tom should go hunt for gold. It was hard to say when Tom would get a chance to visit again, and George had already done well in getting the generator going and a start on the dozer in camp. Dad and I figured we would go off and do some work and let them have a little fun. Prospecting can actually be pretty tough work, but looking for gold always beats working on equipment or clearing trails since you just might find gold.

There is an old bulldozer trail up to the unit that the operators were following when they got the dozer stuck about three miles from camp. It is about 4.25 miles by trail to the dozer along the trail itself. It starts out in the woodlands at camp, rises above tree line into that nasty alder and willow zone one runs into in Alaska, and then up onto the clear areas above. The small mountains around Moore Creek rise a couple thousand feet above camp, to total elevations of around 3000 feet for the tallest. Once you get above the alders it is very open terrain and very easy travel whether by foot or ATV.

Old dozer trail in wooded area above Moore Creek camp

The old dozer trail was in pretty good shape but alders had grown into some lower stretches and willows choked off some upper stretches. These two plants are like giant weeds in Alaska, and the alders in particular grow at amazing rates in the long daylight hours. They are the bane of the Alaska hiker due to their propensity to grow outward horizontally from a slope before curving upward. Along trails they curve in from both sides and crisscross in the middle. You don’t hike through alders; you climb over and under them, and so they really slow travel. It is impossible to drive an ATV through them, and they rapidly grow into and shut trails off to ATV access unless a trail is constantly maintained.

One secret of locating old trails in Alaska is to look where the alders are thickest. They love disturbed ground, and old trails and ditches are easily spotted by looking for lines of alders and willows on hillsides.

My father and I headed up the trail with chainsaws. He walked on up ahead and I followed with the Honda 200 three-wheeler. He was pretty much just scouting ahead, while I followed up at a slower rate, making sure the trail was clear enough to easily get through on the three-wheeler. With the dozer over four miles away by trail and over a couple 2000 foot hills, we wanted to be able to drive there with fresh batteries, tools, oil, etc. We could have just bushwhacked on up and got to work, but it would be a case where something would be needed, and then you would be looking at a long hike to camp and back. The trail needed to be cleared for ATV access to the dozer. This proved to be a very wise decision.

My father disappeared up the trail while I worked along. I would park the ATV, then clear on up ahead with the chainsaw. Then set the saw down, walk back tossing brush aside, and get the ATV to drive it up to the chainsaw. There was lots of back and forth but I was making pretty good time. There were long stretches that needed no clearing, and so after slowly getting though a thicket a sudden advance would be made for some distance.

I was bringing the three-wheeler forward at one point, when the unit made a loud squeak and stopped like the brakes were on. A long period of rolling back and forth and cutting logs to get the rear off the ground and I determined a rear axle bearing was seizing up. I decided to hike down and get George to seek advice as I had no tools on me anyway sufficient to tackle an axle.

I was about a mile out of camp but it was all downhill and therefore a short hike. I found George by the ponds above the cabins with his new Minelab GP 3000 metal detector. I told him what had happened. Then I finally asked him if he was having any luck. He said he thought so and dropped a heavy rock in my hand. I could tell by the heft this was more than one of our regular gold/quartz specimens. Amazingly, George has not washed it off yet. Gold was glinting thought the yellow mud caked on the nugget. I headed over to the pond and washed it off. I think I was almost more excited than George. It was a fantastic gold nugget about the size of a golf ball! Not just any nugget, but one with small fingers of gold creating a delicate pattern over the entire surface of the nugget.

George's amazing museum quality gold nugget from Moore Creek

Moore Creek has lots of smaller nuggets that are predominately just gold, but the gold here is very close to the original source. Even the smallest gold is not worn or rounded, but just as it appeared as the rock that enclosed it rotted away. This also means that much of the gold has quartz attached, and the larger multi-ounce pieces have generally been about half gold and half quartz. I had come to expect this, and was surprised and very happy to see such a large relatively solid chunk of gold come from Moore Creek. The fact that George found one means that more are out there to be found in the future, and that made me very excited indeed. We went back to the cabin, and the nugget weighed in at 3.74 ounces. This surprised George somewhat as it was heavier than he thought and so he was thrilled. Not a bad find for his very first nugget with his new Minelab GP 3000 and his first at Moore Creek!

Bottom view of George's Nugget

Another very good sign for the mine is that the nugget was found in virgin soil on the edge of what we suspect is a large chunk of virgin ground. The fact is that I and others had missed the nugget by the smallest of margins. We had all hunted the area getting just smaller gold. I’m sure I’d been within a couple feet of the nugget, and it was only a few inches down. Anyone could have found it, but George was the first to get right over it. In any case, that virgin area is looking pretty good right now.

I figured George would be hot to go look for more gold after a find like that. But on hearing the problem with the three-wheeler he put his detector aside and we hiked up to the Honda. After a brief consultation we decided I should just get on it and ride it back to camp. It needed more work then we wanted to tackle there in the woods. So I got on and went. It squeaked, and would seize up but I would roll it backward to free it up and go on again. Then it seemed like it decided to work again and I cruised into camp without pause.

We drained the oil out of the motor and got the Honda turned upside down. We got it apart enough to determine there was really not much we could do without a new rear axle assembly. One wheel had actually been welded onto the axle and the rest was in poor shape. We drilled a hole in the bearing carrier and pumped it full of grease. Then got it back together and I drove it around camp a bit. It seemed better, but it was obvious we had not repaired it. The bearing could totally give out at any time.

Honda 200 ATV with trailer at old cabin in Moore camp

Tom finally showed up and he had quite a pile of gold to show. He actually had not been doing very well, but got into a hot spot and found several specimens in a fairly small area. He had 0.19, 0.43, 0.53, 1.06, and 1.78 ounce pieces and so was feeling pretty good about it, but his eyes about popped when he saw George’s nugget. George was playing it all kinds of humble and stuff but we assured him we’d trade twice the normal type of gold finds at Moore for a fantastic museum quality piece like he had found. It is truly a find to be proud of.

It was late and we all were tired so we cooked up some food and waited. It was starting to get darker, which tells you how late it was, and still no sign of dear old Dad. I learned a long time ago not to worry about Bud Herschbach in the wilds of Alaska, but still as it got even darker I started to wonder at what point we should go out looking. But then he finally showed up, and just as well as it was getting dark enough to be hard walking.

My father can out-hike most people half his age, and had decided to go all the way up to the stuck bulldozer to check it out. He reported that a half mile up the trail from where I had stopped there was a very thick patch of willows where he lost the trail. He calmly described literally crawling through these willows and having “something very large” jump up a few feet in front of him and make a huge amount of noise moving off in the brush, but he never did figure out if it was a bear or a moose the brush was so thick. It was probably a moose. He is telling this and I’m thinking I would have had a heart attack right about that time but he refused to make much of it. He has run into a lot of animals in the woods in his years as one of Alaska’s pioneer surveyors.

He finally made it up to the bulldozer and reported it looked in a lot better shape then he had expected and certainly better than the one in camp. It was buried to the top of the track on one side and to about half a track on the other side. On his return trip he found looking downhill that he had gone through far more willows then need be, and had picked out what he thought was the shortest route possible through the thicket and marked it with flagging on both ends.

There was one day left to go on our three day weekend trip. After a good night of sleep Dad and I hiked up to do more trail work. We decided to save the Honda for now for the critical task of hauling heavy loads to and from the airport, like the big empty bottles of propane we planned on backhauling out this trip. I had decided to go on a hunt for more three-wheelers to fly into the mine. Honda three-wheelers are still pretty common in Alaska and can be had for very little money. Most importantly, we can fly them in easily in the Cessna 206. Being dependent on a single three-wheeler that could break down any moment did not seem like a good idea. I wanted some redundancy and more spare parts. We could also use more ATVs for the upcoming bulldozer project to make it easier to get multiple people with loads up to the site.

This trip wound down with little excitement to report. We got the trail cleared all the way up to where the willow thicket started, and once through that it would be clear sailing. My father and I had had enough clearing for the day and so we figured we’d leave that last small but tough stretch for later. Tom and George had prospected most of the day, but the luck had run thin and only Tom had found a 0.35 ounce piece. Funny how quick you get spoiled finding gold that I now say things like that. Not long ago a third ounce nugget would have really seemed like a big nugget.

Just over 8 ounces gold nuggets and gold specimens found at Moore Creek, Alaska

Overall the nugget detecting was quite productive. Tom and George did most of the detecting and found over 8 ounces of specimens between them. George's 3.74 ounce nugget is his largest ever, and Tom's 1.78 ounce piece surpassed his previous largest of 1.64 ounce, found at Moore Creek on his last visit. While this nugget detecting is fun it serves a very serious purpose at Moore Creek. First, 50% of detected nuggets go to the LLC to help fund operations. Or, as in George's case, the finder has the option of purchasing back the LLC percentage which achieves the same goal. More importantly, every nugget find is plotted on maps. As of this trip almost 70 specimens and nuggets have been located totaling over 50 ounces of finds. The map is revealing certain "hot" areas on the creek. Certain zones are producing more nuggets than others. Some tailing piles have produced multiple finds, some none at all, and some just a single piece. Any finds at all increase the probability of a particular pile containing more gold from mere speculation to almost total certainty. Some areas that look very good have turned out to be not so good and vice versa. At Moore Creek it can truly be said that metal detectors are a vital part of our initial exploration program.

Our short but really productive trip wrapped up and we flew back to town. Our generator is running, old dozer puffing, trail nearly cleared to the stuck dozer, and more. But this particular trip will always be remembered as the one when George found that beautiful 3.74 ounce gold nugget. It truly is a find of a lifetime and the nicest at Moore Creek so far.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2004 Herschbach Enterprises

Steve's Mining Journal Index

I have all my various metal detecting requirements pretty well covered. I like to do a lot of different things with detectors so that takes a collection of models all with specific purposes. Most of these purposes have to do with gold in one form or another. One thing I have been lacking for some time however is a waterproof pulse induction detector. I have used several, most recently the White's Surf PI Pro and Garrett Infinium. The Infinium in particular served me well - see my previous story on the Garrett Infinium in Hawaii.

I really liked the Infinium but had two main issues with it. When I recently became aware of a new detector in the works I sent word to Brent Weaver, the engineer at Garrett working on the unit (I am sure with the help of others) to please, please, please work on the EMI (Electro Magnetic Interference) and salt water stability issues. These two problems dogged my use of the Infinium, particularly in Hawaii. The Infinium is perhaps the best detector I ever used in Hawaii on one level - on another it drove me nuts. It was near impossible to get the detector to quiet down and run smoothly, so although it worked it was a tiring exercise. The Infinium is a classic first generation detector. Very good but very rough around the edges. Well, I am not going to take credit for harping on the subject for over ten years but for whatever reason Brent and company really appear to have got it right in the new Garrett ATX model. This detector screams next generation product. It is hands down one of the best pulse induction metal detectors I have ever used. I am amazed at how refined it is. The ATX in many ways acts and sounds more like a VLF than what I have come to expect from a PI detector. I suspect the Recon was the second generation and the ATX is now the third generation product as it is just so much better than the Infinium. Bravo and congratulations Brent and whoever works with you, job well done!!

The first thing that got me was the EMI rejection. This is not the frankly rather horrible process used on the Infinium. The Infinium has 32 discrete unmarked settings in a single turn knob. You are supposed to guess at 1/32 of a turn, wait and listen, turn another 1/32, wait and listen, and after doing this 32 times remember what unmarked setting was better than the rest and go back to it, except basically they all sort of were only a little better or worse. The ATX, push the tune button, wait a couple minutes while the detector cycles, and then the detector is quiet. Really quiet. VLF quiet. Better than some high gain VLF quiet. In my house, in the middle of the city - quiet. I have no idea what they did but oh my gosh this machine tunes out EMI and does it so well it is amazing. Want to use your Garrett pinpointer with the ATX? Turn the Pro Pointer on and toss it a couple feet away. Let the ATX cycle to find the best operating frequency. Now not only no EMI but you can use the Pro Pointer with the ATX on and get not a peep. No interference.

Now there has got to be a catch and urban locations where there is interference but so far I have been using the ATX around Reno like it is a VLF going coin detecting in parks and getting no interference.

Now add in a rock solid stable threshold. Good VLF stable. Minelab GPX 5000 stable. Clean and clear at stock settings, a little noise at higher than stock gain levels, again, in the middle of a city!

Garrett ATX Waterproof Pulse Induction metal detector

I am sure this is not at all what anyone expected from me. I was supposed to go out and go nugget detecting, right? Well, for personal reasons that was not an option when I got the ATX. I have been experimenting with coin detecting with ground balancing PI (GBPI) detectors in the past and have written several articles on the subject. I have found piles of coins with the Minelabs, Infinium, and TDI. Coins from depths VLFs cannot hit except in all metal mode, but with better discrimination than a VLF in all metal mode. But I had lots of issues with EMI in particular, and the relative crudeness of the detectors I was using - crudeness now only apparent because I am running the ATX.

Item three - a very well modulated audio target response. Shallow targets sound shallow, deep target sound deep, and lots of nuance to go around. There is a ton of information in the audio of the ATX, much like in a very good VLF for those that hunt by ear. All the sudden Garrett has dropped the best urban pulse induction detector in my hands that I have ever had. I went coin detecting!

One thing I found on moving to Reno was the ground is mineralized and pretty well detected. I was doing some coin detecting looking for my first Reno silver, but finding depth not what I expected at all. Coins deeper than about 6" were giving weak and erratic signals on the best VLF units made. I was finding coins, but more recent stuff, and nothing beyond about 6". The ground here is not very easy on VLF detectors and what is detectable has been hit pretty well over the years. But I knew it had to be there.

I took the ATX and used the old Infinium trick of concentrating on just low/high targets. The signals break depending on the ground balance setting, so it varies, but in general the tone break is right around zinc penny. Zinc penny and higher coins (silver, clad coins, nails) give a low/high tone. Zinc penny and lower (nickels, most trash, gold) give a high/low tone. The high/lows are very common since all aluminum and small ferrous trash gives a high/low tone, plus nickels, and gold jewelry. Low/high tones are much rarer, basically silver and clad coins and larger ferrous items like nails. The ratio of coins to trash basically depends on the amount of nails in the ground. Old cabin sites would be impossible to hunt. But many parks have few nails, and in the past my ration has run about 50/50 coins versus ferrous trash digging just good sounding low/high tone targets (or just low tone on the TDI). It helps immensely to dig isolated low/high tones as opposed to double blip type tones, which usually indicate a nail. Zinc and screw caps can go either way depending on the ground balance but usually are a much louder signal since they tend to be shallow.

The combination of EMI being non-existent, clean steady threshold, and well modulated audio made using the ATX more like using a VLF than using a PI in the Reno park setting. The big, big difference is the sounds are totally PI and must be learned from scratch but any decent VLF hunt by ear types should get the knack pretty quickly with the ATX. I know I did. Next thing you know I am digging wheat back pennies and my first silver dime in Reno. Only as 1954 silver but silver nonetheless.

My brief foray into coin hunting with the ATX had this result:

Nails and coins found park detecting with Garrett ATX - including silver dime!

Three clad quarters, three clad dimes, four copper pennies, two zinc pennies, 1954 dime, 1920 penny, 1942 penny, 1949 penny, 1956 penny, 14 nails, and a screw cap. There were a few large iron items I did not get out of the hole, so about a 50/50 trash to coin ration, plenty good for me. The old coins were all nice mellow low/high tones, the quarters and more recent stuff much louder shallower targets. I could have left them and just gone for the older deeper targets but they were too easy to retrieve and hard to resist so I got them. A few of the nails are square nails which makes me feel good about the age, as does that 1920 penny. I think I am going to nab some good silver soon!

One thing I learned was take a pair of pliers. The nails tend to come up one end or the other in the hole and if you can grab it with pliers you can pull it out and get rid of it so it is not there to be detected in the future. Otherwise they stick pretty hard in the hole. My holes are always filled and invisible when I get done so this can be a bit more work than nugget detecting, where I just blast a pit into the ground. We have to protect the hobby so use care in parks to never leave a mark.

Which leads to item number four. Superb pinpointing. The 12" coil pinpoints dead center, backed up by an honest to gosh no motion on demand pinpointing mode. The coins were in the middle of my plugs. Or one end of the nail. Excellent pinpointing capability, better than a VLF DD coil. This DD acts more like a mono than a DD, with the inner coil area doing the heavy lifting. For small targets treat the inner coil as the only coil for overlapping purposes as that is the hot zone for small gold nuggets, etc.

Garrett ATX outfitted with 8" round mono accessory coil

I am not trying to sell anyone on coin detecting with a PI. I repeat, I am not doing anything here but telling you what I am doing and my results. Urban PI detecting is not for the faint of heart or those who detest digging junk. Most of you reading, just don't go there. Those of you who see what I am up to, well, this is for you. More later as I get more time under my belt but for now I will say this. The Garrett ATX is the best urban PI I have ever used. For me it (urban PI detecting) just went from a curiosity sideshow thing to something I am going to pursue more in the future.

My main issue with the ATX is hand in hand with it being waterproof - it is a heavy detector. It weighs 6.9 lbs with the stock 12" coil and rechargeable batteries loaded ready to run. Big boys will have no issue but I am of slighter build and so can feel the weight. The good news is the sling included is simple and surprisingly effective. If like me weight is an issue do yourself a favor and use the included sling right off the bat. I went without awhile and once I tried the sling was pleasantly surprised. It just slips over your arm and over the handle, very easy to just slide off the handle when digging. Do keep the rod assembly short for best balance.

OK, the Infinium was the best waterproof GBPI I ever used but it had issues and I have been waiting for over ten years for something better, Frankly, I thought it would be somebody else, not Garrett, that would do the deed. So the ATX first and foremost in my mind is the potential successor to the Infinium that I have been waiting for. I had to get this baby in the water, and fast. So I made a run up to Lake Tahoe, where water meets black sand hot rock infested beaches. I had my water hunting gear from Alaska, chest waders and long handle scoop, so hit it day before yesterday, both on the beach and in the water. I got the usual beach suspects, various trash items, a handful of coins, two earrings (looked good but fake diamonds) and a 14K gold ring with five little 1/10th carat diamonds.

Gold and diamond ring found with Garrett ATX at Lake Tahoe

I could see the black sand lines in the sand. There were hot rocks aplenty, all of which I just ground balanced out with the simple push button method and then just locked. I do not generally use automatic ground tracking and have not needed to on the ATX yet in my limited experience. Again, no EMI. I ran gain up high for awhile and the machine was well behaved but it did introduce a bit of noise. I decided to opt for a quiet stable threshold which was a notch above the stock setting of 10 at the 11 setting. I think you are better off setting the ATX to run quiet so that even a peep is a target. Too much gain leads to false peeps so resist the urge to max it out.

 I am looking forward to getting out and doing some prospecting with the ATX but first and foremost for me it is a water detector. I have plenty of prospecting detectors, and the ATX is a bit heavier than I like for dry land use. I can't wait to get the ATX into the water in Hawaii and see how it does in locations I previously hunted with the Infinium. I think the Garrett ATX is really going to perform for me there.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2013 Herschbach Enterprises

The adventures continue! I left Anchorage rather late Saturday morning. I was happy to find that the creeks had dropped by over half compared to the previous week. I met Al and his partner Kenny at the claims, and found that they were pulling their equipment out in anticipation of the coming snows. After a short visit, I headed up to my camp.

The weather was nicer than I expected. The forecast had called for rain, but it was only cloudy. Everything was looking good. I suited up and headed down to my dredge. Since the water was now down, it was an easy chore to move it across and down the creek. I fired up and ran a tank of gas, cleaning up the area I had worked by hand the previous trip. The light began to fail, so I cleaned up and found I had about 1/4 oz of gold.

This encouraged me and I decided the site was worth more effort. I set my tent back up and moved in. The clouds cleared and the temperature was dropping as I turned in for the evening.

The thermometer read 30 degrees when I got up, and heavy frost covered everything outside. The weather was clear but the clouds were moving in again, and the day soon warmed up into the 50's. I headed down to the dredge and got back to work.

New dredge site at Mills Creek

The bedrock is quite shallow at this site, less than two feet underwater and with only a foot of overburden. The overlying material has some gold, but not as much as I had hoped. Most of the gold is in the shale bedrock crevices, and is not readily visible until you split open the crevices. Unfortunately this slows things up a lot, as you don't know where the gold is, and so all crevices must be broken open. Some have gold and some don't. The bedrock is really rotten at this point, and so I basically just rip it all up, remove the larger pieces that will clog the hose, and then dredge up the rest. The value per yard is high, but the going is too slow to do really well. Running two more tanks of gas netted another 1/4 oz of gold.

My father was still interested in coming up, so I had told him I would drive out Sunday night to give him an update. I quit before running my normal third tank of gas (each tank lasts about 2 1/2 hours) and buttoned up the camp. I headed out as dusk fell.

My truck had made a funny noise on the way in, and now it was apparent that something was really wrong. My transmission grumbled and chirped on the way out, but the noise quit once I got on the highway and into high gear. When I got to Anchorage and had to go to lower gears, it REALLY made noise. I decided it had to go in the shop in the morning.

I cleaned up the gold, and it weighed in at 9.8 pennyweight. Not bad for the equivalent of a days dredging, so I want to work the site some more. So far the gold is a little smaller than I would like to see.

I ran my truck into the shop, and was told it would take a couple days. I called my father, and told him the creek looked good, so we decided to head up the morning of the 5th in his truck. We plan on metal detecting the bench deposits further for a couple of days. Then back to town, and hopefully my truck will be ready so I can get back up to do some more dredging before the snow hits.

Gold for October 2nd & 3rd

Since I had some time to kill, I drove down to Crow Creek to see how my friend Jeff Reed was doing. He started dredging Saturday in the upper creek, and I figured if he was finding lots of nuggety gold that I might be tempted to pull out of Mills and head his way. I met him coming up the creek. He reported that a couple days dredging upstream had produced very little gold. The area is spotty, so this was no surprise, but we had been hopeful of finding coarser nuggets in the upper creek. He had just spent the day sniping around for a new site, and had found about 1/2 oz of gold in bedrock crevices. The crevices were isolated spots, though, and he was still unsure as to where he would dredge next. In any case, since he was not getting rich quick, I felt better about continuing at Mills for the time being. We'll see how it goes.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 1999 Herschbach Enterprises

Winter in Alaska! What is an Alaskan gold miner to do? Go somewhere warm to look for gold, that's what!! My wife and I have been long overdue for a vacation together. We wanted to return to Kauai, Hawaii, as we had been there years ago and fell in love with the island. Kauai still retains much of the quiet, laid back style of Hawaii that has been lost in some of the more popular areas of the state. We chose to stay in the Poipu resort area, which is on the southern-most tip of the island. The area tends to have sunnier weather than other parts of the island.

I have wanted to do some underwater metal detecting in Hawaii for many years. Friends have returned with some incredibly nice jewelry finds after vacations there, and I wanted to give the sunny beaches a try myself. I underwater detect in the Anchorage area quite a bit, but the cold water tends to mean that the quality of jewelry found is that lost by teens and young adults. The items lost in warmer waters tends to be from older, more affluent folks, and so the finds can be more exciting. I have never found any kind of serious diamond jewelry (except tiny little things) and hoped this trip would produce a gem or two. We stayed at the Kiahuna Plantation, the only beach-front condominiums on Kauai, directly adjacent to the Kauai Sheraton. One of the nicest beaches on the island fronts this location, and several other popular beaches are within walking distance. I figured this to be a hot location for metal detecting.

I had purchased a new White's Surfmaster PI detector just for this trip. The PI is a pulse-induction unit that excels in saltwater/iron mineral conditions found in the marine environment. I usually employ VLF/TR (very low frequency/transmitter receiver) units, such as the Fisher Aquanaut, in the freshwater lakes around Anchorage. This is because the VLF/TR units have superior discrimination capabilities, since they are standard coin hunting type units packaged for underwater use. Some of the lakes have a lot of trash, especially nails and bottle caps, and the discrimination can help a lot.

Steve with White's Surf PI detecting on Kauai

The pulse units feature the ability to work in areas that will give VLF/TR detectors difficulties with false signaling, but for all practical purposes one digs all items with a pulse detector. Some, such as the Surfmaster, feature a type of discrimination circuit, but it is not very effective compared to that on the VLF/TR detectors, especially when looking for jewelry items. The best idea when gold nugget hunting is to dig everything, and this is a good idea when looking for jewelry also. Digging sandy areas is so easy that trash items are not as much an issue as in hard pack soils in parks or elsewhere. Just remember to take the trash to a garbage can.

A little side note here: Test a new machine underwater before a big trip such as this. I have previously had a brand new detector leak like a sieve after bringing it on vacation with me. I never was able to get it to seal, and had to stay above water for that trip. Just because it is new does not mean it will work. My new unit spent a night weighted to the bottom of my full bathtub before coming along with me!

I watched where people were playing a lot. There was the line of beach towels and chairs at the top of the beach where it leveled out. The hot spot in the water seemed to be the waist to shoulder deep area, where people would wait for waves to ride in. There was also the "wipeout" zone close to the beach where the rides ended, sometimes spectacularly. I also checked out the bottom with mask and snorkel. The condition of the bottom seemed ideal. Much of the area had less than a foot of sand on top of a hard coral base. I wanted to concentrate on this kind of spot, with a layer within range of the detector where items would come to a stop as they settled into the sand.

The main problem was the waves. They were rather large, more than I could handle un-weighted. I was retrieving targets by holding my breath and ducking to the bottom, and needed to stay in place while I worked. I had considered SCUBA since I am a certified diver, but hauling the gear around is a pain, and I did not like the thought of being underwater for long stretches with lots of people around. It is too easy for them to lose track of where you are, and I could not very well "claim" the area as mine by putting out a dive flag. I solved my problem by going to a dive shop and renting a 40 pound weight belt. This helped me stay put while waves crashed into and over me, and allowed me to drop straight to the bottom to recover the finds.

Steve's finds, including first gold ring from Hawaii!

I put in quite a few hours of time in the water, plus hitting the beach itself. The Surfmaster worked very well; coins were easily detectable down to about a foot, and the machine was very stable. The smallest ring I found (pictured above) was nothing more than a silver wire. I found plenty of coins, a bunch of pull tabs, but only a few jewelry items. These included a fake-diamond encrusted broach, a silver hoop earring, a the very thin silver ring (with a black stone), a twisted silver ring, and the real find of the trip, a very large men's gold band. It was located in a trough on the bottom near the coral base layer. An interesting find was a dollar bill that I saw floating a couple feet underwater. All in all, not bad, but no large diamond ring. I certainly was making finds, and the pull tabs and coins indicate the area is not hunted out, but there was less jewelry then I expected. Oh well, I'll just have to keep returning here until I get it right!

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

My cousin Burton stopped by the store, all excited about gold mining. He had already done a little sluice box work at Sixmile Creek near Hope and at Crow Creek Mine, but had very little fine gold to show for his efforts. I decided we needed to go out together so I could get him headed in the right direction.

It is a lot harder to find gold when you are starting out then most people imagine. The average person tends to assume that if there is gold on a creek, you just need to pan or sluice some material, and you will find some gold. The truth is just the opposite. Put a beginner on a gold-bearing creek, and they will be very lucky to find any gold at all.

Just because a stream is known to contain gold does not mean all the gravels in the valley have gold. Most of the gravels at any gold mine have little or no gold. The secret to successful gold mining is to identify which gravels contain the gold. You then try to process as much of this "pay material" as possible while avoiding moving worthless material as much as possible. Sounds obvious, doesn't it?

Placer gold is gold that by definition has been liberated from the original lode (hardrock) deposits and concentrated by water action. Most of the gold in Crow Creek originated in quartz veins upstream in the vicinity of the Crown and Jewel Mines at Crow Pass. As the gold eroded from the quartz veins, erosion carried it downhill into Crow Creek, where countless years of water action concentrated the gold into placer deposits. Look at a stream valley as nothing more than a gigantic naturally fed sluice box and you get the idea.

Running water is very efficient at separating materials by weight, with the heaviest minerals, including gold, working downward over the years. Massive floods do most of the work, as the entire volume of material in the bottom of the creek must actually be in motion for any concentration to take place. These floods are rare events, and are referred to by geologists as 20 year, 50 year, or 100 year floods, depending on the average amount of time that will pass before you see one of these floods occur. The larger the flood event, the rarer they are.

View up Crow Creek from Area #1

The last major flood on Crow Creek occurred in 1995, and it changed the entire valley. The creek changed channels completely in several locations, and eroded 10-20 feet lower into the valley bottom, leaving the old channels high and dry. This is how bench deposits are created, when remnants of old stream channels are abandoned and left above the new creek level as the creek erodes downward. Subsequent erosion and hillside mass-wasting will eventually destroy most hillside or bench deposits, putting their gold back into the stream. But some survive for hundreds or thousands of years to create today's bench deposits far uphill of the modern stream.

Crow Creek is more complicated than most gold deposits due to the fact that Crow Creek Mine is an artificial valley. The old stream valley is a small bedrock canyon just to the right of the parking lot as you enter the mine. The old miners discovered that prior to the last glacial advance, Crow Creek had eroded a valley much farther down into the material than the modern creek. The glaciers alternately dammed Crow Creek from below and pushed material over it from above, completely filling the old canyon and burying the old gold deposits under hundreds of feet of worthless glacial material. Crow Creek is rather unique in that the glaciers buried and preserved the old gold deposits, rather than gouging them up and destroying them. The gold deposits at Crow Creek are much older than most deposits on the Kenai Peninsula, which have only formed since the last glacial advance. This is one reason why Crow Creek is the richest gold mine in Southcentral Alaska.

The old-timers mined their way down to the bottom of the ancient stream valley. The top material was nearly worthless glacial material. It does contain some gold, but the material has not been concentrated by stream action and so the gold is scattered haphazardly through the material. A large exposure can be seen from the parking lot by  looking directly across the valley. It is mixed round rocks and gravel, with no apparent layering, and is generally very light tan in color. The layer is over 150 feet thick, and the nearly vertical exposure is now slowly falling into the old mining excavation below.

Below the glacial till the miner finally reached old streambed deposits. I refer to these as the "brown layer" as the material usually contains lots of yellow-brown clay. When processed in a pan or sluice you gets lots of muddy brown water. In some areas this layer is saturated with water and relatively soft, but much of it is very compacted and tough to dig. In some places a pick is needed to break out even small chunks of the material. The material consists of rounded rocks and gravels, and contains many boulders, usually larger than the rocks in the overlying glacial material. In some exposures it is obvious as a "bouldery layer" sandwiched between the other layers.

The brown layer was the rich layer, and produced most of the gold mined at Crow Creek Mine. The gold in the layer can be very concentrated, with some material running up to six ounces of gold per yard of material! The gold is coarse and chunky, with match head sized nuggets common and larger nuggets running up to several ounces. This was the "pay layer".

Layers of material at Crow Creek Mine, Alaska

In the lower portion of Crow Creek valley the brown layer often rested directly on bedrock. Most of this area has been completely mined and is the canyon portion of Crow Creek below the parking lot that is off-limits to the general public. A series of old bedrock channels were uncovered and mined to their bottoms. This area was then used as a tailings disposal area as mining proceeded further upstream. There are still remnants of the brown layer resting on bedrock in lower Area #1.

When the miners got to what is now referred to as "Area #1", in other words, the first mining area you reach as you walk up the creek, they found another major layer below the brown layer but over the bedrock. Walk up the trail and turn down to the creek at the Area #1 sign. You will see lots of bedrock exposed on your right, with the creek cutting a narrow gorge through the bedrock. But oddly, as you look upstream, the bedrock disappears. There is a large bowl, or depression in the bedrock above this point, and bedrock is only exposed at one other location on the creek above this point at the upper end of Area #1.

This depression at one time must have had a glacier upstream of it, for it is filled with a dense, dark layer of material I refer to as the "blue layer". The layer has a distinct bluish-gray color because it mostly consists of clay formed from glacial silt. It has many small, angular rocks mixed with it, and hardly any rocks over a few inches in diameter. It can be relatively soft in it's upper reaches, but as you dig down it becomes very tough and eventually turns into rock. There is a good exposure of this layer turned into a conglomerate rock directly against the bedrock across the creek in Area #1. The layer is dozens of feet thick, and may be over 100 feet thick further upstream. The brown layer, instead of resting on bedrock, rests directly on top of this "blue layer" from Area #1 and upstream.

Map of Area #1 at Crow Creek Mine, Alaska

The blue layer is "glacial outwash", in other words material that flowed out from streams issuing from the face of a glacier. The layer is mostly silt and clays formed from silts, and small rocks that have not been rounded by stream action. There is only small, fine and flaky gold in the material, and since it is very tough it tends to roll through sluice boxes in chunks without breaking up. At some locations it is rather "sticky" and can actually pick up gold out of a sluice box as it rolls through.

The absolute richest material that you can find at Crow Creek Mine is where the brown layer rests directly on bedrock, or where it rests directly on the blue layer. The brown layer was once streambed material in motion. The gold tended to work to the bottom of the brown layer, and very rich pockets of coarse gold can be found in bedrock crevices below the brown layer, or in the top few inches of the blue layer where gold worked into the clay's surface. The clay did not have a smooth surface, but many depressions and pockets where gold could lodge. Rolling rocks literally hammered gold into the top few inches of clay. But don't dig too deep into the clay, as there is usually little gold under the top few inches. There is gold throughout the entire brown layer, and most of it is worth running through a sluice or highbanker. Like all layers, however, it does have its barren areas.

So, to recap. We have glacial material, over brown layer, over blue layer, over bedrock. From Area #1 downstream the brown layer may rest on bedrock, but there are sections of blue material below Area #1. From Area #1 upstream the brown layer rests on the blue layer. There is one final layer we must discuss. The tailings layer. It is the final layer that can produce large amounts of gold for the miner at Crow Creek.

The miners started mining Crow Creek near the end of the valley, then proceeded farther and farther upstream. The old-timers were using hydraulic giants, or huge water cannons, to strip the overlying glacial till away, then process the brown layer through a series of wooden sluices. The high volume of material processed caused lots of smaller gold to be lost into the tailings. In some areas, gold washed over the blue layer got caught in pockets and depressions and never made it into the sluice boxes. In Area #1 the brown layer has been almost completely removed, and what remains is the blue layer, covered with loose tailing material. The old miners excavated into the blue layer about 50 to 75 feet at Area #1, so the creek is actually now running in a mini-valley in the blue layer well below where the brown layer existed. From creek level at Area #1 you need to walk at least 100 feet up the hill or more to find any brown layer material remaining.

The tailings do contain gold, and the floodplain in Area #1 consists of tailings less than ten feet thick lying on top of the blue layer. Floods have reconcentrated the tailings, and most of the gold contained in them has settled to rest directly on the blue layer. The creek ran against the far bank before the 1995 flood, but now rests in a channel closer to the trail. The foot of material where the tailings meet the blue layer can be very rich, and I have taken a lot of gold from Area #1 over the years by staying on the blue layer.

Stream cross section Area #1 at Crow Creek Mine, Alaska

The trick to Area #1 is simple. If you dredge in the creek (and I have) there is little gold in the overburden. You get 95% of the gold directly off the blue layer, where it is lodged in small pockets and depressions. The blue layer was severely eroded by the flood, and in the middle of the current stream channel is about 3-5 feet from the surface. It is very tough and very much like soft asphalt in consistency. The layer rises away from the center of the creek until it finally runs up out of the water. The entire floodplain, and the old dry channel against the far bank, and completely underlain by this layer. Remember that during major floods, the entire floodplain is underwater and all the gravel is moving downstream. Gold is concentrated on the blue layer across the entire floodplain, and many rich pockets will be encountered well away from the current creek channel.

If you dredge the creek, you are forced to process the generally worthless tailings on top to get rid of them, but you get little gold doing so. Getting to the blue layer is the key. The blue layer was exposed directly on the surface of the far side of the creek after the flood, and I did quite well with a metal detector along the edge of the creek. Unfortunately, as you follow the layer away from the creek, the tailings get thicker, and contain many large rocks. Most of the material is worthless, so much so that the best strategy with a shovel is to simply throw it aside. Only the foot of material directly on the blue layer should be processed through a hand sluice. You may toss a little gold with the tailings, but if you waste too much time processing generally worthless material, you will get less gold, not more. Finally, if you use a metal detector, get to that blue layer! Detecting the material directly on top of the layer will get you nuggets. Detecting the tailings will get you iron trash of every description.

Area #1 is being overlooked by the public at this time. This will no doubt change next summer after this report gets around. Tourists all cluster in Area #1 on the near side of the creek. The real place to hit is the floodplain area across the creek. Therein lies the problem. You can only wade the creek in the early spring or late fall. Midsummer there may or may not be a bridge crossing way upstream where you can cross, then walk downstream to the floodplain, but there is no good trail.

Burton and I loaded up a hand sluice and digging tools and headed for Area #1 on a wonderfully sunny day. We crossed at the log bridge in upper Area #1 and bushwhacked downstream to the floodplain area. I pointed out little bits and pieces of the blue layer showing along the edge of the creek to Burton. The area we chose had the layer running under 3-5 feet of overlying tailings, but had the advantage of being directly next to the creek. We set the sluice box up directly next to the bank where we could shovel directly into it without using buckets. We could throw large rocks and the worthless overburden over the sluice into the creek, which was a raging torrent this sunny day. Crow Creek is fed by a glacier, and if you are on the far side keep in mind that it rises steadily everyday with the temperature. Crossing over early in the morning can make for a risky return later on a hot day.

Removing overburden to get to gold bearing layer

We got with the program, and started clearing off the blue layer. We would knock off a portion of the bank to remove overhanging rocks, then toss and shovel until we were about to the blue layer. It's easy to tell when you hit it... it's really like digging pavement! Then we carefully scraped the few inches off the top of the layer and fed it through the sluice. Burton got real excited when gold started showing up almost immediately.

 Here is a good picture of the blue layer as we exposed it. The water was rising throughout the day, and so slowly crept up over the layer as we worked. This same spot will be high and dry in late fall as water levels drop. You can see the cement-like quality of the layer. In some places in upper Area #1 the layer is pure clay with no rock, in other spots like this there is a lot of rock in the clay. It actually makes a good rough surface for catching gold, but unfortunately it is soft enough that the material is constantly eroding during a flood and releasing the gold as fast as it traps it. Most of the gold gets caught right where it is when the flood starts to subside, and the material stops rolling and eroding.

Close up of clay "blue layer" exposed underwater

One thing this day reminded me of... I am not a big fan of shovels! The day was very hot, and we were sweating like pigs throwing rocks and dirt. The water kept rising, making it hard to scrape the blue layer clean, and causing me to worry a bit about our return crossing over the log bridge. The water had been touching the logs when we came over as it was. We had a nice amount of gold to send Burton home with, more than all his previous trips combined had found, so we called it a day. We pulled the sluice up, washed it into a pan and panned the day's take.

A couple pennyweight of chunky little nuggets looked up at us from the gold pan. Burton was ecstatic, and thrilled about this new revelation about finding gold on layers, or "false bedrock" as it is often referred to. It really is the key to success at Crow Creek, and at nearly all other placer gold mines, especially in Alaska. I have visited numerous large mining operations, and nearly all operate by stripping worthless overburden as cheaply and quickly as possible, then running only the likely gold bearing material through the recovery system. This is usually material on or in actual bedrock, or sometimes on a false bedrock layer, like the blue layer at Crow Creek. Learning the same principle of "identify the pay layer, and process only likely pay material" will go a long ways towards helping many weekend miners to increase their chances of finding gold.

Chunky gold from pay layer

A few final notes. I've given you generalities here, and there are things to look out for. The tailings are usually relatively loose gray materials with lots of iron trash. In the upper areas of Crow Creek, the tailings had more mud in them, and some of these tailings appear to be the brown layer. In fact, they are brown layer materials that have been processed, and where they were dumped in some areas they rehardened into what appears to be virgin material. Like all the tailings, it can have good gold in it, but it has been through a sluice box. The dead giveaway is nails. If you are finding nails in it, it must be tailings.

The other thing to watch out for is that in Area #2, the brown layer and blue layer do not always have a clean dividing point, but appear as alternate layers. In other words, you dig down through the brown layer, hit a blue layer, then dig through it and hit another brown layer. This indicates some kind of repeated pattern of gold deposition followed by glacial outwash, then more gold deposition. It can get interesting, as hitting the blue layer usually means stop, but in Area #2 you may hit another brown layer farther down.

I'll focus on the brown layer and the upper areas of Crow Creek in a future article. Until then, Good Luck to all you miners out there!!

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2001 Herschbach Enterprises

The fireweed have ceased to bloom, and snow has appeared in the high country. Snow in this part of the country normally appears on the mountain peaks in early September. Fall is a very short season in Southcentral Alaska, with only six to eight weeks between the first appearance of snow in the mountains and serious snow at sea level.

I headed up to Mills Creek Sunday morning and proceeded to setup camp. I had acquired a steel tube and tarp frame tent for the trip, and was anxious to try it out. I often camp out in the back of my truck for short trips, but as I had a couple of weeks off, I decided more room was in order. The tent is 10x13 feet and 6 to 9 feet tall. I outfitted it with an old military woodstove given to me by Al Adams (Thanks Al!). The extra room, plus propane stove, propane lamp, and small propane heater all seemed quite luxurious compared to my normal Spartan camping style.

My father and cousin were coming up later in the day to spend the night and do a little gold mining. I headed out to meet them at the creek crossing, and found they were already almost to camp, engaged in clearing excess alders from the trail in. I helped them finish up the trail work and we got back to camp. They helped me set up the rest of the campsite, and then we headed down to do a little gold mining.

We crossed the creek and proceeded to use my metal detector to search bedrock along the creek just above my dredge site. We immediately started finding some rather nice gold, ranging from match head to little fingernail sized pieces. My father was checking the side of a very steep bedrock outcropping when he got a very loud signal about six feet up above the water. I was surprised when the target turned out to be a very nice two pennyweight nugget lodged in a small pocket in the side of the outcropping.

Frame tent at Steve's camp and faithful mining dog, Kirby

It started to rain quite hard, so we decided to call it a day. My cousin, Bob Herschbach, cooked us up a great meal. I usually just heat up a can of stew, or some other simple fare, so it was a treat to have someone cook up a real meal. We turned in for the evening, and discovered one of the drawbacks of living in a tent. It rained hard all night, and gusts of wind periodically hit the tent, causing quite a bit of noise. It made it hard to sleep but I finally managed to doze off.

We arose Monday morning to find the creek had risen tremendously, and the clear water had turned a thick gray color. Bob was visiting us from Missouri, and had a plane to catch home the next morning, so we were a bit worried as to whether we would be able to get him out in time, as the creek must be crossed to get back to the highway. It had stopped raining, however, so we hoped the water level would drop later in the day.

Since the water made crossing risky, we looked for new digs on our side of the creek. Some old channels and hand stacked rock piles are in the brush across from where I was dredging, so we checked bedrock along the creek in that area. Once again, we started finding some nice gold. By the time Bob had to head out that afternoon, they had found about 1/2 ounce of nice nuggets, including the previous afternoon's finds.

The water had come down, and Bob and my father were able to head back to town. Now it was just me and my faithful Golden Retriever, Kirby. As we settled in for the evening, I planned the next days activities. I was impressed by the size of the nuggets we found on the near side of the creek, where the old channels dump in from the side. I decided that perhaps gold from these old channels had formed a paystreak where they had emptied into the main channel, and also that the old-timers tailings would have dumped in at these points as they worked the channels. Any gold they lost would end up in the creek along the near side. I decided to bring my dredge across the creek and try the area just below where we sniped gold on the bank, and work up towards that location.

Bob & Bud Herschbach sniping bedrock, and their gold

Tuesday morning was spent getting my dredge across the creek. The water had come down, but was still high, and it took careful work to get the dredge across the creek. I spent more time removing rock from the dredge site, then started dredging. I only dredged a short time, but got a couple of pennyweight of smaller gold.

Wednesday I got up, and plain felt lazy! I had a good book with me, and kicked back and read away the morning. Jeff Reed showed up around noon to report that he might come up later that afternoon to do a little bench mining. I decided to get back to work, so after waiting to see if Jeff would show back up, I suited up and got back to dredging. I uncovered quite an expanse of bedrock, but the deposit of coarse gold I was hoping for did not appear. There was gold, but only small amounts scattered about in bedrock crevices. I had about 1/4 oz of gold by the end of the day, and in general the gold was smaller than what we had sniped off the bank just above! I did find one nugget that was over half quartz, a departure from the well worn and solid character of the gold normally found here.

I headed down the creek to check up on Jeff, as I did not see him back up in my area. He had gone back up the creek with his 4" subsurface, and reported that he was not doing very well. The section of creek he was working turned out to have smooth bedrock, and no gold was being held for him to find. I invited him up to my area if things did not improve, and went back up to my camp.

Thursday I continued to work the site, but the area did not improve. Working up the creek, and out nearly to the middle of the channel exposed no real concentration of gold, just sporadic deposits in crevices. Again I got about 1/4 oz of gold. Not enough to really keep my interest in the site. I began to consider moving back across the creek, but figured I had about one more days worth of dredging to finish up material I had exposed.

Thursday night was horrible! It started to rain very hard, and increasingly hard gusts of wind developed. By around 9PM the gusts were up to the 50-60 mph range, and my tent was taking a beating. It was very well staked down, but each gust that hit puffed up the sides and roof, and then sucked them back in. It was very noisy, and somewhat nerve-wracking, wondering if the whole thing was going to fly down the valley at any minute. Poor Kirby probably thought the world was ending, and both of us could not get to sleep. I finally gave up and we both crawled into my truck at midnight. The back was full of gear, so I slept in the front seat, and Kirby curled up in the passenger seat. It may not have been as comfortable, but it was much quieter, and I finally got a little sleep.

Friday morning the rain was coming down in sheets, and the wind had not let up at all. My tired, cramped body stared at out the weather and thought "This is nuts!" Kirby agreed, so I quickly tore down camp, secured the dredge, and got the heck out of there before the creek flooded so high that I could not get out. We got back to Anchorage and I spent the weekend doing odds and ends.

Steve's dredge site and 5" subsurface dredge

I returned Monday morning and found the water was still pretty high. I had decided to try and get my dredge back over to the far side of the creek, but was barely able to cross the creek in my drysuit without a load, let alone carrying/dragging any equipment. I could have dismantled the unit, carried it upstream to a better fording area, carried it back downstream and set it up again, but it seemed like too much work when the area I wanted to move to was only fifty feet away. I decided the time would be best spent prospecting for a better spot to dredge, so I got my sniping tools and proceeded to check bedrock along the sides of the creek.

I did finally find an area on the far side and downstream of my dredge that shows promise. I found what appears to be a layer of virgin pay material resting on very decomposed bedrock. The material is a rich yellow/brown color and fairly compacted. Working the area by hand on Monday and Tuesday produced about 1/4 oz of gold. The gold is distributed throughout the yellow layer and in the underlying bedrock. What struck me most was the gold mixed in the material, as most material on upper Mills Creek seems relatively barren, with the gold heavily concentrated on bedrock. This tends to make for spotty dredging, but if I can get into a stretch where the material has gold in it, dredging can be more productive. I traced the deposit for some distance and it looks to have good dredging promise.

Unfortunately, the weather continued to go downhill. September is our rainiest month, and this one was proving to be no exception. By Tuesday night the rain was continuous, and by Wednesday morning I decided to pull out and wait for better weather conditions. I want to move my dredge to this potential new site and try it out.

When I got back to town, my father contacted me and indicated he and my brother Tom were interested in going back up to Mills to try some more detecting on the banks. They met me Thursday morning in Anchorage, and we arrived at the Mills crossing at about noon. Mills Creek was a raging brown torrent. I paused in my truck, thinking it looked too deep to cross. Since I had my Dad behind me, and a long chain in my truck, I foolishly forged on ahead. I made it about 1/3 across, when my motor stalled. Then I noticed my feet were getting wet. Looking down, I saw water coming in under the doors! Luckily, after a little coaxing, my motor restarted, and I was able to back out.

After a brief stop to bail the water out of my truck, we retreated to Crow Creek Mine, and spent the night camped out in one of the cabins. We did find some gold metal detecting before turning in for the evening, so the day was not a total loss. My brother and I looked the creek over for potential dredging sites, as I plan to move my dredge here after giving Mills Creek one more shot. I'm probably going to try the upper areas of the creek, in hopes of finding some nicer sized nuggets. 1/4 oz and larger nuggets are relatively common in the upper areas of Crow Creek Mine.

We were back at the Mills crossing by 10:30 Friday morning, and the water, though lower, still looked quite high. I now had a better idea of what my truck would handle due to my failed crossing attempt the day before, so we decided not to push it. We headed back to Crow Creek, and detected some more gold. We ended up with a couple dozen small nuggets before deciding to head back to town.

Mills Creek gold and close-up of quartzy nugget

My total finds for several days dredging and sniping came to 17.4 dwt, not counting the nuggets found metal detecting and sent home with my father and cousin. Those finds probably added up to a little over 1/2 oz of gold.

I am currently back at work for the week, and plan to head back to Mills Creek on Saturday, October 2nd. It is Wednesday as I write and the weather does not look good. It has rained all night, and the forecast is for more clouds and rain. I face the prospect of continued high waters at Mills Creek, plus the increasing risk of an early snowfall, which could trap me and my gear high in the mountains. Two years ago heavy snows fell October 10th. I would like to evaluate the new paystreak I found at Mills with my dredge for a couple of days, but will probably pull my gear out and move to Crow Creek for the remainder of the season unless conditions improve. The water is dropping at Crow Creek and is clear enough to dredge now.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 1999 Herschbach Enterprises

I slowly worked my way up the wash, swinging my new Garrett ATX pulse induction metal detector from side to side. I was on bedrock so hunting the best I could, taking extreme care to cover every inch of ground, and keeping the hot spot of the coil as close to the bedrock as possible. I took my time, and moved a rock or two when they kept me from getting the coil as close to the ground as I wanted to. I concentrated on the bottom of the wash but scanned areas along the side that looked inviting.

Hours of careful work had produced a handful of targets. Bullets, shell casings, nails, and bits of flat steel. I was new to the area, relying on friends to point me in the right direction. One of those friends had found a couple nuggets earlier when we were both farther down the gully, but he had wandered off somewhere up ahead of me. I worked along a bend in the wash, where the sand covering the bedrock was deeper. There was exposed hardpan material along the inner corner so I worked along that, digging another nail. Then I saw a bit of bedrock peeking out of the sand, and scanned it with the coil. Another loud signal, probably another piece of steel. I gouged out some soil and fractured bedrock, and out popped a gold nugget! My first Arizona gold, and my first gold nugget with the new Garrett ATX. I was elated and got out my camera to record the event.

The nugget was quite flat, more like a large flake of gold, and later weighed in at 0.7 grams. My expectations for this little trip had been about zero since I was absolutely new to the area and the detector, so I was very happy. I picked up the detector and gave it a couple more swings, and got another signal! This time I was pretty sure it was gold since it was less than two feet away from the first signal. I went ahead and exposed the bedrock crevice and carefully scraped and blew the material away until a small nugget was exposed to human eyes for the very first time.

My first Arizona gold nugget and first found with the new Garrett ATX

This nugget was even smaller than the first, weighing in at 0.39 grams. Again, a clean solid signal, no problem finding this little nugget. Now I had two nuggets in my bottle, and I gave the spot a good go looking for a third, but that was it for that stretch of creek. I continued my way up the wash, very happy with the day and the new Garrett ATX.

Small 0.4 gram gold nugget in crevice - second found with new Garrett ATX

I had recently acquired the detector but I was initially too busy to get out and go prospecting with it. I did a bunch of short day trips coin and jewelry detecting with the machine and posted my results in an earlier article. I finally got the time to go prospecting with the ATX and my first outing was a short day trip to an old hydraulic mine in the northern Sierras. With the drive there and back I only had a short amount of time detecting, and unfortunately did not find any gold. I did learn a few things however. First and foremost was that I forgot to bring along the sling that comes with the ATX. I went ahead and used the detector without, and by the end of the day decided a sling or harness is mandatory for using the ATX for more than a couple hours. Prospecting combines long hours with rough terrain and so is more physically demanding than most types of metal detecting. My forearm and hand was sore at the end of the day from using the ATX.

More detecting to come but lets pause and talk about setting up the ATX for gold detecting. The ATX is ridiculously easy to tune up for nugget detecting. A good way to start if unsure of the detectors settings is to hold the RETUNE/PINPOINT button down while turning the detector on. This resets everything to factory default. The ATX factory default settings are:

Mode: Motion
Discrimination: Zero discrimination (1st LED)
Sensitivity: 10
Threshold: 7
Volume: 10
Ground Balance: Neutral
Ground Track: OFF

With this starting point in the locations I have hunted so far I have been able to adjust the Sensitivity all the way up to the maximum setting of 13. In most locations it is not needed but as a matter of habit I then push the FREQ SCAN and let the ATX cycle for a minute to find the quietest operating frequency. If I intend to use my Garrett Pro Pointer I have it turned on and a couple feet away while the frequency scan is performed to help eliminate interference from the pinpointer when I am using it. If I have a buddy hunting nearby they also should be turned on an operating maybe 50 feet away while the scan is performed, to help eliminate any possible interference from their detector. I want to point out that I was in very close proximity to some high tension power lines on this trip. The ATX was able to tune out the electrical interference from these lines with no problem unless directly under them. I would be able to work there but only by backing the sensitivity down quite a bit.

I normally do a manual ground balance. Just push and release the SHIFT button, insuring that the red LED indicator comes on. This activates all the control secondary functions. Then press and hold the GND BAL button while pumping the coil up and down about 6 inches over the ground. The ground will initially signal (unless it is neutral ground) with louder signals indicating more mineralized ground. Then within 3-7 seconds the detector should go quiet, indicating that the ground balance is complete. Release the button. Finally, I adjust the threshold to be a barely discernible tone. Running without headphones and using the built in speaker I find this to be a notch above the factory default of 7 and so set my ATX at threshold 8. Now I am ready to go nugget detecting.

Garrett ATX standard 12" x 10" DD search coil

I have an 8" round mono coil for the Garrett ATX that I think may be a good choice for nugget detecting but so far I have used the 12" x 10" modified DD coil that comes with the detector. I did this on purpose to be able to report to people on how the coil that comes with the detector performs. I learned a couple very important things. First is that small nuggets give varying tone responses depending just where they are under the coil. A small nugget dead center under the coil will usually give the normal high/low audio indicating a low conductive target. That same nugget moved forward of center under the section of coil connecting the nose to the center coil circle will reverse in signal to low/high. In order to get consistent tones small targets must be centered under the coil. Most importantly, the signal on small nuggets weighing under a gram is greatly enhanced under the inner 5" x 4.5" coil area. Although this is a DD coil it is a new modified design with the inner windings split apart to form the small inner coil area. In some respects it acts like two coils; a large 12" x 10" outer coil and small 5" x 4.5" inner coil.

My advice when hunting for small gold nuggets using the stock coil is to focus on and treat the small 5" inner coil as the only coil on the ATX. Larger nuggets will take care of themselves and signal anywhere under the 12" x 10" coil though as a DD coil the field is centered more down the middle of the coil. The ability to find small nuggets is enhanced in the center coil area with best depth and tone response dead center in the middle of the coil. If hunting for larger than gram nuggets you can focus more on using the overall coil but again, if chasing small gold, focus your attention and act as if you have a 5" coil on the detector.

My air tests with the 8" mono reveal that it has the even coil response I would expect of a mono coil and overall better depth on half gram nuggets than what is in effect the 5" inner coil that comes stock with the ATX. There may be a situation where the 5" inner coil meets the 8" mono in performance on the smallest nuggets weighing only a grain or two but I have not had time yet to explore this possibility. The bottom line is that the ATX comes stock with what acts like two coils, a 12" coil for most targets and a 5" inner coil for tiny targets. The obvious caveat is that you are swinging the weight of a 12" coil when you use it as a 5" coil. And as I found, it is impossible to get the small 5" inner coil into pockets in bedrock or even laterally up against a large rock or the base of a bush. The outer 12" x 10" ring acts as a barrier. So I do very much recommend that for hunting small gold a prospector seriously consider adding the round 8" mono coil as an option. I plan on using it for future hunts now that I have experience with the standard coil. The good news for many people, especially those that might hunt for nuggets rarely, is that the ATX 12" x 10" DD coil is very versatile and can serve well finding small gold nuggets without investing more money in a specialty coil.

Garrett ATX with 8" mono coil

I have lots of questions regarding the stock coil versus the 8" mono as far as how the two differ in handling mineralized ground, hot rocks, electrical interference, and depth on both large and small gold nuggets. I have a lot left to learn still about the Garrett ATX but I will pass on what I learn as I learn it.

The stock coil is marginally sensitive to false signals when contacting rocks. This is a bit odd since it is an epoxy filled coil so in theory the coil windings cannot move to produce false signals when bumped. The signals do not occur consistently or often but in my case at least happened most often when the coil would catch a rock on the surface and roll the rock under the coil. It is possible that the coil cable, even though protected by being enclosed in the lower shaft assembly, is jiggling enough to produce the signals. Another area for more investigation. The open design of the stock coil provides lots of edges to catch on rocks and stubble. A solid bottom scuff cover would be a nice option although they have a tendency to collect debris. This would allow the coil to slide better on the ground, possibly reducing the false signals, and more importantly keeping the coil from hanging up. If I had a wish it would be for a solid elliptical mono for nugget detecting, perhaps a 10" x 6" more or less. The 8" mono with solid coil cover will be nice.

This all leads right back around again to arm strain. The ATX is a heavy metal detector at 6.9 lbs. Add to this the need to use carefully control the 12" coil while prospecting. I found the combination of the need to keep the coil close to the ground while avoiding having it false by rolling rocks under the coil or catch an edge on an obstruction to be very wearing. I have to constantly tweak, twist, and twiddle the position of the coil in relation to the ground. This is normal in nugget detecting. In my opinion superb coil control is one of the secrets that separates the pros from the amateurs. The ATX is simply too heavy for 8 - 12 hours of this activity daily, especially for days in a row. At least for this guy! There are no doubt some people for whom it will not be an issue. I have decided that for my nugget detecting with the ATX additional support is necessary.

The included sling is much better than I thought it would be. It hooks over one arm, drapes across the back of the neck, and drops over the opposite shoulder to support the ATX. I found the easiest option is to just slip the elastic loop at the end of the sling over the control pod and onto the handle of the ATX. With the rod length kept short it balances perfectly there, and is very easy to just slip back off when putting the detector down to dig. The only improvement I can see would be for extra padding under the area directly back of the neck where the sling splits to go around the arm. There is no padding there and it tends to dig a bit if used long hours with just a thin shirt.

I decided to go one step further however. I recently acquired a Minelab Pro-Swing 45 harness and bungee system. This new harness incorporates a plastic strut that transfers weight from the shoulder to the waist belt. This not only relieves shoulder strain but helps keep the harness belt from creeping up your back as the front of the harness is pulled down. I have other heavy detectors I thought might benefit from using this harness and so it was a happy coincidence I already had one on hand to use with the Garrett ATX.

The Pro-Swing comes with a clip and Velcro wrap you can position wherever you like on the detector. I keep as much weight as possible to the rear by keeping the shaft short, basically just using the lighter two lower sections and about 3 inches of the uppermost rod section. This makes a nice little spot between the upper rod locking rings to attach the clip. The bungee can be disconnected at both the detector end of the bungee by slipping it off the clip or off at the shoulder also, which I found I preferred. I now buy cheap LCD watches for all my detectors and leave on them since I normally do not wear a watch myself. I can keep track of time or set alarms for myself to tell me it is quitting time. I put my ATX watch on at the same location. Total aside here but every detector with a LCD readout should have a built in clock and alarm. Time flies when I am detecting!

 Garrett ATX and Minelab Pro-Swing 45 harness

It took a bit of fiddling to get the detector set right, which is very easy. Just take a guess at the correct bungee length and go detecting. It takes just a second to adjust the length by pulling down on the bungee end to release and pulling up again to lock. You feel very quickly if the setting is too long or too short and just adjust up a bit to get it right. For even terrain the system works like a dream. I just glided along with no weight on my arm, directing the detector back and forth. In rough terrain I adjust a tad short so I have to push the detector down a little, and can take pressure off the bungee to allow the detector to come up a bit when needed. Negative pressure, if you will. Only when hitting a high spot did I actually need to lift the detector. Bottom line for me when using the ATX for full days of nugget detecting this is the only way to go. I have experienced tendonitis from excessive detecting hours (is there such a thing?) and it is no laughing matter. It can put you temporarily out of business for a long time as these sorts of injuries take a lot of time to heal. Do not ignore arm pain when detecting!

Now back to the fun stuff. The Garrett ATX handles bad ground and most hot rocks with ease. I have detected several different locales now and basic ground balancing is all that I have needed to do. I doubt I will ever need the optional ground tracking but it is there if I do need it. In very uneven mineralization automatic ground tracking can smooth detector responses but it also can rob depth so should only be used when absolutely needed. Manually balancing to the ground should be sufficient.

I did encounter hot rocks. If few in number I basically ignore them as they are usually on the surface and a little kick takes care of them. If they are more numerous, or more intense, like the basalt cobbles I encountered at one location, it is possible to manually ground balance against the hot rock to eliminate it or reduce its effect. Just find one and then balance over both the rock and the surrounding ground. I try to find an average setting that works to eliminate the ground and hot rock signal and usually the ATX will do just that. The ground and the offending rock are both tuned out. More intense rocks may require tuning mostly to the ground and a bit for the rocks to alleviate issues from all but the worst rocks while keeping the ATX properly balanced to the ground. If required, back off the sensitivity as full sensitivity enhances ground and hot rock effects. I would not even have encountered the issue at the default ATX sensitivity setting of 10 but maxed out at 13 some hot rocks "lit up". Remember the goal is to get the smoothest possible audio out of the detector that allows very small or very deep nuggets to jump out. Fighting too much sensitivity is a common mistake. If the ATX is banging on hot rocks that cannot balance out, back the sensitivity down to compensate. In very rare cases advancing the pulse delay (Discrimination) setting on the ATX will allow for dealing with extreme situations. Finally, the DD coil may also be of help versus the mono coils if mono coils are being used, although I have not confirmed this as of yet.

The new Iron Check feature on the Garrett ATX is very effective. It is biased to not give false signals on gold targets so only works on shallower and larger targets. Still, I found it very helpful in confirming that loud shallow signals were indeed the ferrous targets I thought they were. It would only take a quick dig to confirm the ferrous identity but in areas with lots of surface trash this eliminates a lot of needless digging. Just push the button, wave the coil, and the ATX gives a "goose honk" on ferrous targets. Non-ferrous items like bullets or shell casing will read good but as always they could also be nuggets and so they need to be investigated. Many iron hot rocks will also read as ferrous so an option in some areas instead of other tricks may be to use the Iron Check to confirm suspected hot rocks.

I continued my hunt up the wash, concentrating on exposed bedrock. I got a very faint signal in a little pocket and dug in, this time exposing an even smaller nugget. This one only weighed 2.5 grains (480 grains per Troy ounce) or 0.16 grams. Now we are talking! I was impressed with the large coil on the ATX being able to find such a small piece of gold in mineralized bedrock. Again, a very clean, discernable signal, although weaker than the nuggets found before. Note here that I opted to use the speaker on the ATX this day and forgo the headphones. It was a very quiet place so I could hear the detector well enough, and there were snakes in the area (saw a hawk carry one off!) so it was nice being able to hear what was going on around me. Still, I am certain using headphones would have made this small signal jump out even more. It is always a good idea to use headphones when chasing small gold that produces the tiniest signals.

Small 0.16 Gram gold nugget found with Garrett ATX - can you see it?

Frankly, in the United States more often than not it is all about the small gold. Large nuggets are easy to find in many locations, like the area we were hunting. The bedrock is shallow and most of the large nuggets have been found except in rare places a coil has not been over yet. Going deeper will find no more gold since bedrock is so shallow. Small nuggets are hard to detect however and they are also far more plentiful than large nuggets. Many mining districts do not have any large gold at all so you either find the small nuggets or nothing at all. Garrett seems to have realized this and made significant progress in improving the small gold ability of the ATX compared to the now over ten year old Garrett Infinium. Now truthfully, in many locations a good, relatively inexpensive VLF detector is the best choice in the United States when chasing small gold. The problem is areas where there is either ground mineralization or hot rocks or both that seriously impede the ability of VLF detectors to operate efficiently. These are the locations where the ATX will shine.

Luck was with me this day. Again, I worked slowly and carefully up the wash, concentrating on places where I thought bedrock was shallow enough to detect. I got another faint signal from a crevice in exposed bedrock. This one was down in some pretty solid rock so it took a bit of hacking and prying to get it out. Out popped nugget number four, the smallest yet at 1.8 grains or 0.12 grams. One little nugget was maybe a fluke, but now two tiny gold nuggets with the Garrett ATX with stock 12" x 10" DD coil. Definitely impressive.

0.12 gram gold nugget found with Garrett ATX metal detector

After two days of nugget detecting I can say without doubt that the new Garrett ATX is a very capable nugget detector. It easily handles ground conditions that most prospectors will encounter in the United States. Most impressive for a pulse induction detector is the small gold sensitivity of the ATX out of the box with the stock coil and no tuning tricks. Basically all I did was bump the gain (sensitivity) up, ground balance, and go. The ATX retains all settings when powered down, so firing up again after a break is no more difficult than turning the detector back on. The waterproof design does add weight, but with the obvious benefits of being able to work in pouring down rain without fear that the detector will be damaged. Even the speaker is fully waterproof. I think the ATX has great potential for working in and around streams and rivers looking for gold lodged in underwater crevices and pockets. I have my suit ready and have the optional underwater headphones required to use the ATX with mask and snorkel. The included headphones allow the detector to be submerged but the actual working ear muff portion of the headset must be kept high and dry.

All in all Garrett has produced a very powerful and very versatile detector at an extremely attractive price. That is a lot of superlatives in one sentence but it is a fact. I have no doubt my ATX will pay for itself in the coming year. My only warning is that this is a professional grade pulse induction metal detector and not for people expecting VLF type discrimination capability. Yet with practice the ATX offers far more than just base level PI discrimination, which is all but non-existent. For basic dig-it-all nugget detecting however, the Garrett ATX is about as simple as it gets. A novice can be up and running in minutes with this detector. The team at Garrett deserves praise for bringing a unique detector to market, expanding the options available for all detectorists.

1.36 grams of gold nuggets found with Garrett ATX - smallest 0.12 & 0.16 Grams

Here it is, four gold nuggets found with the new Garrett ATX pulse induction metal detector. Total weight 1.36 grams, smallest nugget 0.12 grams. The dirty quarter found metal detecting is for scale. All found in mineralized ground with the stock 12" x 10" DD coil and no headphones (used built-in speaker). Again, I was impressed by the ability of the ATX straight out of the box to hit gold this small. I can't wait to see what I can do with headphones and the 8" mono coil.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2013 Herschbach Enterprises

The Chisana area of Alaska was the site of the last major gold rush in Alaska in 1913. As a young man researching areas to look for gold I found a reference to this remote location in the Wrangell St. Elias Mountains. It is accessible only by air and for short periods of time each year. I started visiting this area in the early 1970's and then off and on again over the decades that followed.

The area is high above treeline and frozen for most of the year. It was mined with simple shovel into sluice box type operations along the creeks followed up by hydraulic mining on bench deposits. The remote location, lack of water, short season, and generally small area of the gold deposits meant this district never saw anything more complex than hydraulic mining operations. In later year operations have been confined to smaller scale hand operations plus gold dredging and metal detecting.

I told a couple stories about this area as part of my Steve's Mining Journal but kept fairly low key about the location. This was mostly because the claim owners were not looking for publicity. However, the mine owners decided to sell a couple of their claims. They had to advertise them to sell them. That in turn gave me the excuse to finally tell more about my visits to the place over the years, and to share the many photos I have of this rather unique part of Alaska.

I am telling the tale as part of an on-going episodic thread on the Detector Prospector Forum - The Chisana Story - check it out!

Steve Herschbach with gold creviced from bedrock at Chisana, Alaska

This ended up being one real busy trip. I blew out of here about 7PM last Friday night and got to Mentasta by midnight. I sacked out in the front seat of my truck, and was back on the road by 5:30AM. Had breakfast in Tok, then on to Chicken to deliver gold pans to Sue Wiren in "downtown Chicken".

Then off to Boundary at the Canadian border. I spent several hours chasing down miners to get permission to hunt land. Permission had been lined up in advance from a couple but one in particular I was trying to find. He was around, but I kept missing him. It was worthwhile as I got to talk to a couple other guys in the area. The area looks interesting so once I get permission I will have to head back up for another try. I finally headed to one of the fallback locations I had lined up, and by 10PM had found just over an ounce of gold with my new Minelab GP 3000. The largest nugget was just shy of 1/4 oz and the rest were nice chunky pieces. The area was pretty brushy and so I ran the 11" DD coil instead of something larger. I like the GP 3000... it ran smooth as silk and lacks the faint "warble" of earlier Minelab units.

Steve with Minelab GP 3000 hunting gold in Fortymile area, Alaska

I camped out in the truck again, and was up early again the next morning. By afternoon I had just under an ounce of gold with the GP. I wanted to hit the magic one ounce mark and so grabbed my White's MXT with 10" elliptical DD coil and headed back to the spots where I had found gold with the GP. I found another pennyweight of smaller nuggets that put me over the ounce mark.

I had to meet my father and brother at the Chicken airstrip by 5PM and so I hightailed it back to town. They were there when I arrived. My father had flown up while my brother and sister-in-law had driven up. We loaded up the plane and flew over the hill to Napoleon Creek to visit Judd and his son David.

"Downtown" Chicken, Alaska

My brother had never detected gold before so I hooked him up with the MXT to start with. But as usual his beginners ear interpreted the threshold ground noises as signals. Nugget detecting requires more expertise in interpreting signals than most other types of detecting, especially when using VLF detectors. So I set him up with the GP 3000 instead. The Minelab SD/GP detectors are Pulse Induction (PI) detectors and by virtue of their design essentially ignore ground mineral and mineralized rock signals. What this means is they generally do not have a variation in the faint threshold sound unless an actual target is under the coil. This can be much easier for a beginner than learning the sounds a VLF detector puts out in highly mineralized ground. The GP 3000 does have a lot of control settings that can overwhelm a beginner, but using the suggested stock settings works just fine. I made a few extra adjustments for Tom (my brother) and sent him detecting.

And he started finding nuggets! I always get a kick out of helping someone detect their first nuggets, and it was just that much better in that it was my brother. He decided he really liked the Minelab. Still, to prove a point I grabbed the White's MXT, and started finding about two nuggets for every one he found. Expertise does count, and in trained hands the MXT is a very capable detector. I thought it did quite well indeed in the admittedly mineralized soil conditions.

Steve with White's MXT metal detecting for nuggets on bedrock exposure

My father was having no luck at all. He has fairly poor detector technique, and I just can't convince him to slow down and keep the coil close to the ground. I have no doubt he walks right over many nuggets as his coil is often several inches off the ground. Coil control is one of the real secrets of nugget detecting. If you only have a few inches to play with, giving them up by running the coil high over the ground really makes it hard to find gold. But he insists on doing it his way, as he eventually always finds some gold. But he could find more.

Judd put us up for the evening. We got some more time in the next morning, and Tom and I found some more gold. I ended up with about 3/4 oz with the MXT while Tom got just over 1/2 oz with the GP 3000. Dad still came up dry.

Our real reason for being in the Chicken area was that we had volunteered to survey a lot for the 40 Mile Miners District. We had to meet a State survey team in Chicken in the afternoon, and so flew back to Chicken. We hooked up with them and planned the lot survey. It is amazing how something that years ago would have been very simple can turn into a major project these days. We got the planning done and then my bother and sister-in-law drove back to Anchorage.

I had planned on heading back to Anchorage that night also, but the time was late, and my father still had no gold. So he talked me into going back to the border to my earlier digs to score a few nuggets. A good decision, as I came up with four fat nuggets that totaled over an ounce in weight. One round chunk weighed over 3/4 oz plus three other nice pieces. I had set my father up with the Troy Shadow X5. It was getting quite a lot of ground noise in the all-metal mode, so I set it up in the silent search discriminate mode with the discrimination set at 3. Dad ended up finding two round nuggets weighing in at over 8 pennyweight (20 pennyweight per ounce). So he was happy... he had his gold for the trip.

Over 4 ounces of chunky Fortymile gold found with metal detectors

I ended up with the gold above for the trip. 4.27 ounces of nice, solid nuggets. The larger ones on the left were found with the Minelab GP 3000, and the smaller nuggets grouped to the right were found with the White's MXT.

I had a 9 hour drive ahead and so took Dad back to the airport and sent him on his way. A 2-1/2 hour flight for him, and an 8-1/2 hour drive for me. But well worth the drive, with gold in the poke and lots of visits with friends and miners in the Fortymile!

2011 Update: As great as this gold and outing were it turned out to be the end of this stretch of Fortymile gold adventures. In 2003 something else came along that diverted my attention for years to come - Moore Creek, Alaska.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2003 Herschbach Enterprises

The Gold Prospectors Association of America has a new set of mining claims on one of the best mining sites on the Kenai Peninsula south of Anchorage. The claims are only accessible to GPAA members, but access to this ground alone is well worth the cost of membership. The membership kits contain a guide to GPAA claims nationwide, a gold pan, panning video, snuffer bottle, and more. The membership also includes a one year subscription to the GPAA's excellent magazine. The claims are relatively new, and so I decided to drive down and check them out. IMPORTANT NOTE - THESE CLAIMS ARE NO LONGER AVAILABLE TO GPAA MEMBERS.

I loaded up my nugget detector and headed out of town. The drive south is very scenic, and wildlife is usually seen along the way. One location just south of Anchorage, along Turnagain Arm, is a good spot to see Dall Sheep. The sheep come down in the spring and feed on the slopes just above the highway. They will often come down right beside the road, much to the delight of tourists and locals like myself. It was at this location that I took this picture of a Dall Sheep walking along the shoulder of the road.

Mills Creek, Alaska

The GPAA claims are on the same location as the old workings of the Polly Mining Company, one of the most productive old mines in the area. The creek has extensive deposits of gold along the banks above the creek, and most of the gold was mined by washing these bank deposits. There was a pretty good group of GPAA members and visitors there when I arrived, as a general outing and picnic had been planned for the weekend. After chatting awhile, I grabbed my detector and proceeded to explore the area.

Most of the people were working the bedrock exposures along the right bank of Mills Creek above the point where it joins Canyon Creek. Many small gullies cut the bank, and old bench workings are evident in abundance. Some gold has been found with detectors on the bedrock, but most people are using highbankers and sluices at this location. Some dredging is also taking place along the creek, with decent results. Nuggets up to several pennyweight have been found in the area. The only problem is that getting to site requires crossing Canyon Creek. The road crosses the creek, but the water depth requires your vehicle to have good clearance. My Chevy S10 was fine, but you would not want to cross with a vehicle that has any lower clearance. Many people park and cross in waders. The stream flow is fairly slow at this point, so crossing in hip boots or chest waders presents no problem.

Steve detecting bedrock at Mills Creek

I worked one of the gullies for a while, removing rocks and brush to uncover bedrock, but only found one small nugget. I headed up the creek, checking the exposed bedrock with my detector, and found a couple more nuggets. I was not having much luck, but finally found a bedrock exposure on the trail, where people were literally walking over the gold. I worked at removing the rocks and small amount of overburden from the site, finding small nuggets periodically as I checked the bedrock with the detector.

Twenty little nuggets found with Gold Bug 2

The day was wearing on, and I decided to head back to town. My vial ended up containing twenty small nuggets, weighing a total of just over a pennyweight (1/20th of an ounce). I highly recommend this area, particularly for those wishing to enjoy the camaraderie of the members of the GPAA. They are simply a terrific group of people, friendly, and always willing to share what they know about mining with new members. This is a great way for someone new to mining to learn what it is all about.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

"I hunted hard and got gold every day but one for two weeks, but could not get over larger pieces. I went left when I should have went right. When it comes to getting the big ones the first couple rows you hit often tell the game. 14 nuggets this week got me not quite another ounce of gold, for a two week total of 36 nuggets and 2.86 ounces. Most of the gold was found with a Fisher F75 Special Edition, three nuggets were found with my Minelab GPX 5000 and eight small nuggets with the Fisher Gold Bug Pro. I can't help but admit I am shy of where I was hoping to be on gold, but that said had the best two weeks of fun times with good people I could have. Really, really good groups, and the people make the fun. Many thanks as always to the Clark family and crew for a fantastic experience."

Little did I know when I wrote the paragraphs above that I would have already made my last visit to the Ganes Creek Pay-To-Mine operation. It was quite a surprise when in the fall of 2012 it was announced that the last and final season at Ganes Creek had already happened and that the mine was closing its doors to the public. I can't say I did not see it coming but I thought there would be at least a "one last time" or "final season" sort of affair.

So much has been written about Ganes Creek in the last decade that I see no reason to delve into the details of hunting gold at Ganes Creek. Over 1700 ounces of gold nuggets and gold specimens were found by visitors since the mine opened to the public in 2002. It truly has been a once in a lifetime experience for many people and this last entry I will just devote to some random photos and notes.

Ganes Creek is actually a large commercial gold mining operation, with the pay-to-mine happening as a side business. Here is a shot of the main mining camp. The closest cabin is the combination washroom and rec area.

Main camp at Ganes Creek, Alaska

Ganes Creek valley is both wide and long, with many square miles of tailing piles left by decades of mining with bucket line dredges and bulldozer/dragline operations. Many locations were mined more than once. Here we have a view of the mine above the camp, with the camp just barely visible in the distance.

Ganes Creek upstream of camp (just barely visible at tip of dark area extending from right)

Each day the mine sends a bulldozer around to various locations to flatten out old tailings for detecting. Visitors wait until a large enough area is ready for everyone to have a decent shot at finding something.

Bulldozer prepping an area for the visitors to metal detect for gold

Tailing piles mowed down and flattened by bulldozers

Longtime visitor Bernie P excavating a target - will it be a nugget?

Depending on the time of year visitors may get to see parts of the commercial mining operations at work. Here we have the miner using a Denver Gold Saver to process buckets of concentrate from the main operation.

Denver Gold Saver employed as a cleanup device at Ganes Creek

Although the goal of the detector crowd is finding large nuggets, the bulk of the gold found while commercial mining is actually smaller in size. here is a cleanup from the Denver Gold Saver.

Gold recovered while commercial mining at Ganes Creek

Finally, all good things come to an end. At the end of each week visitors put their gold out for a group shot of both the gold and the people.

The total take for Week 3, 2012 at Ganes Creek, Alaska. Very large multi-ounce nuggets are getting hard to find.

The visitor group for Week 3, 2012 at Ganes Creek

The opening paragraph of this article explains that while I found gold almost every day, I was unable in a two week stay to find even one nugget over an ounce. This is one reason why the mine closed to the public. The t-shirt shot above has gold separated into piles and you can see many people are finding just a few small nuggets in a week. For many people this might be the most gold and even the only gold they have ever found, but the mine owners want to see everyone going home with more gold than what has happened in the last few seasons. Here is my gold from this two week visit, and a couple photos of the totals board. The board had a running total for a decade but was erased on this trip. Luckily I took a photo just before it got erased to document the amazing finds made over the years.

Steve's two weeks - 36 nuggets and 2.86 ounces total

Final look at the multi-year records before the board was erased - 1651 oz by end of 2011

First 3 weeks 2012 - 72 nuggets/18.45 oz (Wk1) 72 nuggets/17.6 oz (Wk2) and 74 nuggets/11.95 oz (Wk3)

That sums up my final visit to the Ganes Creek pay-to-mine operation. It was really something to see over the years, and I am proud I played a little part in making the whole thing possible. It does turn out however that that 2012 would not be the absolute last time a group of people hit the tailings at Ganes Creek looking for gold. In 2014 an exceptionally heavy flood season took out much of the valley and even the old machine shop - a real shame since the machine shop was an in place museum of sorts. The flooding caused a lot of issues at the mine and a group was privately invited up to inject a little cash for cleaning up the mess. You can get some details of that 2014 visitor group here.

With that, one last pretty picture of Ganes Creek Mine, Alaska. Click photo for larger version.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2012 Herschbach Enterprises

Wow, what a dramatic turn of events. After many years of juggling permits and more types of paperwork than one can imagine I screwed up not once but twice and caused our mining claims to be lost! I'm not much for making excuses and bear the responsibility for the mess. Thankfully, I have good friends and partners and so a hanging did not occur. The error was part of a convoluted situation, but suffice it to say you had better get all the facts straight when messing with mining claims on areas closed to mineral entry. The feds are absolutely unforgiving of errors. The story was such that I wrote it up and had it published in the ICMJ Prospecting & Mining Journal.

I had big plans for the summer as detailed at Alaska Gold Dredging Adventure 2013 and with the claim now gone there was quite a bit of planning to roll back. I was able to cancel all the equipment on order and return the rest. I had to tell my partners there summer plans were also messed up but suggested various options we could undertake. Not to make light of a bad situation but things are working out. Time to make lemonade out of lemons!

I experienced a bit of depression over the whole mess and decided I was fed up with permits and paperwork for the time being. I went so far as to sell out of some other federal claims I was involved in to just get free of it all and spend a year regrouping. I still want to possibly do a dredging operation, but have put it off to 2014 at least while I look at various options. One thing I did decide was that perhaps I was thinking too small with a 6" dredge and so now am mulling over options for placing an 8" dredge someplace.

In the meantime I am just going to hang loose and go prospecting, with my main goal to stay mobile and to stick with methods that require no permitting, which generally means staying non-motorized. I am putting together a mobile tent camp and basic prospecting gear including sluice box, recirculating rocker box, and metal detectors. I am going to start in the Fortymile area near Chicken, then head for the Iditarod country, and finish up in the Nome area. I plan small side trips to the Petersville area and Kenai Peninsula if time and circumstances permit.

I do intend to use metal detectors for the bulk of my prospecting efforts and am relying on the four units above to put gold in my poke this summer.

Gold Bug 2 with 6.5" coil. This will be for scraping/detecting bedrock cleaning up the tiny bits.
Gold Bug Pro with 10" x 5" DD coil and 11" x 8" DD coils. General purpose tailings detecting.
F75 Special Edition with 13" DD coil and 11" DD coil. General purpose tailings detecting.
Minelab GPX 5000 with 8", 11", 16" and 18" mono coils. The "big gun"! For use anywhere there is not too much junk.

Fisher Gold Bug 2, Gold Bug Pro, F75 SE, & Minelab GPX 5000

The Gold Bug Pro and F75 are redundant. For most people the Gold Bug Pro is the way to go. But I get a tiny edge with the F75 on larger gold in tailing piles and I like the large target id that pops up on the screen while in all metal mode compared to the tiny indicator on the Gold Bug Pro. The Pro is a tad hotter on small gold than the F75. The bottom line is I could narrow it down to three machines by leaving the F75 behind but can't quite bring myself to do that. The machine has been too good to me so it goes along and I will be using it for much of my detecting.

I intend to split my time between hunting old ground to get some gold and doing some true blue sky prospecting looking for undiscovered gold patches. Patch prospecting is common in desert areas but I am unaware of anyone giving it s serious go in Alaska, so figure I may as well give it a shot. The terrain and ground cover do not favor this type of metal detector prospecting in Alaska and so most people stick with hunting old mine workings. The odds on patch hunting here are slim but the potential rewards are great.

I have my trusty sluice box, but have also finally acquired a rocker box. I have always wanted one, but did not want a wood homemade unit and have never seen a commercially made rocker i really wanted. Alan Trees recently started making a plastic rocker box which looks really good. I got one for $599 plus $100 shipping to Alaska. I want it for working areas away from water in non-motorized locations and so have paired it up with a 50 gallon tub to use as a water recirculation system.

I will fill out more details here later but that is the rough plan for now. I will be hitting the road for Chicken in mid-June and checking in every few weeks with updates

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2013 Herschbach Enterprises

There is a prelude to this story. In mid-May my wife and I flew down to Reno for our youngest daughter's college graduation. Her older sister was also there, and the last night of our visit we went out for dinner. The place had Asian food, and we all got fortune cookies. My fortune:

''You will have gold pieces by the bushel.''

I put it in my wallet.

My friends Jeff, Brian and I made a spur of the moment trip to Ganes Creek near McGrath, Alaska to metal detect for gold over the three day Memorial Day weekend. We made a similar trip last year in July, and had good luck finding gold nuggets, including the largest I've ever found, a 4.95 ounce nugget. As you may imagine, we have been anxious to make a return trip. Brian is new to detecting, so I loaned him my chest mount converted White's GMT with 14" coil for the trip. Jeff and I used Fisher Gold Bug 2 detectors, both with 14" coils.

It was spring at Ganes Creek, but the weather had been hot in Alaska, and so the only ice was left on some ponds and along the creek. Daytime temps were hitting the 70's and 80's, but it was into the 40's at night. There were many fires in Alaska due to our abnormally hot, dry spring making for hazy air, and at times you could smell the smoke. The mosquitoes were not yet out in force, and head nets were not needed. Unfortunately, this is not normally the case later in the summer.

Jeff went up Friday morning, and Brian and I met him Saturday morning. Brian was feeling a bit competitive and worried Jeff would get a big jump on him, but my hopes were to see a lot of gold on our arrival.

I was a bit worried that perhaps our visit last year was a fluke, and that gold might be harder to find than we thought. So I was not happy when Jeff reported only one nugget for a long days hunt just upstream from where I had found the 4.95 ounce nugget last year. And only a pennyweight nugget at that. Not very promising.

I had my heart set on hunting some old dragline piles next to the airstrip. We had hit them a bit last year, with no results but some trash. But I felt there had to be gold there. We had found several nuggets in the airstrip itself, including a 3.5 ounce nugget my father found. The airstrip was topped with material from this tailing pile, and so we figured the gold had come from there. We loaded up our detectors and headed off to give it a try.

Tailing piles along airstrip at Ganes Creek (Brian standing in top center pile for scales)

I walked up onto the pile and in ten minutes had a 1.11 ounce nugget! Jeff was amazed. He had spent a long day before looking for gold, and I score a big nugget right off the bat.

That set the tone for the three days. I had numerous areas I wanted to try, pinpointed from my aerial photos. At most we hit I had the first nugget, in about ten minutes. Sometimes the other guys found gold, sometimes not. I on the other hand was unusually lucky this trip. I just kept putting my coil over the gold.

Still, Jeff found his largest nugget ever this trip, a one ounce nugget not 50 feet from my first in the ''Airstrip Pile''. Brian also found his largest nugget ever, a 1.33 ounce nugget from a pile within a couple hundred feet of the camp, christened the ''Cabins Pile''. I found a 1.89 ounce nugget in this same pile.

Brian with his 1.33 oz "Bear Nugget"

The next day I got off to a slower start, but caught up at the very end of the day with a 2.45 ounce nugget off the ''Airstrip Pile'' down in the brush. I like hitting oddball spots, and my willingness to work in the brush paid off big time.

The last day, Memorial Day, I went clear off the scales. We went over a mile upstream above the camp, and I found a .97 ounce nugget. Another tall tailing pile by the runway with the windsock stuck in it, the ''Windsock Pile'', gave me 9 nuggets, five a 1/4 ounce or better. Everywhere we went I found gold.

I wanted to try the old bucketline tailings way downstream, and within ten minutes found the largest nugget of the trip, a 3.22 ounce gold/quartz specimen. Finally, trying above the cabins upstream on the tributary, Potosi Creek, got three more nuggets; 4.2 dwt., 6.0 dwt, and 11.3 dwt.

Steve with 3.22 ounce gold/quartz specimen

The bottom line is I could do no wrong with a detector this on this trip. Brian got 2.5 ounces, Jeff 2.8 ounces, and I ended up with an incredible 14.4 ounces! The last day alone I found 8.14 ounces of nuggets. Grand total for three people in three LONG days - 19.72 ounces.

So is it all gone? Did we get it all? No way. We did not scratch the surface. Ganes Creek is vastly larger in area than you can imagine. The tailings run for miles. There are a couple areas we have given pretty good attention, but none I would not hunt again. All hunting was with the Fisher Gold Bug 2 or White's GMT with 14'' coils, with full rejection of any iron targets. Only solid good signals were dug, and all scanning was ''speed scanning''. All the areas that produced gold should produce more with careful work. All I can say now is there is plenty of gold to be found, and after everyone gets through hammering the creek this summer I will go up again this fall, and find more gold to prove it.

But really, what do I think of the odds for finding gold at Ganes Creek now? Brian is relatively inexperienced compared to Jeff and I, and was learning a new detector. I'd say his finds were about on par with what I expected of him. Jeff was way off... a real cold streak. He should have found twice as much. And I was hot as could be. I found about twice what I would expect. All this is based on bare gut feelings, but I'm thinking 1 ounce a day is a sort of average. But any number of nuggets will blow that away... and bad luck could shoot anyone down.

Steve shows off gold found at Ganes Creek over Memorial Day weekend

Close up of the gold nuggets and specimens from Ganes Creek

The big thing here is the ''nugget factor''. You can find nothing all day, then end up with a couple ounces in one nugget. I was just plain lucky in that regard. I simply happened to place my coil over more large nuggets. They add up fast, and so really get you ahead fast.

So the biggest advice I have is never quit, never give up, never slow down. We put in about 15 hour days, and used them well. But if you are easily discouraged, you'll have a tough time at Ganes Creek. Persistence is the name of the game. And a good fortune cookie might help.

The newer dragline/bulldozer tailings are vast in extent, and seem to have more nuggets, but more trash, than the old bucketline tailings. But I can't help but feel that really big nugget is in the bucketline tailings. They are relatively trash free, and so require real patience. You can hunt for a couple hours with hardly a signal, and those are usually large steel. It's easy to get the feeling there is not much gold in the cobble piles. But in all those cobbles I just have to believe there is a fist-sized cobble of gold/quartz lurking. Just like my 3.22 ounce piece... but larger! 2011 Update: I was right - many nuggets weighing over a pound have come from the cobble piles since.

But if you do not mind more trash targets, the dragline/bulldozer piles seem to have more nuggets in general, and would be worth the most attention for most people.

Steve's five largest "chunks" of gold from Ganes Creek weekend

Ganes Creek is being opened to the public for the first time this year, with one week stays at the mine running $3000 per person, room and board provided. You keep all the gold you find. The largest nugget found at Ganes Creek weighed 122 ounces. For more information and photos see the Ganes Creek page here.

2011 Update: Those early days of easy pickings at Ganes Creek are gone forever. Now, ten years later the pay-to-mine operation continues. I was at Ganes for two weeks in 2011 and will be there again for two weeks in 2012. These days bulldozers are run every day to turn material over and expose new nuggets. Every nugget found is one less to be found, however, and it is getting harder to find gold at Ganes these days. In 2010 I found 6 ounces of gold in one week at Ganes Creek. My spring 2011 trip of two weeks also got me 6 ounces. A half ounce to an ounce a day average may still sound pretty good, but the fact is only a few very experienced detector operators like myself pull it off. The majority of people who visit Ganes would do better to set their sights on perhaps an ounce of gold in a week of detecting. Though big finds still happen now and then - the largest nugget found at Ganes Creek by a visitor in 2011 was a solid 10.5 ounce beauty.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2002 Herschbach Enterprises

My friends George and Gary worked on me for a couple years to convince me to make a trip to the UK to hunt Celtic gold coins at http://www.colchestertreasurehunting.co.uk/ The guy next to the Welcome to Colchester sign is Gary, one of the pioneers and current record holder for gold coins found with this outfit. I finally committed in 2009 for a trip in October 2010. 

There is a pay to hunt operation in Colchester where deals are made with farmers to allow detectorists access to the fields to hunt for relics and coins. There are various rooming schemes and we went with the "full ride" version which is like an all inclusive vacation will all the trimmings. There are more fields to hunt then you will have time. It runs about $1500 a week plus airfare which from Anchorage was about another $1500. We booked a two week stay.

The group consisted of me, George, Gary, Todd, and Todd's brother. The flight from Anchorage to Heathrow was uneventful if a bit long. The overseas flights are quite comfortable though, with coach being more like First Class on a domestic flight. All the things you would normally pay extra for, like meals and in-flight entertainment, are included in the ticket price. Just like the good old days.

George Hunting the Stubble

We made the flights to Heathrow and were picked up at the airport. Settling in consisted of tossing our gear in our rooms and then heading right out for our first hunt. It was raining and the field we hunted had been plowed recently. It was thick mud, more like clay than dirt, sticking to the bottom of boots and search coils. It mattered little at the time in the excitement of finally being there with detectors on. All I found was a few buttons and other items but at least I was detecting.

The reason for going when we did was to get good weather but it did not work out that way. It rained for over a week. The farmers do not plow in the rain as all it does is make a muddy mess. We hunted fields harvested but not plowed (stubble) or fields that were plowed earlier. The plowed fields were sticky mud that made our feet weigh pounds as the mud built up on our boots. The stubble has no mud but you are swinging through 6" - 8" of cut off grain stalks. We ended up fighting conditions for the greater part of the trip.

St Mary's Church Little Bromley built in 11th century

Each day we got up early, got fed, and headed out. We picked a hunt site, and were driven there. We hunted until lunch, and the driver brought us a warm meal in the field. Get a bite, and then hunt until dark. Ten hour hunting days, with Chris taking care of all the details. The main goal is to maximize detecting time, and we did just that. People ask what kind of sightseeing I did while I was there and the answer is only what I saw while detecting or driving to a detecting location. The operator has permission to hunt fields all around Colchester but most are no more than a 15 -20 minute drive. Many were near old churches, like the one in the picture above. The churches were very much the center of life in those days and so being near one is a good bet on there having been activity in the area for thousands of years.

There are very few rules. Rule number one - fill your holes! This is a must to keep in good graces with the farmers. Keep all your trash to keep it from getting plowed under to be dug again in the future. I always hunt with a trash pouch. Rule number two - stick to the chosen fields. The deal with the farmers means the one whose field you are on gets paid by the operator for you being there. The next field over, even if you hunted it the day before, if it belongs to a different farmer then do not go there. The group decides where to hunt, and once the decision is made, stick with it. You can hunt the same fields morning and afternoon, or switch after lunch. Rule number three - declare all your finds. Some people try and skirt the rules by not declaring their find, so they can keep it immediately, and so they do not have to share a cut with the farmer, if any. This is the worst offense of all, and will get you banned for life from the operation. The rules are the rules and there is no patience for offenders.

Lunch in the field - the rains just let up!

You need a good VLF that can reject iron, and dig the rest. The rest is copper, lead, bronze, silver, and for the lucky few gold. Aluminum is not something found often. Everything is old. My first coin was a 1700 copper, the oldest coin I'd ever found. No big deal I am told - new stuff! And so it went. Good finds are 12th - 16th century silver coins or around 3rd century Roman copper coins. The most desired are the BC Celtic gold coins.

I used a Fisher F75 Special Edition and a White’s MXT Pro with Bigfoot coil. I saw lots of MXTs and quite a few Minelab E-TRACs in addition to many other good VLF units. I had an E-TRAC along also but never did fire it up. For what it is worth whenever I invest the time and money in something like this I never go without at least two detectors and two headphone sets. I ran the F75 most of the trip mainly because the very long hours of metal detecting favored the F75s light weight and balance.

Steve and Gary's White's MXTs with Bigfoot coils

I came hoping to find a gold coin but try as I might it did not happen. The next best thing is a silver “hammered” coin, a coin made literally by taking a piece of silver and pounding it with a hammer between a set of dies. Hammered silver or “hammies”. People got excited when one was found but they are not all that rare. Lots are found but the real finds are the ones in excellent condition, and they are rare. Most of the ones I found were damaged in some way. It was common practice in the old days to make change by cutting a coin into halves or quarters so finding half a coin is more the norm than not.

When the weather let up things improved considerably. The fields dried out, the farmers started plowing, and gold coins started to be found. Not so much for our group however. We heard about others finding gold, but despite being in a group of experienced, hard working detectorists, the gold eluded us. It was not until near the end of the two weeks that George managed to find the much sought after Celtic gold. I also was nearby when Chicago Ron found his own Celtic gold, although far from his first.

Big smile from Chicago Ron with Celtic gold just found!

The size of the fields ranges from large to truly immense. In many cases I would just wander randomly around the huge areas. Sometimes Gary would point to where previous finds were made. Sometimes the fields, if looked at carefully, revealed clues. Gray areas in the midst of all the light brown soil indicated some kind of past building site, like a home or pub. A faint raised area might indicate an old road. Broken pottery, glass shards, and pipe stems are a sure sign of past habitation. Often, however, it is just a needle in the haystack hunt. People who cover lots of ground with their coils at the proper height and who efficiently recover targets have the edge. I really found it to be little different than nugget detecting, except you do not have to dig super deep holes. Almost everything is a spade dig or two down since most of the finds are small in size.

The fields are huge!

I did find an official “treasure” which means an item that is not a coin but is made of precious metal. It is a tiny bell, most likely one tied to a hawk but it could be a bell on any harness. Treasure is any find that is not a coin made of precious metals. A silver coin is not treasure, but my silver bell is. Coins, if found in a group are considered a horde, also treasure. You get to keep what you find, after everything is examined by the authorities and cataloged. This takes months so you have to wait some time before you get to show off your finds. Treasure may be claimed by the government, and if so it is bid on by museums. The high bidder gets the treasure, and the proceeds are split between the finder and the property owner. I like the system since it allows regular people to legally detect for items and gives the museums a steady supply of finds to choose from. In the United States most of what we were doing is against federal law with potentially severe consequences. The sad reality is people break the law and do it anyway, but it all happens under the radar. The British system makes far more sense.

Steve and Fisher F75 hunting in jolly old England

The bottom line is I hunted for two weeks and made many great finds, the oldest finds I have ever made by over a thousand years. Amazing stuff and a great time. Here are the photos and descriptions:

My official treasure find:

Silver medieval hawking bell - reported as treasure to the museum

The one day I hunted with the White's MXT Pro and Jimmy Sierra Bigfoot I got what I consider to be my best find, because it has a story. One of the best things about hunting with Chris is he has access to true experts. A day after this find this is the report we got back:

DIANAE CONS AVG antoninianus of Gallienus (253-268 AD.) found by Steve

This one is a DIANAE CONS AVG antoninianus of Gallienus (253-268 AD.) This is part of the so-called "Gallienus Zoo" series of animal reverses. This one appears to be either the gazelle http://www.stoa.org/gallery/album452/08_CR_GAZOO or possibly the left-facing stag elk variety http://www.stoa.org/gallery/album452/11_CR_GAZOO These two are just a couple of the many animals found paired with this reverse legend. The series invokes the aid of several gods - Apollo, Diana (this one) Jupiter, Liber (Bacchus) Neptune, Sol, etc, all with "CONS AVG" (protector of the emperor) and various animals on their reverses. This series dates to 267-8 AD. and was produced at the mint in Rome.

This is an interesting find as Britannia wasn't part of the Italian Roman Empire at the time this was struck. Britannia was part of the break-away Gallic Roman Empire at that time, so this piece evidently was in circulation for a few years until after the re-uniting of the Empire under Aurelian (c. 272-275) to have traveled to Britain. Among Aurelian's reforms was a revamping of the silvered Æ coinage which had become barely better than bronze with a tiny percentage of silver under Gallienus and Claudius Gothicus, his successor.

Books will call Gallienus' antoniniani "billon" - and so they were at the beginning of his relatively long reign which, in the beginning, was shared with his father, the unfortunate Valerian I. After his father's capture by the Sasanid Persians c. 260, the antoninianus went through a swift series of debasements under Gallienus to become a coin containing so little silver it needed to be silvered to keep up the pretense of being a double-denarius. Although officially silvered, Gallienus' later antoniniani are seldom encountered with any of their silvering remaining, and things may have finally become so bad that even the pretense of silvering may have been dropped at the end of his reign. An occasional subject for contemporary copies as well, this one seems to be official.

I'll refer you to this page in my website. http://www.stoa.org/gallery/album452 The organization I work for - Ancient Coins for Education, Inc, or ACE - recently received the donation of a fairly well-developed private collection of Gallienus' zoo coins. Since the donor asked that we do our best to keep the group together, it is currently an adjunct exhibit to our travelling museum. This is what the collection contained when it was donated. We have since added a couple of types the original collector was missing.

Mark

Truly a great adventure. I did not get my gold coin but I beat my oldest coin finds by OVER A THOUSAND YEARS! Pretty amazing and best of all two weeks with friends. Thanks to the operation owner and his wife for sharing their home with us for two weeks, and all the great meals. Hopefully I can do it again someday.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2010 Herschbach Enterprises

Note October 2018 - See my return to Colchester to try once more for Celtic gold!

One of my favorite places in Alaska is Bonanza Creek near Chisana in the Wrangell - St. Elias mountains. This location is accessible only by air and is about 250 air miles east of Anchorage. The elevation of around 5000 feet makes for a very short season. Snow persists into June and starts falling again in September. One reason I talked my father into visiting this site in the early 1970's was that it is very remote, and mining in the area concentrated on finding the richest deposits. Material that is very good by today's standards was left as too poor at the time. The gold was reported to be large, and it seemed reasonable that some good gold had been overlooked.

I've known the claim owners for a long time, and have done very well metal detecting on this creek over the years. My original supposition was correct, and much rich ground remains. The ground is heavily mineralized, but even so I have done well with a variety of VLF detectors here, including the Compass Gold Scanner, Fisher Gold Bugs, White's Goldmasters, and Minelab XT17000, XT18000, and Goldstriker. My family and I have found thousands of nuggets here over the years.

Old mine workings above Bonanza Creek

I purchased a Minelab SD2200D specifically to try this locale again. The last trip to Bonanza Creek gave me the impression the area was getting hunted out, but I suspected more nuggets could be found with the SD. When I say hunted out, I mean of larger nuggets. The area is still full of smaller nuggets. But it was getting hard to find any nuggets over a pennyweight.

The largest nugget I had found here so far weighed 6.8 dwt, found with my old Compass Gold Scanner. My sister actually beat me out, having found a 7 dwt nugget with the original Fisher Gold Bug model. The history of the area indicated larger nuggets could be found, but they have eluded us so far. As we went back over the years with more sensitive detectors, larger quantities of smaller nuggets were found, but the big nuggets were found early on.

My father, Bud Herschbach, is an Alaskan Bush pilot, having flown here since the 1960's. He currently owns a Cessna 206, a very capable plane with a large load capacity, yet the ability to land on small unimproved runways. My father, Jeff Reed, and I departed Anchorage in fair weather and headed for Northway to meet the claim owner to get the keys to his cabin.

After leaving Northway we made our way through the mountains to Chisana. The mountain strip we land on is something that would amaze most people. The approach is made flying up a small valley. A turn is made up a side creek and a landing is made uphill directly into the side of a mountain. It is something that must be done correctly the first time, as a missed approach means a nearly impossible climb out against the face of the mountain. The landing strip is just some bare dirt in the tundra, and very short at that. It is the kind of landing that has a person clutching their seat and hoping nothing goes wrong.

As usual Dad aced the landing, however, and we parked the plane. We loaded our gear up and walked over the hill towards Little Eldorado Creek and camp. Upon arrival we found all in good order, although a bear had forced entry into one of the cabins. We straightened things up and settled in.

Since we had hunted the area with detectors carefully over the years, Jeff and I wanted to try something new. The current owner has done well dredging the claims, and we figured we might do well to snipe the many exposed bedrock areas in the creeks with drysuits, masks, and snorkels. So our first morning Jeff and I suited up and headed down Bonanza Creek to snipe for gold. Jeff had a cold and was feeling a bit under the weather, but we had visions of underwater crevices full of large gold nuggets to push us on. My father took his Tesoro Lobo and headed out on his own to look for gold.

Jeff sniping for gold in drysuit

Well, Jeff and I ended up disappointed. We spent a long day poking and prodding into crevices with our hand tools. We found quite a bit of gold, but none of the rich pockets we were anticipating. The old timers, and more recent dredgers had done their jobs well, and shallow exposed bedrock areas did not give us as much gold as we had been hoping. I got kind of discouraged and started skipping along over areas. Jeff, for all that he was not feeling well, was more persistent, but no hot crevices were revealed.

Jeff and I finally gave up and headed back to the cabins. Dad was waiting there for us, and we told him about our lack of results. We then asked how he had done, and he tells us he had ranged over quite a bit of ground, and had finally got a good signal with his detector. He then pulled out a very nice 3.1 pennyweight nugget laced with quartz to show us!

Needless to say, Jeff and I were very excited about his find. It was the largest nugget my father had ever found, making it even better yet. We decided that the area he had found it in was well worth our attention (naturally!) and excitedly made plans for the next days nugget hunt.

The weather was pretty poor the next morning, so we headed out under cloudy skies to search for gold. Jeff and I diligently searched bedrock along Bonanza Creek while Dad wandered on up ahead of us. There were lots of great looking bedrock exposures along the creek, but try as we might Jeff and I found little but nails. Jeff was using a Fisher Gold Bug 2 while I was using my new Minelab SD2200D. We finally caught up to my father in the area where he had found the nugget the day before.

Bedrock was exposed in the middle of the floodplain along one stretch, and this is where the 3.1 dwt. nugget had been found. We started detecting in the area and finding some small nuggets. Finally I looked across the creek and saw some bedrock exposed along the bank. I decided to cross over and give it a try.

I did a little scanning, and after a short while I got a strong signal. It sounded big enough to be a nail, so I had no big expectations. Imagine my surprise when an 8 pennyweight nugget popped out of the ground! It was the largest nugget I had ever found in this area, and I just stared at it a bit before I picked it up. There are few things in life as fun as finding a nice nugget with a metal detector, as far as I am concerned!!

Steve points to where 8 dwt nugget was found with Minelab SD2200D

Well, a lot of activity ensued along that bank, and a few more nuggets were found, but I had found the big one. We finally wandered back towards camp, and got caught got in a torrential downpour at the mouth of Little Eldorado Creek. We hid out under a rock ledge for awhile, and the rain let up. We then proceeded up to our old detecting grounds on some high bench deposits above Bonanza Creek.

The old miners found that there was a lot of gold in old stream deposits well above the current stream level of Bonanza Creek. These type of gold deposits well above the current creek level are referred to as "bench deposits". They built a ditch and flume system several thousand feet long to bring water from the upper creek to deposits on the valley wall farther downstream. Lumber had to be made from trees miles away, then transported into this high mountain location and assembled into a water transportation system crossing valleys and cliffs. The remnants of this old water transport system are truly awe-inspiring, and are something I dwell upon every time I visit this locale.

Once the water reached the high gold deposits, it was directed through large nozzles (giants) to wash the gravels into sluice boxes. Large areas of the hillside were stripped completely to bedrock, and much coarse gold was recovered. Today acres of bare bedrock exposed by these old mining operations exist well above the creek, and represent a perfect opportunity for the new age metal detector user.

Gold was lost in these old washing operations. As material was washed with the nozzles down the hill to sluice box recovery systems, an occasional nugget would get stuck in a crevice in the bedrock. These nuggets were few and far between, and without the aid of modern electronic detectors it would have been very hard to find these few lost nuggets. The old miner would literally had to have split open and scraped out every crevice to find the lost gold.

Metal detectors allow the modern day prospector to easily scan the old workings to find the scattered lost nuggets with ease. Jeff, my father, and I spread out and started looking for these lost nuggets. The main problem was that my family and I had already scanned the area and found the easy pickings in previous years. Still, with diligence one can always find more gold. My particular hope was that my new Minelab would find gold I had previously missed.

Well, we didn't miss much! I found a few nice pieces in nooks and crannies, but nothing outrageous. Jeff was finding some smaller nuggets with his Fisher Gold Bug 2, but no larger nuggets. He was able to hit lots of smaller nuggets that my SD2200D missed, but my larger nuggets were more what he was looking for.

We did locate an area literally in the ATV trail that was producing lots of little nuggets. So many, in fact, that my father and I decided to set up a sluice box and process the gravel rather than metal detect.

Bud Herschbach shoveling gold bearing dirt along edge of trail

The morning of the last day was nice and sunny. Dad and I went ahead and set up our sluicing operation. Jeff decided to keep metal detecting. We filled buckets with gravel and ran them through the sluice box. The material was incredibly rich, with more gold appearing in the sluice box after every bucket of material was run.

We grew tired of shoveling, and decided to clean up the sluice. Processing less than a yard of gravel produced nearly two ounces of gold! It just goes to show how rich some of the material was that the old miners were after. There is still gold where we were digging. Someday we will have to go back and get some more.

In summary, I was very happy with the Minelab SD2200D. It operated on this difficult ground very smoothly, ignoring the hot rocks and ground entirely. I ended up with some nice nuggets, including an 8 dwt piece. It's the largest one in the picture below. I only wish I had had more time, as we were cramming a lot of activity into three days. There is a lot of deeper ground here I need to search.

The second largest nugget, weighing 3.5 dwt, was found by my father with his Tesoro Lobo SuperTRAQ. It is the quartzy piece in the picture. All the other 1/2 dwt to 1 dwt pieces were found with my SD.

Jeff was using his Fisher Gold Bug 2. He found a lot of smaller nuggets, but was frustrated in not even finding a 1 dwt nugget. He is usually very hot with a detector, so I attribute this to simple bad luck more than anything.

Steve with gold found running sluice box, and some detected nuggets (largest 8 dwt)

My main feeling about the SD was not that it got overwhelmingly exceptional depth as compared to the VLF units, but that it was so much easier to operate in hot ground that more time could be spent simply covering ground. The VLF's require slow, careful work due to the background noise, which simply slows you down. Actually, I ended up impressed by what a good job we had done on previous trips with the VLF machines, as large swaths of ground that once produced many nuggets now seem completely cleaned out.

All in all a very nice trip, with about three ounces of gold found. Hopefully we will return someday soon!

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

My father, two friends, and I flew northwest to the Interior Alaska town of McGrath Friday morning. I have permission to hunt several creeks in the area, but have had a hard time getting there the last couple summers. Bad weather or scheduling has kept me away. Everything finally came together this year, so off we went. My father is a classic Alaska bush pilot with a Cessna 206, so I'm luckier than most when it comes to access.

The destination for this trip was Ganes Creek, owned by Doug Clark and Dan Wiltz. Ganes Creek has produced over 250,000 ounces of gold, and some of the largest gold nuggets ever found in Alaska. Some very large nuggets have been found here with metal detectors, and I have wanted to visit the creek for years. After reaching the mine and settling in, Doug pointed us to some old tailing piles. A friend of his, who knew little of detecting, had found a half-ounce nugget in the vicinity, so it seemed a good place to start.

I had brought my Minelab SD2200D along, but found the ground to have low mineralization. Bedrock around McGrath is mainly slate/shale. There are lots of igneous cobbles in the overburden, but nothing real hot. Easy detecting ground. The main problem with the tailings was lots of iron trash. I decided to give my Fisher Gold Bug 2 with 14'' coil a try. Since we were hoping for large nuggets, I put it in Iron ID mode, which I normally have not used before. I did find that the machine chattered a lot until I turned the threshold knob down. It appears the threshold control does affect the machine in the iron id mode, although you cannot actually hear the threshold.

Tailing Piles Along Ganes Creek

Everyone else was using the Tesoro Lobo SuperTRAQ, all outfitted with the 11'' DD coil. Again, due to iron trash, they all ran the discriminate mode instead of all-metal. The Lobo is one of the rare nugget detectors with a full range discriminator. This proved valuable this trip. The control is adjustable, and it is very important that it be set no higher than needed to tune out nails and other small iron items. We ended up finding all the nuggets on this trip while employing iron discrimination.

Our theory was simple. There were large nuggets in the area, and we wanted them. Tuning up for the little ones was not the idea. In fact, no one wanted to waste time trying to recover small nuggets and digging lots of worthless iron trash would definitely be a waste of time.

I started chasing gold in the early seventies. I've dredged and detected all over Alaska, but spent most of my time in areas where large nuggets are rare. I've always wanted to find a big one, something over an ounce, but it has eluded me. I have made numerous detecting trips to large nugget locales, and detected literally pounds of gold over the years. I have no problem finding 5-7 pennyweight nuggets, but nothing larger has come my way.

I finally dredged a .98 ounce nugget in 1998 at Crow Creek Mine, but even then felt like I had not really done it. .98 ounce is close enough to generally say I found a 1 ounce nugget, and I do. But I still did not feel I had hit the big one. So I went ahead and decided to back off on spending so much time dredging, to spend the time chasing hot areas to detect for large gold.

A trip to the Wrangell Mountains last year netted me an 8 dwt nugget, my largest with a detector. Then off to the Fortymile last fall. That expedition turned up a 3/4 ounce nugget. Things were looking up. So this adventure was a part of my new game plan. Big nuggets the goal... heck with the little ones!

Bud, Steve, Brian, and Jeff

My father is always game to go mining, but does not have my passion or patience for it. I bought him a Lobo last year, as the automatic ground balance is right up his alley. The machine is very forgiving. Still, he has sloppy habits, mainly a very poor swing. He is only near the ground directly in front of his feet. I've tried to get him to do better, to no avail. We've searched lots of tailing piles before, with little success. We all start detecting, and in less than 15 minutes Dad gets a beep and kicks the ground. In a very surprised voice, he exclaims, ''I'll be damned... I found a gold nugget!'' There lay a nice 13.1 dwt piece, his largest ever.

That got us fired up!. It was the end of the day, but in short order I found a 7.5 dwt nugget, a 1.1 dwt nugget, and .7 dwt nugget. Jeff hit a 2.6 dwt piece.

We got some sleep, figuring to strike it rich the second day. But it was not as hot as we had thought. About noon I finally found a quartzy 14 dwt nugget. Since these are nuggets lost by the original operations, many of them have lots of quartz. The nuggets with higher gold content were generally caught. I found a 1.8 dwt, and Jeff hit a 1.3 dwt piece, but nobody else had any luck by 2PM.

It was sunny and about 90 degrees. We are not used to such temperatures in Alaska, and everyone of us was suffering. Dad, Brian, and Jeff rolled up and announced it was time to head back to camp for a break. ''Leave me here; I want to keep hunting'' was my reply. Jeff decided to keep hunting. Dad and Brian gave in and decided to stay, but sat down to rest. Jeff and I hit the tailings again, and in maybe 20 minutes Jeff found a nice solid 17 dwt nugget. This rejuvenated the troops and the hunt was back on!

Jeff With 17 dwt Nugget Found With Tesoro Lobo

We wandered down back trails through the tailing piles, and Jeff finds another 5.6 dwt nugget. Some time later we were detecting some tailings next to the creek, and I hit a nice 15 dwt piece. Jeff and I are pretty happy at this point, but Dad and Brian had no gold for the day. Brian had not found any gold at all yet, and this can be very hard on someone relatively new to nugget detecting. It was nothing but bad luck, as he basically was doing everything right. He simply had not put the coil over a nugget yet.

After dinner Brian, Jeff, and I headed for the tailings off the end of the runway. After less than an hour, the mosquitoes were bothering me enough that I headed back out to the runway. Nobody was in sight, so I wandered down the shoulder of the runway swinging my detector. The runway is made out of flattened tailings, so I figured it was worth a shot. Besides, there were fewer mosquitoes in the open! One hundred feet down the runway I get a beep and a 1.7 dwt quartz pebble with a couple chunks of gold in it. I met Brian and Jeff back at camp; they had found no gold. My father returned from exploring up the creek. He also found no gold.

Steve With 14 dwt Nugget Found With Gold Bug 2

The third and final full day started with rain. We did some exploring upstream, but with no success. The mosquitoes were out in force, so Jeff and I donned headnets and searched more tailing piles. Dad explored up a side creek, while Brian indicated he wanted to search in the camp vicinity.

The rain let up, but not the mosquitoes. They liked the cooler, damper conditions. Jeff and I searched tailings without luck for some time. We finally wandered back to the runway. Jeff finally picked up a couple nuggets on the runway shoulder near where I found the one the day before. I then hit a nice one also.

Jeff was hot to get with it, but I convinced him we should go find our partners and tell them about the new finds. I was anxious for Brian to find a nugget. As we got to camp, up wanders Brian with a big grin. He had obviously found gold. A beautiful 7.8 dwt nugget that everyone agreed was the best looking nugget found. Solid gold with just a spot of quartz, and a bit of twisted wire appearance. The find really raised Brian's spirits, and he was raring to go now.

Brian's 7.8 dwt Gold Nugget

My father was way up a side creek exploring, so we hooked up with the Doug and his crew and did a little instructional detecting. They were getting the idea that maybe these things were good for something after all. My father wandered up as the group headed up the creek. He said he was too tired to go with us, but when I mentioned we had found some nuggets on the end of the runway, he decided to head that way. Jeff could hardly stand it, but we wanted to spend the time with the miners in appreciation of the opportunity they had given us.

We finally explained we wanted to go try the end of the runway, and headed that way. We asked Dad how he had done. He says, ''Well, I found one. It's ugly, but kind of heavy. Maybe it weighs an ounce''. He pulls a palm-sized nugget out of his pocket. Our eyes grew wide and we explained to him that the nugget was at least 2-3 ounces. It had a lot of quartz, so it was hard to tell. It turned out to weigh 3.5 ounce. Unfortunately, it appeared to have been run over by a bulldozer. One edge was a clean break with ragged edges of gold hanging out. It is hard to tell, but I'm guessing it is one half of a 7 ounce nugget.

Bud excavating a target - is it a bullet or a gold nugget?

  
Gold nuggets Bud found with Tesoro Lobo ST at Ganes Creek

We figured the other half was waiting to be found. It was also our last full day, as we were flying back around noon the next day, so we detected late into the evening. All told, we found about 15 nuggets in the runway material, mostly in one area. Brian found a second nugget weighing 2.4 dwt. I ended up with five nice nuggets ranging from 1.3 to 7.5 dwt. Jeff found six from .9 to 4.5 dwt. But we did not find the other half of that big nugget.

It was late, so off to bed. Everyone had gold; Brian’s was the biggest he had ever found, Jeff’s was his largest, and my father had hit the jackpot. I was happy, but my largest nugget was a tie for the one I detected in the Fortymile, and still not larger than that .98 ounce nugget I had dredged. Jeff was also been hoping for something over an ounce, but at this point time was running out.

I slept poorly that night, waking constantly. I woke a 4AM, and after an hour awake decided to get up. It was light (all night this time of year) and time passes slowly staring at the ceiling. I figured I might as well do a little detecting while I waited for everyone else to get up around 7AM.

I wandered off up the creek, mainly wanting to get far enough away so as not to disturb anyone. I went to the first big tailing pile I came to, and covered it pretty well. Nothing at all. So I wandered up the road a bit, and came to a wide set of tailings that appeared to have been pushed up in a pile by a bulldozer. From the looks of it a sluice had been set up, and the bulldozer was pushing tailings to one side.

I started scanning along, and near the top of the pile got a strong signal. I dug it up, and peeking out of the soil lay a little gold potato! I gazed at it in disbelief, and picked it up. It was caked in dark soil, but I knew I had finally found the big one I had been looking for all these years!

  
4.95 ounce nugget found by Steve at Ganes Creek

It was still only about 6AM, so I looked an hour longer. I did find another 2.9 dwt nugget a few feet away, but that seemed to be it for this pile of dirt. About 7AM I headed back to camp. Dad and Brian were up, but Jeff was still snoozing away. We got him up, and I did show and tell with the nugget. After washing it up, it came up at 4.95 ounces on the scale. Literally the find of a lifetime, as no other nugget will mean as much to me as this one does.

I showed the guys where I had found the nugget, took some photos, and started packing up to leave. I decided I was perfectly content to kick back and relax. The rest of my crew searched my magic tailing pile for a while, but did not find anything. Maybe my find was luckier than I know. In any case, they headed back to the end of the airstrip to search, but only Jeff found a nugget, 1.5 dwt and the last of the trip.

Time to go home, so we packed up and flew back to Anchorage. I’m back to work now, and it is hard to believe I found that nugget just yesterday morning. In retrospect, what was so wild about the whole thing was that I had essentially given up on finding the big one this trip as we were basically out of time. Talk about the early bird catching the worm!

I found every nugget but one with my Gold Bug 2 set in Iron ID mode. It ignored most trash except for old rusted cans and larger steel items, such as oversized bolts. I dug a pocketful of bullets and shell casings, but they were not so common as to be annoying. I did run my batteries dead at one point, and spares were at camp, so I fired up the SD2200D and found one nugget with it. A nice 1/4 oz nugget at about a foot. But I soon grew frustrated digging trash, sometimes at extreme depth. I have been getting pretty good at reading targets with the SD, but it is nowhere near as good at discrimination as other detectors. I was happy to put new batteries in the Bug and get back to using it.

18.5 Ounces of Nuggets Detected Ganes Creek, Alaska

For the low mineral ground we were in, and the desired goal... pennyweight plus nuggets, any good discriminating detector will do the job. My Gold Bug 2 worked well and the Lobo did a great job for the other guys, and is a hard machine to beat for all-around detecting. But all in all, the name of the game on this trip was ''keep your coil low, and keep it moving''!

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2001 Herschbach Enterprises

My new mining strategy is to concentrate on adventure and seeing new places, instead of just revisiting old locales to get more gold. This trip is the first test of this emphasis on chasing large gold in new locales. The first step is to research locations where large gold nuggets have been found in the past. This is fairly easy, and involves nothing more than reading lots of old mining reports. The best place to look for large gold nuggets is where they have been found in the past. The next step is getting access to those locations.

It should come as no surprise that the kinds of locations that have produced many large gold nuggets in years past are most likely claimed by somebody. Rich mining ground is hard to come by, and the proven producers of yesteryear are obvious to anyone who wants to take the time to research them. Many of these areas are not only claimed, but have been for generations, with the claims passing from father to son. There are many second and even third generation mining operations in Alaska.

In those cases where the claims have not stayed in a family's name, they have most likely been sold to someone else when the miner was ready to move on. Good ground is valuable, and a miner usually does not just walk away from it. He finds a buyer and sells it. The chances of finding good nugget locales in Alaska that are not claimed are slim. If they are not, it is most likely because the ground is now in a park, and therefore subject to restrictions on mining. Denali National Park has some good nugget creeks that are no longer claimed, but since they are in a National Park even metal detecting is restricted. Other creeks are now on Native lands, which are private property and require permission from the applicable Native corporation to visit.

Bucket line dredge on Wade Creek, Alaska

My mining buddy Jeff made the acquaintance of a miner in the Fortymile region of Alaska, and after a couple years of quietly asking had finally received permission for us to visit the claims. The Fortymile area is named after the main river in the area, the Fortymile River. The Fortymile district is really just the U.S. side of the famous Klondike goldfields of Canada. It is one of the earliest areas to see mining activity in Alaska, with gold rushes in the 1880's. Jeff and I also know several other miners in the area, and so we made plans to visit the area and see what we could find.

Jeff drove his camper, while I followed pulling a trailer behind my truck. We brought along a new Bombardier Traxter XT ATV and a little dirt bike. We had no set plan as to where we were going, so we wanted to be prepared for any eventuality. Our first goal was a creek where a miner I knew was running a small bulldozer operation. If that did not work out, we had a couple alternative creeks lined up to visit. This was to be real exploring at it's best.

It is about an eight hour drive from Anchorage to Chicken, Alaska. The drive was uneventful, if a little long. It was exciting to be seeing country I had not seen in many years. My business partner Dudley and I had mined in the Fortymile back in the 1970's, so I have been this way before. The roads have improved a lot since then, I can assure you.

When we got to Chicken we stopped at the Chicken General Store and visited awhile. We got a few clues as to locations we might want to visit, and where to find the miners on a couple creeks. Chicken has a long mining history and is still being mined today. The major landmark in the area is a very large bucketline dredge still sitting where it stopped just a short way off the road as you leave Chicken. You can visit the dredge by stopping by the Chicken Gold Camp.

We drove north up Jack Wade Creek and headed for our first destination. The creek we were heading for was on a small side road that wound down a narrow valley. Jeff and I had never been here before, and so were only vaguely aware of where we were heading. We pulled into one mining camp and talked a bit. The folks pointed us down the valley, and we continued on. We then came to a second mining camp, and stopped to visit.

Fall Colors in the Fortymile Area

We knew the miners by chance... it seems I've met most of the guys over the years at work or prospecting. We chatted a bit, and they told us that there was some pretty high water where we were headed. I was leery of making a high water crossing in my Chevy Blazer, as I had blown up the transmission last summer crossing Mills Creek in high water. The transmission is vented directly on top, and water going over the top can get in and cause damage.

We decided to turn back and head for Jack Wade Creek. Jack Wade has a good mining history, and parallels the road for some distance. Some of the largest nuggets ever found in Alaska had been found here in the past. We did not know the miners on the creek, but had been told where to look for them. Night was starting to fall as we got back to Jack Wade, so we camped for the night.

The next morning dawned clear and beautiful. The fall colors were showing, making for a spectacular sunrise. We drove up and down the creek looking for the miners. The camp we had been told to find them at was deserted, and so we decided to poke around the old bucketline dredge. We had been told it was ok to look for gold there, but I'm not sure if this is true. Still, we wanted to find something, and finally turned up a few smoothly rounded nuggets on bedrock above the creek. The location showed signs of being thoroughly mined, however, and did not hold out much hope of finding much gold.

We stopped by the miners camp one last time, but they still were not there. The day was wearing on, an so we decided we had better head for one of our other alternative destinations. We had two creeks in mind, and both would require going overland for quite a few miles. We mulled it over for awhile, and decided to go on in and visit one of the creeks and see how it looked before the day wore completely out. Jeff put most of our gear on the Traxter, and I followed him in on my little dirt bike.

Jeff on Bombardier Traxter XT

The ride was easy for Jeff, but exciting for me. The little bike scooted along all right, but it was white knuckle riding to keep it on the ridges between the mud holes. I have not done much riding on motorcycles, and was kind of proud that I managed to not completely wipe out. We finally pulled into the mining camp that afternoon, and let the miners know we had arrived. They invited us to stay with them and put us up in their cabin. It seemed we had finally found somewhere to search for gold!

There was some time left before the sun went down, so Jeff got out his Tesoro Lobo SuperTRAQ and I fired up my Minelab SD2200D. The ground in the Fortymile area is fairly mineralized, and low frequency machines with automatic ground balance perform more smoothly than high frequency detectors like the White's Goldmasters. There are lots of false signal on mineralized "hot rocks". The Minelab SD detectors excel under these kinds of conditions.

There was some bedrock exposed along the valley wall just below the miner's cabin, so we started looking there. We started find a few nuggets almost immediately! The nuggets were thick and worn very smooth, as is much of the gold in the Fortymile area. The gold has rolled around in streams for eons, and has very little quartz left in it. The day was drawing to a close, however, so we called it a night. We were excited to see what the next day would bring.

The next day dawned under clear fall skies. We offered to show the miner what we could do with our detectors by running them in his mining cut, and offered to give him any gold we found. We just wanted to be able to dig some nice nuggets, and realized this is how the miners make their living. It would also give us a chance to learn more about the mining operation and how the gold was deposited in the creek.

This operation is using a bulldozer and a couple track hoes to strip the overburden to bedrock. The gold is concentrated entirely on the bedrock, with little in the overburden, so the overburden is stacked to one side. The bedrock is completely decomposed and much darker than the overlying material, so it is easy to tell where the gold begins. Several feet of the decomposed bedrock is scooped up and run through a recovery plant. Tailings are run into areas previously mined, and the stockpiled overburden is then pushed over areas once mining is complete.

These kind of modern mining operations are more environmentally friendly, leaving gently rolling hills and ponds in their wake, but they are not very good for metal detector operators. Old mines where the workings were left open have much more potential for finding lost nuggets, but the newer mines cover up the holes as they go, so there is little chance of finding gold at many of the newer mining operations. But since we had permission to look in the current mining cuts, we were almost sure to find gold.

And so we did, with nuggets turning up right and left as we detected the bottom and sides of the excavation. The miner watched with great interest, since any nuggets we found along the edges of the excavation indicated he might have to widen the hole to reach gold outside the current edges. The miner did have a Fisher Gold Bug that he personally uses for just that, and he has found it to be an important testing tool in his operations.

Mining operation in progress

We found a couple of ounces of gold, the largest being a 3/4 ounce piece I found that was shaped like one of those elongated fishing sinkers. It was great fun, but we had been hoping to find something larger. The miners have found quite a few nuggets weighing several ounces in the past, but the current cut was in what they called "smaller gold". Considering that all of the nuggets we found weighed several pennyweight each, I'd take that kind of small gold any day!

Still, while this was great fun, we wanted to find some gold of our own. Jeff and I headed for some of the old high bench workings, and the miners told us we could keep any of the gold we found in the old mining areas. Benches are remnants of old stream locations now perched high and dry above the current creek level. Once the water was flowing over these locations, but as the stream erodes downward it eventually leaves portions of the old streambed deposits above the creek. Sometimes these deposits can be hundreds or even thousands of feet from the modern stream.

Steve with Minelab SD2200D and gold just found

We hit an old area far above the creek. I seemed to have the edge over Jeff, as my Minelab SD2200D was outfitted with the Coiltek 14" mono coil, whereas his Tesoro Lobo had the 11" DD coil. The extra coil size and the ability of the SD2200D to ignore mineralized ground seemed to give me that little bit of extra depth required to hit nuggets that the Tesoro was missing. In short order I found about an ounce of nice chunky nuggets. Jeff was only finding a couple of pieces.

The area started to play out, so we headed down the creek to some other bench deposits. Jeff's fortunes improved, and he started finding more nuggets. One stretch of bare bedrock extended up steeply from the creek up the valley wall. Since this was nearly bare bedrock, we switched to smaller search coils. It was slim pickings, but we both found a few nuggets. Jeff was working at the top of the exposure right where it was going into the trees, when he yelled down at me.

Steve's Nuggets - Just over 1.5 Ounces

I walked up, and Jeff had a big grin on his face. The day was about over, but Jeff had found a nice 1/2 ounce nugget to make up for my finding the majority of the nuggets earlier. It turned out to be the largest "keeper" of the trip. We did a little more hunting, but finally turned in for the evening. We spent the night, then rose the next morning and headed back for town. Jeff ended up with over an ounce of gold, including that nice 1/2 ounce nugget. I had 1.5 ounces of chunky gold to take home, but my largest keeper weighed 3.5 pennyweight, so Jeff had me beat for big nugget bragging rights. The miners invited us back next summer, so we will have another chance to look for large gold nuggets here someday.

For more information on the Fortymile Mining District, get Gold Placers of the Historical Fortymile River Region by Warren Yeend

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

I particularly enjoyed this little expedition. It is always nice to get out and spend time with my father, Bud Herschbach. He has taken a liking to Mills Creek and was anxious to return and look for more nuggets. This was also helpful since my truck was out of commission and he was able to give me a ride to the claims. He picked me up Tuesday morning and we headed for the claims. The drive down the Seward Highway was brightened by exceptional fall colors, with the leaves hanging on the trees a little longer than normal this year.

A little note here on trucks and water. The shop informed me that my transmission was full of water and that the bearings were shot! I was not aware that transmissions were vented on top of the body of the unit. On many 4WD vehicles it is routed via a hose to a higher location in the body to prevent the entry of water. The Chevy S10 Blazer has no such extension on the vent, and so any water rising to the top of the transmission can enter and destroy the bearings. I have no doubt that when I stalled my truck out crossing Mills and had water flowing under the doors that it was also flowing into my transmission. An expensive lesson for me, and a warning to others who drive in deep water. Find out where the vents are on your transmission and differentials! If I had been aware of this problem and changed the transmission fluid immediately I could have prevented the damage.

When we arrived at camp we moved our gear into the tent and then went down to the creek to metal detect for gold. The water had dropped some more, so bedrock exposures were easy to come by along the edges of the creek. We spent the remainder of the day removing loose rock and debris from the bedrock and carefully detecting the crevices. The work produced numerous small nuggets up until the light began to fail, and we headed back into camp.

Fall colors along Turnagain Arm

I decided to spend Wednesday dredging, as I needed to decide whether to try and continue at Mills or to pull out and head for Crow Creek. I worked the shallow bedrock area I had exposed earlier while my father continued to metal detect for nuggets. I attacked the material aggressively, determined to give it a good shot a producing. However, after uncovering a wide expanse of bedrock I found nothing more than the same scattering of gold trapped in small crevices. There were no large nuggets and not even any nice little pockets of gold to perk me up, just tedious crevice work for a bit of gold here and there. Finally, even that seemed to peter out, and towards the end of the day I was not finding much gold at all.

I have no doubt the gold continues in this area but after pausing and considering the situation I decided to come back for the gold next season. I had about 7.5 dwt for the work so far that day, and could probably have ended up with about 1/2 oz for the day if I continued to dredge. BUT...  my father had to return to town the next day, my truck was in the shop, and I was not sure when I would get it back, and serious snow could fall at any time. Everyone else had already pulled out of our claims for the season. I decided the amount of gold I was seeing was not worth pushing the season any further under the circumstances.

1/3 oz gold dredged Thursday

We got up Thursday morning and proceeded to load up the dredge and tear down the camp. We spotted a good-sized black bear cavorting around at the very edge of the brushline up the mountain. It is the first bear I have actually seen at Mills Creek, and he had managed to evade the bear hunters that were in the area the last few weeks. I am often asked what I do about bears. It seems to be a serious concern for a lot of people. In general, I do nothing other than keep a very clean campsite. The statistics do not support everyone carrying weapons because of bears. More people are shot accidentally in the woods than are eaten by bears. It makes more sense to be afraid of people, and the bears know this. They will give you a wide berth if given the chance.

That being said, I sometimes carry a 12 gauge pump shotgun. This is usually when I am alone in the woods, and it is basically a security blanket issue. Here I am over forty years old, but when I am alone in the middle of nowhere in the dark, and I start hearing funny noises in the woods, well, let's just say I rest easier having my shotgun nearby. But realistically, in this part of Alaska bears are not usually a real threat. There are other parts of the State where they are thick, and encounters can be a daily event, and it may warrant having a weapon in those areas.

Packing up the campsite

We finally got everything loaded up, and decided we had enough time to do a little more metal detecting. Dad had found a few more nuggets on Wednesday and we decided to try the last area he had been working in. We immediately began to get some nuggets. I tackled an area where the material was a little deeper and the bedrock dipped below the surface of the water. I started getting some nuggets, and so Dad started helping me work the hole. It kept filling with water, so we would scoop out the water with a pan, then detect a nugget or two before it filled with water again. After getting a very strong signal, we were both on our knees peering into the hole as I scooped water out. Suddenly, as the water washed back after a scoop, a large nugget appeared on the side of the hole! It looked like a monster, and I swore it was a 1/2 oz nugget at the time, solid and thick. It turned out later to be 5.4 dwt, just over 1/4 oz, and still a very nice nugget. I have to tell you, I sure get a thrill when a nugget like this shows up! It makes it even better that I shared finding it with my father.

We ended up with about 1/2 oz of gold from that one small hole in bedrock in about an hour. The pocket worked out, however, and we had to leave, as I wanted to drop my dredge off at Crow Creek as we headed back towards town. We gathered up our tools, and did just that. There was no sign of Jeff at Crow Creek, so we dropped the dredge off in the upper area of the creek and headed for town.

Bud Herschbach with his detected nuggets (including the big one!)

Steve's detected nuggets, plus the 1/4 oz nugget

All in all, a very nice trip. The weather was fine, it's always fun to get out with family, and we found some very nice gold. The plan now is to try my luck at Crow Creek, which is closer to home, and has less problem with being snowed out without warning. I'll hook up with Jeff Reed, and we'll finally get to do some dredging together.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 1999 Herschbach Enterprises

August is the month when I think about prospecting in the high country. The snow has usually melted out of the upper elevations about as far as it is going to. The days will be getting cooler by September, and by the end of September fresh snow will be falling.

I've always dreamed of finding my own vein of gold. You know, that big quartz vein with the seams of gold laced through it! I've spent almost no time actually looking for that dreamed of vein, however. Genuine prospecting takes extreme amounts of time and real dedication on the part of the prospector. It's also a real long-shot. I've known several old prospectors who spent their entire lives looking for the big strike without finding it.

So I've always concentrated on mining gold as opposed to prospecting for it. Prospecting is looking for something that has not been found yet. Mining is getting it out of the ground once it's been found. I've concentrated on known producing locations because I've always had limited amounts of time to spend.

The thought of genuine prospecting is never far from my mind, however, and I have been working towards several projects. The secret of successful prospecting is to put the odds as much in your favor as possible. Simply wandering around in the hills is a true waste of time for all but the most lucky of prospectors. Luck is great, but helping it along with knowledge is a very good idea.

First, you need a goal, one that is realistically possible. One particular interest of mine has been the application of metal detectors in prospecting for lode (hardrock) gold and other conductive metals. There is plenty of gold in Alaska, so the thought of finding it is realistic. The old timers were quite good at what they did, but Alaska is large and there remain many areas that need further prospecting. And since the old-timers did not have electronic prospecting at their disposal, new methods might reveal deposits that might otherwise have been overlooked.

Views in Hatcher Pass, Alaska (Willow Creek Mining District)

Spending time getting proficient with metal detectors and other tools of the trade is high on the list of things a person needs to do to be successful. I've been doing just that for many years, and learning about the latest technology keeps me busy. It's a bad idea to get too comfortable with a particular way of doing things when it comes to technology. Advances are constantly made that make old ways of doing things obsolete. Keeping up with the latest detectors and how they work seems like a full-time job.

Second, lots of reading. The books about detecting are important to my particular requirements, but of more general use are books about lode deposits and how they are formed. Certain rock types are associated with gold lodes, and learning what these rocks are and how to identify them is very important. Narrowing down the search by studying up on known mining districts will help the most. If you are going to look for gold or other minerals, putting yourself in a region where they have found before raises your odds tremendously. You already know the area has the right geology, so the goal is to find deposits that have been overlooked so far.

And third, the subject of this story. I believe making exploratory trips to examine known deposits to be one of the best learning tools available. Actually getting in the area of new or old mines, looking at the ground, and looking at the deposits themselves really helps translate all the book knowledge into reality. I like to look at a mine and try and figure out ''why did they decide to dig here''? It also gives me a chance to try out my detectors to find how they will work with real ore samples, and what kind of problems I might face.

I called my friend Ben and asked if he was interested in going up to Hatcher Pass north of Anchorage to detect for lode gold. He was all for it, and had an old White's Goldmaster II, so we met up and headed for the hills. The skies were overcast but the clouds were high, so it looked like weather would be no problem. And in fact, the weather improved later in the day.

Old mine portal (caved in) and rail system for dumping waste material

We hiked up to the vicinity of some old mines, keeping our eyes open for quartz. The gold at Hatcher Pass is pretty classic stuff, with slightly rusty quartz being what you are looking for. We found some small test pits, and I showed Ben my method for checking quartz samples.

I tend to cheat while scanning quartz float for gold. Float is quartz that has traveled, or ''floated'' away from the original vein. In many cases you may be dealing with sub-grain particles of gold scattered through the quartz. The ground conditions around hardrock mines are usually not the best for working the detectors at high gain/sensitivity settings.

So I run the smallest coil for the detector, then jack all the settings full up. I pick up the quartz samples and rotate them around on the bottom of the upside down coil. This takes a bit of practice with the Fisher Gold Bug 2 or White's Goldmasters as you must keep your hand away from the coil. But I've found I can extend my fingers and roll the suspect quartz around on the coil. Some of the gold enclosed is so small that if the quartz chunk is more than a couple inches thick you cannot detect it. So rotating it around to expose all sides is important.

Now the trick here is that most any nugget detector will work. But the more sensitive the unit is to small gold, the better the chances on less rich ore. From my personal use I give the Fisher Gold Bug 2 with small 6.5'' coil the nod. The Goldmasters follow-up, mainly because you are stuck with the 10'' coil. I have not tried the Sierra Hot Foot out for this use, but it may be the ticket for the Goldmaster for scanning quartz samples.

The Tesoro Lobo ST with small coil is surprisingly hot when used like this, since you can run the sensitivity up into the red zone on the dial. The 3x7 concentric is quite sensitive for a machine running at 17.5 kHz. So it might also be a detector to try for this purpose.

Like everything in gold it all depends on what you have for potential targets. For Hatcher Pass, the quartz is relatively pure with enclosed gold. There are some conductive sulphides, but they tend to be with gold also, so no problem detecting them. The gold tends to be small, although rich pieces exist. But the more sensitive the detector is to small gold, the better luck you will have. Rich ore with larger gold will be no problem for most detectors.

I recommend anyone considering this method air test their detector with 1 grain or smaller pieces of gold. If you cannot get significant depth on a 1 grain piece of gold then weaker ore will be hard to find. Air testing is valid as I am suggesting you hand manipulate the samples.

Now notice I'm not saying any model of detector will not work. I really am not a brand name guy... I'm just reporting what has worked for me. The smart thing to do is test your machine and see if it will do the job. If it works, great! Bench testing will save a lot of field time in this particular area.

A side note here. Yes, I have a Falcon Gold Probe. And yes, it is hot as can be on tiny gold. But it really only scans a 1'' wide area at best, and so is not very practical for examining volumes of rock. I use it once I get my or samples home to pinpoint the gold so precisely that I can run my little rock saw through the right spot to get good cross sections showing gold.

Ben detecting hillside below old mine

We started finding and scanning quartz as we wandered up the hill towards the old mines. I finally found some quartz that gave a signal, and saw a bit of gold in the piece. In the pack it went. More patient work revealed more pieces of ore for my backpack.

Ben seemed to be having a hard time with his detector. It appeared to have a short in the wiring somewhere. But beyond that, much of the gold I was detecting was just slightly too small for him to get a good signal with the Goldmaster. The Gold Bug 2 has a definite edge with it's small coil. This did not surprise me, as I have used the Goldmaster units for this before, and had migrated to the Gold Bug 2 to get that extra edge.

We finally got up to some old mine shafts and wandered around checking out the old portals and various remnants of the old mining operations. One thing that impressed me was the amount of rock that had rolled down off the mountain in the years since the mining took place. The upper slopes are obviously not very stable, and large rocks littered the old mining sites.

We looked in a few old tunnels, but stayed out of them. It's never a good idea to go into these old mines. The safety standards of the day were minimal, and the supports, if any, have weakened over the years. It's not worth your life to chase a few ore samples inside these old mines. We did find a few more pieces of gold bearing quartz around the old portals.

The day was getting late and so we finally decided to head back to my truck. I had a dozen good ore samples to show, and once again was very happy with my Gold Bug 2 for this kind of work. Ben also liked what he saw, and decided he would have to have one also.

Steve's gold ore samples from trip

Going down is much easier than going up, and we were back at the truck in no time. The weather had cleared considerably, and we enjoyed a nice drive back to town under sunny skis.

Please be aware that most of the hardrock mines in Hatcher Pass are patented properties. In other words, they are no longer just mining claims, but actually are private property. Few of the mines in the area are ''abandoned'' and permission should be sought from the mine owners to sample the mine dumps. Use extreme caution around the old mines, as many tunnels, shafts, and old structures present a hazard to the unwary.

See my previous story on Detecting for Lode Gold at Hatcher Pass for more information.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2001 Herschbach Enterprises

The problem with packing dredging equipment into a canyon is that someday you must pack it out again. I spent a good deal of Saturday and Sunday doing just that. The dredge had to be packed piece by piece up the creek to a log footbridge. There is a 100 foot climb up a rope above the footbridge, and then a short walk to the base of another steep hill. The distance is not too far, it is just kind of vertical! The photo above was taken during one of the previous weekends, so the snow is now gone. This kind of access is the main reason why I prefer the twin 5.5HP pumps on my dredge. I'd rather make two relatively easy trips, than one heavier and more dangerous trip with a large motor.

After retrieving most of the equipment, I wanted to get in some nugget detecting. I decided to try and find some new detecting sites, as the previous weekend proved the old sites are getting a bit lean on gold. I have had my best luck detecting at Crow Creek Mine by following the surface of the old hydraulic workings. The old miners used pipes to bring water from a considerable distance upstream. This water was directed through large nozzles (giants) which were used to wash vast amounts of material through the sluicing system. The mine is actually an artificial valley, about 250 feet deep, created by the old mining operations.

Looking down into Crow Creek canyon

As the water and material was washed into the sluice boxes, gold settled into the surface of the material below. Much of the old Crow Creek operation never reached bedrock; the gravels were washed in a v-shaped cut into the sluice boxes. When they stopped mining, much of the gold was left in depressions and pockets in the surface of the mining cuts.

A lot of this remaining virgin material, with its enriched surface layer of gold, can be found today, but it usually requires a bit of work. Worthless material caved onto much of the virgin ground, and later mining covered much in tailings. Finally, the area has grown a thick layer of brush, which obscures the terrain during most of the summer. Early spring is the best time to prospect for new sites at Crow Creek, before the lush vegetation sprouts up.

I chose to use a Fisher Gold Bug 2 on this trip. While this is an older manual tuning design I am familiar with it and in the hands of a person who knows how to tune it the Gold Bug 2 can hit some very small gold. I have no problem in low mineral ground finding tiny pieces weighing a tenth of a grain or less (480 grains per ounce). I spent some time prospecting the tops of some steep slopes, but only found a few buckshot. I proceeded upstream, when a small bank of brown gravel along a side gully caught my eye. The main gold-bearing material at Crow Creek is a clay-rich yellow-brown color that is easily distinguished from the washed gray tailings. The tailings material is also very loose, while the virgin material is very compact and can require a pick to loosen at times. The picture above shows the gray tailings on top of the brown virgin layer. The boundary, where the gray meets the brown, is most often a very productive layer.

Gray tailings over brown virgin material & small nugget on layer

The tailings tend to have a lot of iron and other trash, and not much gold, so I rake it away from the brown layer. The detector is used to carefully check the surface of the brown layer for nuggets. The nuggets are often found around rocks lodged in the surface of the brown material. A few more scrapes off the surface, and a double-check with the detector, and then more tailings must be removed. In some areas, the virgin material can be very rich, and so I always work into it a small distance to check. Many times it is unproductive compared to the rich boundary area, so I just follow the layer along.

The ground at Crow Creek has very little iron mineralization, and high frequency detectors like the Fisher Gold Bug 2 and White's Goldmasters really shine here. They can be used at full sensitivity levels with no problem, and it will hit incredibly small gold, even with the standard 10" elliptical coil, although to really get the edge go to the smaller 6" elliptical coils. After several hours of scraping and detecting with the Gold Bug 2 I came up with 28 nuggets. The area looks good for more, and you can bet I'll be back in the future!

Steve's nuggets for the day

The largest nugget, in the lower right hand corner, weighs 6 grains. The smallest is about 1/10th grain. The total weight is 41.7 grains, or 1.7 pennyweight. The number of nuggets is encouraging, but the small size is keeping the weight down. Still, a vast improvement over the last couple of weekends.

~ Steve Herschbach
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