Winter in Alaska. The days are short and the ground covered in snow. What is a miner to do? It is time to work on the permits.

Since we just acquired the Moore Creek property in 2003, the first order of business for 2004 was permitting. We have quite a few things to do before mining can commence, and so I decided to put in for a five year Annual Placer Miners Application for general exploration and facilities work.

There are several things we need to accomplish. First, the previous owner left one of our D9 bulldozers stuck about four miles out of camp in a mud hole. We need to get the bulldozer started up and get it unstuck. Since it is outside our claim block, we need a Miscellaneous Land Use Permit for Cross Country Travel to move it to the claims. Once we get the bulldozer into camp, we want to use it to lengthen our airstrip. This needs a plan and permitting. We also want to clear existing trails that have grown over with brush.

One thing some people do not understand is that structures on mining claims also need permitting, even if they already exist. We have several cabins on our claims. In these days of lawsuits, abandoned structures represent a liability to the government. Part of the permitting process includes getting a permit to have permanent structures. Things like fuel storage and outhouses must be covered.

Then there are the mining and prospecting activities. Our initial operations will be of a small-scale nature, but still they must be described in detail in the plan. The main thing on state land is that activities that disturb less than 5 acres do not require bonding. Any disturbance over 5 acres requires that bonding via the State Wide Bond Pool be obtained. Yearly reclamation reports must be filed for all work performed, even that under 5 acres. Suction dredges need an EPA permit, Corps of Engineers permitting, and possibly a fish habitat permit. Other agencies, like the Alaska Office of History and Archaeology must be notified to review your plan.

If this all sounds like a lot, you are right. Moreover, because there are so many agencies to notify, it would be easy to miss something and get in trouble. Luckily, in Alaska the state has a master permit in the form of the Annual Placer Miners Applications (APMA). This one master application is filled out and the state farms it out to most of the various state and federal agencies for approval. Various applications can be made for periods of up to ten years.

Aerial view of tailing piles and ponds at Moore Creek, Alaska

I filed for a “Multi-Year” Miscellaneous Land Use Permit and Reclamation Plan Approval for five years. There is a $100 fee for the first year, and $50 for the other four years, so the filing fees came to $300. This is a bargain considering all that is done for you in one application. You can find all the paperwork online at the Alaska State Division of Natural Resources (DNR) website. If you examine the forms you will note that they are designed to cover many different scenarios. Just fill out the applicable sections, and draw lines through areas that do not apply. Overall, it is not terribly difficult, and the process has the virtue of making you think through the entire process by asking some questions you may not have thought of.

Anyone thinking miners can just go out and tear up the earth without a second thought should read these things. You have to have a plan for filling every hole and ditch and a need a permit for just about everything except breathing the air.

Our main permitting covered moving the bulldozer into camp, getting the facilities and fuel storage covered, the use of suction dredges and highbankers for placer sampling, and possible pitting or trenching on the hardrock prospect. We also applied for the ability to upgrade the existing airstrip to make it safer, as it currently is a bit too short for continual safe access. It also is limiting the amount and size of equipment that can be flown in, as it is dangerous to attempt to fly in with anything larger than a Cessna 206. Safety is the main concern over time.

You might expect all these permits to take forever to be approved, and for operations that are more complicated, they can. However, our low level of initial activity made permitting easy, and the state of Alaska is doing a fantastic job of getting these things processed. I got the approved permitting back in less than 30 days. Huge kudos to the people at the Division of Mining, Land, and Water. Do remember, however, that it can take longer if you want to do something more complicated, so file well in advance.Overflight of D9 bulldozer stuck on hill The only real surprise I received was from the Alaska Office of History and Archaeology. I had proposed that as part of continuing operations that old pre-existing ditches and other remnants of mining be reclaimed and derelict old structures removed. I thought this would be a benefit in that we would in effect be "cleaning up" after the old miners. You can imagine my surprise when I got a letter notifying me that these old ditches might be historic, and that we should not disturb them. Funny how the ditch I dig today must be filled back in, but if the ditch is old enough, it now must be left alone!

The first order of business to consider was the bulldozer move. The overland permit stipulated that the move had to be made by May to take advantage of frozen ground conditions and snow cover. This meant that we must get to the bulldozer in the winter, which presented difficulties of its own. The bulldozer was stuck up to the top of the track on one side, and so would be frozen in and hard to get out. Combine that with the size of the unit, a D9, its age, mid-sixties, and our general lack of operating knowledge, and I came up with what I thought was a good solution. We offered to trade the dozer itself to a local miner on the condition he got it unstuck and did what runway and trail work we needed done before taking the unit off-site back to his own mine. In this way, I figured we avoided the difficulty of not only getting the unit into camp from its current location but got our work done by a more experienced operator. So we made just such a deal.

Old D9 bulldozer stuck in soft spot over the hill from Moore Creek

Our plan was to acquire a smaller, newer bulldozer that would be more reliable and more fuel efficient for the smaller scale operations we anticipated. But as we researched the situation it became obvious that this was going to get real expensive. Even a used bulldozer was going to run a good chunk of change, not to mention the cost of getting it to McGrath. Then would come the difficult task of getting it from McGrath to the mine, a distance of over 60 miles. That old bulldozer began to look better all the time. But the deal had been made, and so we waited for spring to come.

As has often happened in this Moore Creek story, things worked out for the better. The miner was unable to retrieve the bulldozer for us. On one hand I was unhappy to see the opportunity missed for the season, as we would now have to wait until the next winter to move the bulldozer overland. But that was more than offset by the fact that I now realized what a valuable thing a bulldozer is that is already on-site in remote Alaska. We were far ahead to work with what we had. Now it was left to us to get the bulldozer running and out of the hole it was stuck in, and then move it into camp in the spring of 2005. Our runway improvements would have to wait another year

Memorial Day finally approached and our first trip to the mine for the season. A new 6” suction dredge was purchased to take the mine for some bulk sampling work, as well as a little 2.5” dredge and small highbanker for more portable sampling efforts. I wanted in particular to sample some of the old tailing piles to get an idea how much smaller gold there was in them. We already knew they contained scattered large nuggets, but if it is to pay to re-mine the old tailings it will be the smaller gold that really makes it pay. The inefficient old recovery methods used at Moore Creek, combined with the large amount of heavy magnetite and chromite in the concentrates, and the clay content of the material, all indicated to me that the gold losses would have been substantial.

High of the list was getting the old existing bulldozer trail up to where the dozer was stuck cleared out of brush enough so we could get our Honda 3-wheeler up to it. Four miles over small mountains toting tools, batteries, and whatever else we might need on our backs was not an option we liked. We needed something cheap and small that would fit in the 206, so I shopped around and found a used Honda 3-wheeler. If you ever buy one of these be sure and check the tires because even if the unit is free three new tires is going to set you back a few dollars. Once we got the trail cleared for the 3-wheeler we could then begin the task of getting the bulldozer started and out of the hole.

Honda 3-wheeler stuffed in back of Cessna 206

My father and I planned on heading up with a full load of gear in the Cessna 206, and my brother Tom wanted to make his first trip up to the mine. I was excited to have Tom along as his job as a surveyor usually kept him busy summers so we rarely get out together. This made for a full load so I had the 6” dredge shipped to McGrath prior to our departure. We would fly to the mine, open up the camp and deliver our equipment. Tom had to go back to town the third day, so the idea was to fly him to town and then go into McGrath to bring the dredge in the same day. A 6” dredge is more than a single load for the 206 but by staging half the unit in McGrath we saved an extra trip to Anchorage.

My cousin Bob planned to come up from Missouri a few days after we left for the mine. He would hook up with a friend of ours, Mike Graves, who would fly them up in Mike’s Super Cub. And so, with plans all made and dredge waiting in McGrath, we finally headed out for Moore Creek. The flight was rather uneventful. When we arrived at Moore Creek, it was obvious that spring was early this year. There were more leaves on the trees than there normally would be on Memorial Day weekend. Usually things are still pretty bare this early, and patches of snow and ice would not be unusual. But as you will see in the pictures the trees are were pretty much leafed out when we arrived.

I had been waiting all winter to do some prospecting, and since Tom had a limited amount of time we decided to go prospect the tailing piles. Metal detectors have been effective in determining which tailing piles have larger pieces of gold in them, and presumably smaller gold also. We have been mapping all nuggets found and so a picture of where the hot areas are on the claims has been slowly building up over time. Since I wanted Tom to have the best shot at finding some gold, I loaned him my Minelab GP 3000, while I used the Garrett Infinium. The Minelab has a significant edge in that I have it outfitted with a 24" x 12" Coiltek UFO coil. This larger coil not only gets some extra depth, but probably more importantly allows the operator to cover more ground while detecting. In some ways I think the amount of ground one covers with a detector is more important than an extra inch or two of detection depth. If my detector covers twice as much ground as your detector, I am going to be electronically processing more material than you, even if your detector gets a couple more inches of depth than my detector. Just like when running other mining equipment, it is often about how much yardage you are processing more than recovery efficiency.

By the time we got the camp opened up and equipment put away we did not have too much time left. We headed down to some tailing piles next to the runway where a couple nuggets had been found the summer before. It seemed like a good area, but all we dug was small steel trash and bullets. Tom finally found a little 0.13 oz piece but that seemed about it for the spot this time so we headed back to camp. We decided to do a little more hunting near camp and just at the end of the day Tom found a 1.21 ounce nugget, by far the largest he had ever found in his life. Not bad for the first day on the ground, and a short day at that! I, on the other hand, had no gold to show for the day.

Tom with Moore Creek gold specimen excavated from tailing pile

The next day we decided to head way down the creek to check areas we had not hunted before. In theory the chance for larger gold should diminish as we head downstream, but you never know until you try. We hoofed it on down and did quite a bit of work getting through thick brush in low lying areas. But try as we might we had no luck down the creek. After some time with no success you get the feeling maybe you should wander back to areas where gold has been found before. We did just that, and Tom found a 0.15 ounce piece near Nevada Gulch below the airstrip. Then back to the cabins and he goes and finds a 0.25 and 0.10 ounce pieces near to where he had found the 1.21 ounce chunk the day before. And here I am again on the second day without a nugget to show. It appeared I was on one of my rare cold streaks. Not much you can do about them except persevere. Given the choice I'd rather Tom was finding the gold anyway but it is even better to both be finding gold.

My father was not much into detecting this trip and so was doing general camp work and scouting out the trail over to the bulldozer. Tom and I headed off the third day down the the area below the airstrip where Nevada Gulch comes in, and I finally got a couple small pieces, 0.09 and 0.07 ounces respectively. Not very big, but lots better than my time on this trip so far. My father and I got involved in more camp work, but Tom wanted to do some more detecting. I pointed out an area between the cabins and Moore Creek I thought really should have some gold. I had hunted there so far with no results, but the area just felt right. There was some bedrock outcropping there and that seemed like a good sign. And so right at the end of the day Tom goes and finds a 1.64 ounce nugget with my detector exactly where I pointed with my finger when I pointed the spot out!

Tom's time was up, and so he and my father flew off to Anchorage the next morning. This also offered the opportunity to fly in another load of equipment and fuel from Anchorage. I on the other hand finally had my GP 3000 back in my possession, and so I headed down and across Moore Creek to try some areas on the far outer edge of the paystreak. In theory the northern side of the creek is where the gold occurs and so by heading over to the south side I was heading in the wrong direction. But gold is where you find it, and I figure any disturbed material at all in an old mine is worth running a detector over. You just never know. And sure enough, I came up with four nuggets weighing 0.08, 0.14, 0.27, and 0.68 ounces, for a total of just over an ounce. This was more like it and it showed gold at the far extreme edge of the old operations.

Tom's 1.64 oz and 1.21 oz nuggets showing iron staining common at Moore Creek

My father returned, and we made the flight into McGrath to pick up the 6" dredge. This is the Keene model with twin 5.5HP Honda pumps. I like the twins as they are easier to handle than one big pump, and also have the advantage of allowing a person to use one or the other or both pumps for other things. One of the pumps works great on a 4" dredge or as a highbanker pump. So the twin pumps add some versatility to the operation. A 6" dredge is a pretty bulky unit, but we had flown the floats and hose in on the previous two loads. We were able to get all the remaining parts of the dredge into the plane and then on into Moore Creek in a single load.

The main reason for the 6" is for use as a sampling device on the many large tailing piles left by the old mining operations. There are several factors that combined to put what I guessed was a substantial amount of gold into the tailings. First, the nature of the gold itself. Even a lot of the smaller stuff has quartz attached, making it lighter and harder to catch. Then Moore Creek has an exceptionally high chromite (chrome ore) content in the concentrates, with some concentrate containing over 35% chromite. Chromite is a lot like magnetite (black sand) in appearance, but is not nearly as magnetic. It is likely the old-timers experienced quite a bit of riffle packing from the heavy concentrates. Another factor is that the decomposed material near bedrock has a fairly high clay content, and much of the material would have clumped and run completely through the box without completely breaking up and releasing the gold. However, years of sitting exposed to rainfall percolating though the tailing piles should have broken down a lot of the clay in the tailing piles by now. Most of the loss was due to the nature of the recovery systems employed. The old operations used long straight sluice boxes with angle iron riffles. They fed everything a one yard at a time into the sluice, including all the larger rocks. They did not screen off the rocks but instead just pitched the larger ones that stuck in the box out by hand. These large rocks created turbulence as the water flowed around them which could blow the gold out of the riffles. And the dumping of full bucket loads caused surges in the flow of material instead of the steady even flow that is desired. All these factors combined meant we have good reason to suspect the 1.5 million yards of tailings at Moore Creek contain substantial amounts of smaller gold in addition to the obvious loss of the larger pieces we are finding with the metal detectors. Since nearly all the tailing piles have large ponds of water adjoining them, a 6" dredge makes for a relatively inexpensive and portable device for testing the tailing piles.

Newly assembled 6" suction dredge ready to go to work

We used a Honda 3-wheeler and trailer to haul the dredge up to the tailing pond at the upper end of the mine and got it assembled. While we put the unit together I heard a "woofing" noise on the hill behind us. There sat a nice little black bear, watching us and no doubt wondering what we were doing. We watched him and he watched us, and finally he lost interest and wandered of around the edge of the pond.

We floated the dredge over to the pile where we had first found a number of nuggets with detectors in 2003. We measured the section of the pile we wanted to dredge to calculate out the yardage so we could come up with a per yard figure of the gold content of the material. The dredging itself was the easiest I have ever done. This particular tailing pile was mostly decomposed bedrock with a few larger cobbles scattered through the material. The pile looks almost sandy on the surface and has little vegetation growing on it, indicating that it came from on or in the decomposed bedrock layer and has little of the organic surface material in it. These types of piles have almost always proven to be a good place to metal detect. I placed the suction nozzle for the dredge just below water level on one end of the pile, and fired the dredge up. A hole was created just below the water line, and then we used picks and hoes to rake the material down into the water where the nozzle just sucked it up. The occasional oversize cobble that appeared was grabbed and tossed before it could get to the nozzle. We ate into the pile, creating an underwater shelf a little over a foot underwater as we moved forward. There is an incredible amount of dredging that can be done at Moore Creek with a pair of knee-high boots and little need to bend over. Basically you just stand there and rake material down to the nozzle. All the material being dredged is actually being dumped back into the bottom of the excavation from which it originally came years ago, so we are in a way we are returning the place to it's original condition by mining it a second time. The old timers dug a hole and put it in a pile; we are taking the pile and putting it back in the hole.

About this time Mike Graves and my cousin Bob show up in Mike's Super Cub. The tailing pile we were dredging on is actually an island in the middle of a pond created when the excavation the miners created filled with water. We were using a little inflatable boat to travel back and forth to the island. It was a one person raft, so a person would paddle over while a string was tied to the shore. Once you get to the far shore, someone back where you started pulls the raft back for their use. Well, Bob paddles over with no problem. The trick with these little rafts is to sit or kneel in the middle. But Mike tried sitting on one end, a thing my father had tried previously, and got similar results. Backwards and over into the ice cold water! I really felt sorry for Mike but luckily it was a nice day and the cabins near at hand so he could get out of his wet clothes in short order.

We wrapped up our little test dredging operation. A half day of dredging moved approximately 9 yards of material and produced 0.21 ounce of smaller gold or 0.023 ounce per yard. Not counting the larger nugget that might be found now and then it looks like this pile might deliver 1/4 to 1/2 ounce a day of gold if worked with the 6" dredge. This pile had produced nuggets weighing over an ounce while detecting the surface and so it is likely that the diligent dredger would have the occasional day running over one or even two ounces of gold due to this "nugget factor". Normally I would not consider a 1/4 ounce of gold in a day with a 6" dredge to be something I'd get excited about back in my old dredging haunts on the Kenai Peninsula. But there I dredged along with the knowledge that it would be the rarest of things to ever dredge nuggets weighing more than 1/4 ounce in size. That average daily take of smaller gold is all a person can really count on. Here, I'd be a much more motivated dredger knowing that it is almost inevitable that nuggets weighing one to three ounces will be found from time to time. We will never really know just what this will really average out to until somebody goes ahead and works a tailing pile for a couple weeks in this fashion.

Suction dredge sampling tailing pile at Moore Creek

One thing I know for sure is that in my over 30 years of dredging the largest nugget I've ever found with a suction dredge was a one ounce nugget at Crow Creek Mine in 1998. I have no doubt I could easily break that personal dredging size record at Moore Creek, and so I think in some ways the dredging opportunities here are almost better than the metal detecting. Many people, like my father, prefer to see some kind of reliable, steady gold production. Metal detecting is for the select few who can go for days finding nothing and not get anything and still not get demoralized. But from what I've seen more people are happy getting at least some gold every day as long as they know they still have that shot at a really good day now and then. As the surface areas get detected out this type of steady production work will be more and more important. The main goal for me is to prove enough yardage by this type of testing to justify setting up a small excavator and trommel operation to reprocess the tailing piles. I have had a gut feeling it will pay but I do not buy excavators based on gut feelings.

The next morning I got Bob set up with my GP 3000, and Mike had his own Minelab Eureka Gold. I told them about the area below the airstrip where I had found my largest nugget the summer before, a 3.5 ounce section of a rich gold bearing vein. The area had produced a good number of nuggets so far and the area was regarded as the "hot spot" on the creek by the previous owner. I had good reason to believe the area still held good promise, and Mike and Bob headed down to check it out. My father and I moved the dredge over to the next closest tailing pile. This one looked distinctly different from the other pile. It had more cobbles and rocks and more vegetation growing on the surface, indicating that it contained more overburden than the other pile. Yet it had produced some nice nuggets with the detectors also so I was curious how it would prove out with the dredge.

We worked away at this new tailing pile. This one was much taller, and so the face of the excavation got to be over 10 feet tall. It is important not to undercut the material adding to the risk of falling rocks or a complete collapse of the material, and so we found ourselves standing high above the water raking material down to the nozzle below. Careful raking and the tossing out large rocks before they could fall to the nozzle made this work remarkably well. We threw all the rocks into a zone between the island and the edge of the pond with the idea of eventually creating a causeway that would allow us to walk over instead of using the little raft. The pond is deeper than it looks and so it will take some time but I've always found it to be beneficial to direct rocks to a certain area than just tossing them randomly in every direction.

Bob and Mike showed up halfway through the day, and as Bob stood on the bank of the pond he held up something big to show us. We paddled over to check it out, and it turned out Bob had gone right to the area I had sent him with my detector and found the largest specimen we've located at Moore Creek to date. A 5.13 ounce chunk of what appears to be a perfect cross section of a rich gold-bearing vein. Just like the type of vein I'm dreaming of finding on the hill above our claims. It is exciting to find this kind of large gold specimen, but more exciting for me is what they keep telling me could exist elsewhere on our claims. These specimens have not traveled far at all from their source. Bob was of course ecstatic at having set the Moore Creek record for our group, but since nuggets up to 20 ounces have been found in recent years and up to 100 ounces in the early days his glory may be short-lived. I have since performed a specific-gravity test on the specimen, and it consists of 2.94 ounces of quartz and 2.19 ounces of gold. Some exceptionally rich gold ore indeed.

Bob Herschbach and his 5.13 ounce specimen

Close up of 5.13 ounce gold specimen seen on edge

2011 Update: I purchased the specimen from Bob. The gold was only visible around the edges and so I tried an experiment. I ground the specimen down on all sides until gold was visible, and then put a partial polish on it. The quartz is partially translucent so you can actually see below the surface and see gold enclosed in the quartz. The price of gold increased enough that I finally sold the specimen.

5 ounce gold specimen ground down and polished to better show gold

We wrapped up the dredging for the day as soon as we moved about the same 9 yards of material as we had from the other tailing pile. This time there was only 0.11 ounce of gold to show for the work, and so it was obvious this pile did contain more of the worthless overburden material than the other tailing pile. This calculates out to about 0.012 ounce per yard. Nothing to get too excited about with a dredge but an excavator with a one yard bucket it would add up. Since this material is already sized and stacked and next to an existing tailing pond/settling system the cost to process it is much lower than it would be to process virgin material. A good trommel system should also get better small gold recovery than a 6" dredge. More sampling is needed but the initial results so far look very promising with at least some small gold to be found, without consideration of larger nuggets.

A couple days of dredging left me feeling like doing some detecting. Even that easiest of dredging operations was a lot more work than swinging a detector. We got in a coupe hours before turning in for the evening, and I found a 0.09 oz nugget and my father found a 0.29 oz nugget. The real chance would come the next day, our last for the mine on this trip.

We loaded up the next morning and headed down to where Bob had found his piece. It was one of those chunks myself and others had walked within feet of. And like most nuggets, this one, although found with a Minelab GP 3000, was shallow enough that any detector at all would have found it. Bob just got his coil over it first. We all started hunting, but results at first were pretty slim, with me finding a few smaller pieces. It got very hot, and everyone started running out of energy as the temperatures climbed. I finally wandered off down the creek on my own and back into an isolated little area back in the brush. And boom, up comes a 1.93 ounce specimen! I got really excited, of course, and in short order I found another piece weighing 0.28 ounce. It was time to call in the troops so I climbed a nearby tall tailing pile and yelled away for the other guys to come over, but could not hear anyone reply. I hiked on over and rounded up Mike and my father, but Bob had already returned to camp. Unfortunately I had broken the spell, and try as we might my new area dried up. I ended up with the gold of the day, with the 1.93 oz and 0.28 oz pieces, plus 0.18, 0.09, 0.07, 0.08, and 0.05 ounce pieces for a total of 2.68 ounces . That put me over 4 ounces for the trip, but Bob beat me for total weight, most gold, and largest specimen so far, all in one find!

4 ounces gold specimens found by Steve at Moore Creek

The pictures above show my finds for the week, plus the 0.35 ounce of gold dredged from the tailing pile shown below. The pictures are not to scale; my specimens that are shown too small as the dredged gold is closer to life-size as seen in this picture. Those larger pieces found dredging would brighten most people's dredging days. As you can see even the smaller gold is very rough and has quartz attached. This gold has not so much rolled down the creeks as it has just rotted out of the rock and so there are going to be lots of pieces with quite a bit of character to them. The only real downside to this gold is the quartz content does not make it very amenable for jewelry work, as the quartz tends to pop out when heated.

Gold found while suction dredge sampling the tailing piles

All in all a very good start for the year. We got our propane refrigerator working but were frustrated by the 3 kw diesel generator. The darn thing has a hand crank starter and although it would pop and cough we could not get it running. It appeared to be some sort of fuel supply problem, but take apart what we may it just would not run before we all got so tired of cranking we gave up. The dozer problem remains to be tackled. Getting the dredge on site was a big plus, as getting good volume samples is critical in deciding just where and how to set up larger scale mining operations. I'm a very cautious miner in that regard. I do not believe in proceeding with any kind of serious mining without sufficient yardage blocked out and proven in advance. Too many people think that is time wasted and just jump in and start mining, but that is why the vast majority of mines go broke. We will block out enough pay to make whatever operation we go with have a high probability of turning a good profit. Part of that will be determined by exactly what equipment gets used in the actual mining operation, which also gets determined by the sampling program.

Final lesson for this trip - if I ever loan you my detector and point you in a certain direction, you'd better head there! Both my brother and cousin got their best finds ever on this trip and I was glad to see it. The next best thing to finding a nugget or me is seeing other people find them. The happiness is contagious whenever gold is being found in our camp, no matter who is doing the finding.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2004 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

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

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

This entry in Steve's Mining Journal is a bit different. It is a copy of a couple posts I made on some forums regarding the Garrett Infinium as a coin detector. It is part of the Detectorprospector.com goal of collecting all my scattered internet posts into one location.

I have found gold nuggets with the Infinium and done well with jewelry using it as an underwater detector. Since the Infinium has a dual tone id system it has some interesting potential as a coin detector. To test this and to simply get in more use with the machine I went out to a local playground to test the unit. There is loose pea-gravel around the playground equipment, and I wanted easy digging material as I wanted to dig all items in this test.

The group of coins on the right, plus two pieces of wire and a nail all came up lo-hi tone. Quarters, dimes, and copper pennies. Basically, if I only dug lo-hi tones I would dig nothing but coins and a small amount of trash!

The results on the left are from the hi-lo "gold range" tones. This equates to the jewelry range on VLF detectors and as any jewelry hunter knows this is also the foil, pull tab, aluminum range. The Infinium also reveals it's love for wire in this range, in particular bobby pins and paper clips. I found quite a few broken zipper parts. The stuff by the battery that looks like large wire is actually string and other items with small metal connectors. The bent shallow "V" shaped item is a plastic ink tube from a pen, and several of the smallest targets were pen tips. Also a few pencil eraser ends, a common school yard find. There are also a couple very rusted nuts. Most large iron items normally read lo-hi but if they rust enough they sometimes come in as hi-lo, as these did. This is also where you get the nickels and zinc pennies. And jewelry. I found an earring, a couple pieces of broken chains, a couple pins, and a pendant.

Coin detecting with the Garrett Infinium

It looks to me that if you are in the right area and willing to forgo the nickels (and nobody cares about zinc pennies) then the Infinium might actually work very well as a coin detector. Just dig lo-hi tones only.

No surprise on the hi-lo tones. If you go for the jewelry range you are going to dig lots of junk. Not bad on a beach or in the pea-gravel, but it would wear you out in an average park setting.

In a nutshell the hi-lo tone equates to the zinc penny and lower range on a VLF detector, and the lo-hi tones equates to copper penny and higher. The wild-card is iron items which can id in either range depending on shape and amount of decomposition (rust).

I can't comment too much on the depths as I did not dig anything that was in the hard packed ground under the pea gravel. My main goal was to just dig lots of targets to see which tone I got. Everything was less than 6" deep. However, I did have my Fisher CZ-5 and White's MXT along, and the Infinium easily detected a dime I buried beyond the discrimination range of both detectors while correctly giving the lo-hi id. The only way the VLF machines could hit it was to go to all-metal mode.

Needless to say I plan on trying this in a couple heavily worked "old coin" sites later to see what might turn up.

One thing I did find is that the Infinium has what is referred to as a "modulated audio" In other words, smaller or deeper targets sound fainter. I did find that I could reliably predict many of the nickels and could have dug less small trash as the nickels really bang out on the Infinium. It hits nickels harder than any other coin due to the machine being tuned for gold range targets. If I did not think jewelry finds were a possibility I think I could get many nickels and dig less trash by paying attention to the intensity of the audio. The wire items also seem to "move" as you walk around the target. The coins stay centered.

Steve Herschbach

Garrett Infinium Pulse Induction metal detector

I went coin detecting with my Infinium... Posted by Steve Herschbach on 5/1/2004

Hi, I finally got my hands on the 14" mono coil for my Infinium. I've been wanting one for some time, as in theory it should get better depth on target in mild ground than the DD coil that comes stock with the unit. I have a ten day prospecting trip coming up the first week of June and so was desperate to get the coil before the trip.

I'll have to weigh the mono coil as compared to the stock coil but I immediately liked its lighter weight. The stock coil is just plain heavy. The mono is epoxy-filled so not as light as it could be, but it is big improvement over the DD in this regard.

I took the unit to a nearby freshwater beach that has been heavily detected for many years. It dates back to the 1920's. Like most beaches it replenishes with new stuff constantly but the older coins have been detected out of it for the most part. Those that can be reached, anyway. A friend with an Explorer has been trying to get the last few and declared to me a few days ago that he figured he had about cleaned it out. He even went so far as to use the big Coiltek WOT coil on the Explorer. Nice thing about beaches... you can dig big holes!

The Infinium has a dual tone system. You get a hi-lo tone on low conductive items and a lo-hi tone on high conductive items and large iron or steel. I've found in the past that smaller nails and other elongated steel items like hair pins read hi-lo as if they are low conductive items.

Excepting iron and steel, which can go either way, the hi-lo tone is where you get jewelry, aluminum, zinc pennies, and nickels. Lo-hi tones are copper pennies, clad coins, and silver.

What makes the Infinium different from other PI units is the tone system. Most pulse induction detectors are single tone "dig it all" machines. So the Infinium tone system, while far from perfect, allows for some uses that are not practical with other PI detectors.

The beach I was at is littered with aluminum trash of all sorts, and deeper down there are lots of nails and other iron trash. And some jewelry. Basically, every swing gets at least one or more hi-lo tones. Lots of noise, but I've found if I keep my headphone volume low its no big deal.

What I've found to be rare on the beach is the lo-hi tones. Lots of detecting keeps the beach fairly clean of newer coins. And the larger nails are rarer than the smaller ones. So I set out this morning to only dig lo-hi tones.

I headed right for the middle of the beach, one of the most detected places in my town. After only ten minutes I got a nice mellow, lo-hi tone. The sand on this beach is of varying depth, and is on top of a clay-like base. At about ten inches I hit the clay, and there embedded in the clay was a 1953 silver dime! Now, this may not be a very old coin by most standards, but to find it where I did pretty much blew me away. Countless detectors have been over this dime. The signal I got was not weak. It did have a more mellow response than a shallower coin would, but it was a solid signal.

So I used the dime as center base and started spiraling around it. Lots and lots of hi-lo tones which I'll go dig some other day. Probably deep aluminum but I'm sure I passed over some deep jewelry today. But I stuck with the program.

After a couple hours I had dug 16 targets, four of which were coins. The other three were all wheatbacks from the 1940's. All were in the clay layer below the sand.

The pennies were shallower than the dime, which might lead some to wonder why they were still there. All I can tell you is the ground runs about 78 on a White's MXT, so pretty mineralized, and there are hi-tension power lines nearby. So while the depths I'm talking about here my not seem impressive, all I can swear to is that these coins were missed by hordes of detectors over the last 30 years. I was very impressed.

The mono coil, while I did not compare it directly, seemed to me to have a clear edge over the stock DD coil for depth. I could pinpoint MUCH easier with it, as the signal were right in the middle where they should be. The mono coil has a traditional cone-shaped detection pattern with best depth and signal dead center.

Add the fact that it is light and I have a new favorite coil for the Infinium. I can't wait to get it out nugget detecting next month. But tomorrow morning it is back to the beach to tackle some of those hi-lo tones and see if I can find a gold ring. And look for more lo-hi coins after I get tired of digging aluminum trash!

In any case, to use a PI on a trashy beach and be able to come up with one in four targets good as opposed to just digging everything is what the Infinium is all about. It has some real power in dry land areas where other detectors may be having issues due to mineralization, and once you get used to its dual-tone id system you can do things with it that you cannot do with a normal "dig-it-all" PI detector. I really have to caution that the discrimination is not perfect, and in some areas it may be useless, but depending on the mix of targets it can work well, as I think this day showed.

Pulse induction is not for everyone, but I have to tell you I'm really having fun with this thing. I can't wait to see the look on the face of my Explorer buddy. He is not going to be happy that a Garrett got coins he missed.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2004 Herschbach Enterprises

Well, I've been kind of quiet lately about a trip I took last week. But the papers have been filed and so now I can spill the beans.

This is a long story, so bear with me. There is a creek in the McGrath area that I have been aware of for 30 years. I first visited Moore Creek in 1973, actually as a detour from Flat, Alaska. I had researched out the Flat area as being a likely place to look for gold, and talked my father into flying me there. But when we got over the area there was all kinds of obvious activity below and so we turned back towards Anchorage in disappointment. On the way back we flew over some old mine tailings that looked inactive. We landed and poked around a bit. My father and I panned nice quantities of coarse, quartzy gold... and the place has had my attention ever since. I actually refer to it in another story I have online but the reference passed unnoticed by most. Moore Creek is the first place I ever tried to use a metal detector to find a gold nugget!

An old-timer named Don Harris held the ground for decades. We got to know Don and visited the mine several times over the years. I let it be known that I was interested if he ever decided to sell the place. I was dismayed when he sold the ground a couple years ago to someone else but understood as it was someone he knew well in the McGrath area. But a few weeks ago I got a call from the new owner. Family issues demanded he leave the area and so he wanted to sell, and he had been advised by Don to give me a call. I jumped at it. The price was out of my range, so a limited liability company was formed by myself and three partners to buy the claims.

Large gold specimen found by previous mine owner at Moore Creek

We got the core 480 acres but some of the surrounding ground had lapsed over the years. I went in last week with my father (one of my partners), and we spent 95% of the time on claims work, including staking 4 more claims comprising 520 acres of ground. So the total property is now 1000 acres. I did find time to prospect a bit, and found a 1/4 oz nugget with my detector and some other gold, but I had little time to devote to metal detecting this trip. Enough time for that down the road.

Anyway, we got the additional ground staked, and paperwork fired off to Fairbanks via Express Mail as soon as we returned to Anchorage. So the new claims are now recorded and I can relax a bit.

Aerial view of old mine workings at Moore Creek, Alaska

Why have I been interested in this ground so long? Well, it has produced over 60,000 ounces of gold by rather conservative estimates. The creek has a long history, and the information on the early years is sparse. A nugget over 100 ounces was found in the old days, but recent times have seen nuggets of up to 20 ounces. The kicker for me is that the gold is extremely rough, much rougher than even Ganes Creek gold. Lots of quartzy nuggets, and many that are just sections out of thin, super rich gold veins. I can just smell the hardrock gold! This was driven home by the chunk of quartz vein shown below which the previous owner found metal detecting on the claims.

But unlike Ganes the hardrock source has a been narrowed down to a very small target area. The source lies uphill of the creek, and a couple small veins have been uncovered. Battle Mountain moved in to do drilling work in the 1980's, but claims disputes kept them from the actual work and then the price of gold collapsed. The ground never was drilled So while the hardrock is there it has seen minimal exploration. Until the hardrock prospect is drilled it will never be known how much gold remains in the hill. The big question is whether there is substantial hardrock gold still in place, or has most of it eroded to form the creek placers? Nobody knows the answer to that... yet. I've got the whole hillside staked and hope to find some of the answers eventually.

My main goal was to just get the ground for now. We have already started cleaning up the camp from years of neglect and clearing the inevitable alders that have grown over trails and such. But we will stay low key and simply develop and explore for some time, doing lots of sampling and getting a feel for the potential of the ground. I'm curious how much of the quartzy gold was lost by the old miners into the tailings, and if their old workings are worth re-mining. There is some potential for virgin ground that needs to be nailed down. And the big question is the hardrock. All good questions that will take lots of sampling to get answers.

So there you are. I ditched my last claims as they were tying me down and I wanted to be more free to bounce around the state. Now I'm tied down again, and the future will no doubt see me spending most of my free time at Moore Creek.

Now you know why I was not back at Ganes Creek this summer. Though Ganes Creek is just 40 miles away. If you draw a line from Ganes Creek to Donlin Creek, another big new strike in Alaska, Moore Creek is midway between on the same mineral trend. Good neighbors to have! If you are interested a Geologic Report on Moore Creek is available in pdf format at http://www.dggs.alaska.gov/webpubs/dggs/pr/text/pr096.PDF 

So I'm a very excited guy right now. But also mourning the fact that my trips to Nome and the Coldfoot area have once again been shelved. Just not enough time...

For now we are just doing claims improvements and exploration. We need to get established and get a better feel for the potential. There is a lot of work to be done upgrading the facilities. Item #1 is the airstrip. It's about 1400 feet, just enough for a 206 but scary for a 207. Even the 206 is pushing it somewhat if the wind is unfavorable. I just got back from a meeting with some miner friends and they have talked me into getting a permit to lengthen the runway. Did I mention I have a couple of old D9 cats? So I'm rounding up the paperwork and getting the application in for that. I'll probably just go an APMA for five years for low-level exploration activities. Luckily the current state political environment is quite favorable compared to previous years and this should be no major problem, aside from those normally associated with filing for permits.

View looking up old overgrown airstrip at Moore Creek Mine, Alaska

There are existing cabins in place that I need to get approval to use in the APMA. We own them and their contents, but existing cabins are a sticky issue on state land. Technically the state wants them removed at the end of mining activities. But as operations are ongoing and open-ended at the moment it's mostly just a matter of getting proper permits to use the cabins for now. The theory is we own the cabins and contents but do not have permission to have them on State land yet! So I'm getting up to speed on all the ins and outs of state claim ownership. In general, it's considered far better than owning federal claims nowadays, as the state looks at claims and mining as a revenue source to be more or less encouraged. The feds seem more inclined to just make mining claims go away.

Setting up the LLC (Limited Liability Company) was really easy. Every state has it's own process, but it's basically the same. In Alaska you go the the Alaska Banking, Securities, and Corporations website and download the application. It is all of two pages. Fill it out, and file with a $250 filing fee. It's somewhat like a business license as you have to renew every couple years. An LLC is a cross between a partnership and a corporation. You manage it like a partnership but it affords you most of the legal protections against liability of a corporation. You also need an operating agreement to really cover yourself against things like partners dying, etc. Generic agreements can be had and modified to suit. Your liability is essentially limited to what you have invested in the LLC, in this case our claims. If it turned out we had an EPA toxic waste site on our hands we could walk away. We would lose what we invested in the claims, but they could not come after my house or my business. At least, that's the theory!

Getting the LLC set up was a key first step. With this done a business checking account was the next step. Monies were deposited by the LLC members, and the claims purchased using a Quit Claim Deed for Mining Claims Form found at the DNR website. This form must be filled out and notarized, then filed with the Recorder's Office. We executed a second Quit Claim Deed on all rights to structures, tools, equipment on the claims. Exclusions were noted on some items the old owners want to retrieve.

That done, the ground was examined for potential claims on surrounding land. These claims were staked using Alaska's new MTRSC forms located at the DNR website. A factsheet on the process is found at is also found there. A copy of the form is put on the NE #1 corner of each claim while staking. Our claims are located in the Mt. McKinley Recording District, and that means documents are recorded in Fairbanks. Kind of silly in this day and age. But that's the way it is. A copy of the claims form is filed with the Recorder's Office, in this case via Registered Express Mail. You actually have 45 days to file the paperwork but why delay? I always fear paper stakers mucking up the process and so I want to get on record ASAP.

Old cabins at Moore Creek Mine, Alaska

The only part of the whole process I found confusing was the filing fees. Since all the paperwork for four claims was being filed at once, was it $15 for the first page, and $3 for each additional page? Each claim form had a plat copy attached with existing and new claims plotted, so each claim had two pages - eight total. I finally called the Recorders Office and the very nice lady that answered told me $15 for each claim form of one page, plus $3 for each attached page. So it was $15x4=$60 plus $3x4=$12 for a total of $72. I also paid $2 per filing, another $8, to have copies returned immediately. I was told I did not need to pay for postage for this but I enclosed a self-addressed stamped envelope anyway.

Rental fees are also due on new claims. You can pay at a later date but have the option of paying at the time of filing if the calculation form with the MTRSC Form is filled out. I elected to pay the fees at time of filing. The initial Alaska rental fee is $25 per 40 acres. We filed three 160 acre claims and one 40 acre claim so the initial fee was $325. The fun part about that is the fees expire in September and must be repaid by the end on November for next year. The only way to avoid this was to wait until after September 1st to file the new claims, but we did not want to wait that long. Besides the risk of someone else staking the ground weather gets very dicey in September in Alaska and we might have access problems.

The MTRSC system is sweet. You basically stake claims by the quarter section (160 acres) or quarter-quarter section (40 acres). The old claim system can still be used for claims where section corners do not fit the actual deposit well, but in this case it was fine. The advantage is that it is easy to pre-map the claims, and calculate Latitude/Longitude coordinates for the corners. This is all done in advance, claim forms filled out, etc. I had all the claim corners input as waypoints in my GPS. So once you get on the ground you use your GPS to get to each corner. I also had little metal tags prefilled out with corner identification info for each corner. Doing this all in advance at home saves a lot of frustration in the rain and the brush!

GPS is fine for claim staking... you are not doing an actual survey. My Garmin would get me close but when you get to the spot a GPS gets flakey and you find you can't quite get a fix within the last 40 feet. It does not matter. Just get on location and if you are in the right terrain find the best close tree to use as a corner post. I had to actually dig posts in at a couple spots but most of my corners ended up being trees. The marked corner on the ground is the actual legal corner, not the GPS coordinate, so keep this in mind when placing the actual corner.

So the hardest part was just doing it. I scoped the corners by aerial photos, but reality on the ground is harder than when you are looking at aerial photos. It all looks so easy when looking at the photo, but get on the ground and thick brush and wet areas make it more fun. Still, we are not talking a vast number of claims and distances here, and since I had plenty of time I took one day to do two claims and another day to do the other two.

So that's it up to this point. I'm now looking over the Annual Placer Miners Application found at the DNR website to proceed to the next step.

I did do some detecting, almost as much to find out where the old trails were as much as to go find gold. Here are the few nuggets I found. The largest, at 4.7 pennyweight (20 pennyweight per Troy ounce) was off the top of a large tailing pile well below camp. Just like at Ganes Creek. It's fairly quartzy but thick with gold. The next is about a pennyweight and solid gold and came off bedrock just above camp. The smaller ones all came off bedrock at the uppermost workings above camp.

A few nuggets found on claim staking trip

The ground is exactly the opposite of Ganes for detecting. The bedrock is fairly neutral, but the cobbles are strongly negative and positive. So when ground balanced to the background you get both big "boings" off negative rocks and strong positive gold-like signals off positive rocks. I had a Fisher Gold Bug 2 and my father was using his Tesoro Lobo SuperTRAQ, both of which we have used with great success at Ganes Creek just a few miles away. But here at Moore Creek the ground noise was such that we had to use the detectors in their iron rejection modes just to operate. The iron id systems rejected the rock signals, but the signals were so powerful that the machines clicked and blipped constantly. Still, you can tell a good signal from these hot rock overloads with no problem

Anyway, there was little time for detecting this last trip. I'll be headed back the first week of August to give it a more serious workout, so I'll have a better idea after that as to the detecting potential of the ground. There are old detector holes scattered about, but other than a couple nuggets I have no idea what they were finding. All the holes were very shallow indicating older, less powerful detectors were used. I'll be using my Minelab GP 3000 here in the future as it is obvious the hot rocks are a real issue at Moore Creek, and the GP 3000 deals with difficult ground better than any other detector made.

I've been inundated with inquiries and rumors regarding our intent for these claims. Everyone assumes it is intended as a Ganes Creek style operation. It actually was not the intent in acquiring the claims. The real thing that happened here was a great opportunity arising and being taken advantage of. While we have discussed the possibility of a Ganes style operation there are issues with the State on doing a non-mining business on mining claims. As in... you can't. So to just advertise out as a tourist operation is a no-no. State mining claims are for mining.

That is not to say that metal detecting is not a legitimate form of mineral extraction. Obviously I can use a metal detector to efficiently recover nuggets from tailings that would prove uneconomic if mined by traditional methods. I could hire a guy to look for gold with a metal detector if I thought it would pay (and I could trust him!). Mining also has a long history of work being done for a share of the final cleanup, and so percentage deals are a legitimate form of mining. I am a professional detectorist and have made quite a few miners happy splitting my finds with them 50/50 and locating potential mineable ground at the same time. It's not recreational, it's mining and prospecting. It's all in the intent.

Old Northwest dragline parked on Moore Creek property

But I digress. The Moore property has tremendous mining potential. The Iditarod-Nixon fork Fault is one of the most important mineralized gold structures in Alaska. The Iditarod Mining District is the fourth largest gold producer in Alaska at 1.5 million ounces. There is a high potential on the remaining placer resources at Moore Creek and good potential for the hardrock. In fact, the hardrock is what has my main interest. The placers may simply serve as a way to keep the property active while exploring for hardrock. I have one located vein on the property, but it takes more than that to prove a mineable deposit. Basically, it takes drilling, not an inexpensive thing to do in Alaska.

The immediate goal is to clean up the access and start sampling of the placers interspersed with hardrock prospecting. The vein has been traced for about 300 feet but both ends are covered by topsoil and brush, so trying to establish it's overall length is an obvious early step. It needs more assay work to determine it's tenor. I really do not think this vein is THE source I'm after, however. What you need these days is lots and lots of veins in a fairly large area to make it mineable by open pit methods.

So people need not hold their breath waiting for some big announcement about a Ganes style operation at Moore Creek. It's not impossible something like that may be worked out someday, but for now we have other plans for Moore Creek. The more we talk about it the more excited we get. My partner Dudley is already shopping for dozers and excavators and getting shipping costs. This guy is getting gold fever! My father called today all excited about using simple seismic or ground penetrating radar to search for deep channels in the main streambed and then firing up the churn drill to sample.

Big picture factors are playing into this also. The economic structure of the U.S. is getting shaky (big deficits soon to be followed by the printing of more money) and so the future of gold is looking brighter. Inflationary times are always good for commodity prices. The Donlin deposit is looking more like a go all the time, and if so we could just find ourselves with a road system and a world class mill nearby. The Kuskokwim region could explode development-wise over the next few years. These are good times to be sitting on a gold mine, and the Iditarod area is a good place for that mine to be.

Anyway, I'm working on my Annual Placer Miners Application (APMA) now, and hope to file it soon. The APMA is a single application that is then sent to all the appropriate agencies for approval (and no doubt additional requirements) and it is a real nice system. You do not have to chase down separate forms and make separate applications with a bunch of different agencies. They can cover you for up to 5 years, which is what I'll be shooting for. They can also be amended as needed. Once I get it filed I'll keep everyone up-to-date as to how long it takes and what problems crop up.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2003 Herschbach Enterprises

In 2007 I was sent a prototype of the White's PulseScan TDI to test, and I was so impressed that I decided to put the new model into service at my "pay-to-mine" operation at Moore Creek, Alaska as soon as it was available. Moore Creek has mixed hot rocks that severely impede the performance of regular metal detectors. I lobbied for and got four of the very first units off the production line in the spring of 2008 and those detectors were provided to visitors at Moore Creek that had no detector of their own or who needed a backup.

These people by nature often have little or no detecting experience. I was happy to find some stock settings for the TDI that worked well at Moore Creek. I could basically set the detector for somebody and as long as they did not touch the controls it worked well. Just turn the detector on and go.

Still, experience counts for much and novices have a tough time finding gold nuggets, just due to lack of basic detecting skills. We had found in the past that regardless of the detector used we were happy if novices could just find any gold at all metal detecting during their visit. So I was very pleased that many new detectorists at Moore Creek found their very first nuggets metal detecting with the White's TDI. The unit is not only very capable but also quite easy to operate and so really the only task left to the novices was to get over a nugget.

Mike and Karl were pretty typical of many of our visitors. Never really done any metal detecting for gold and no detectors of their own. I sent them out with the TDI and they each found by far the largest gold they had ever found in their lives. The small stuff at Moore Creek is larger than many people will ever find and so I had the opportunity to create some real life experiences for a lot of people. It really is a good feeling seeing people make their first finds and knowing you made it happen.

Mike's gold specimen weighed in at 0.28 ounce and Karl got two, 0.12 and 0.25 ounce respectively.

Mike B. & Karl E. of Anchorage, Alaska with Moore Creek TDI finds

Close up of Mike and Karl's gold specimens

I was doing some bulldozing at the mine to stir up some nuggets for our visitors. I got to one little knob of gravel and after I flattened it out I thought "that looks like a good spot". I had not done any detecting in a couple weeks and figured it was about time. So when I got the dozer back to camp I got a TDI out and headed to the location. A guy had just come into camp as I was leaving and so I told him to head up the same way.

I got to the spot and started detecting. First down one row and up the other. After about ten minutes I got a nice signal, and dug up a great 0.31 ounce specimen. It is a little section of a quartz vein with a nearly solid gold core of gold running through the middle.

0.31 ounce Gold Specimen found with White's TDI

I turned off the detector and headed back to camp. The other guy was now just arriving and asked me what was wrong. I told him nothing was wrong, but that I'd got my nugget and so was done. You should have seen the look on his face! Poor guy had been looking for gold for days and I walk right out and find a nugget in ten minutes.

We had an 82 year old gentleman in camp that week who was not having much luck detecting so I gave the specimen to him to take home to Florida.

So what were the settings, etc. we used with the White's TDI at Moore Creek? The Pulse Delay was always at 10, the most sensitive setting for gold, and we were always able to run the maximum Gain of 12. The Ground Balance was tight as we have both a positive and negative hot rock at Moore Creek. A bit one way and the positive rocks signaled and a bit the other way and the negative rocks signaled. Negative hot rocks are by far the more prevalent. In general a setting of about 9 eliminated nearly all the hot rocks. But no matter how much I tweaked there were faint hits on some hot rocks. This is not surprising as the Minelab PI detectors also hit the hot rocks at Moore Creek. The ground is a weird mix of fairly neutral soil made up of the underlying decomposed shale bedrock with basalt and monzonite hot rocks eroded from the nearby hills.

However, I determined a couple things with the TDI that really helped with the new people. First, virtually all gold at Moore Creek gives a high tone, even multi-ounce pieces. I believe this is because of the generally high silver content combined with the specimen nature of the gold. Surprisingly, when silver is added to gold it lowers the conductivity instead of increasing it, and so low purity gold is more likely to give low conductor high tone responses on the TDI. You can figure with 99% certainty that a low tone is an iron target or hot rock at Moore Creek. I ended up with the novices ground balancing to kill the high tone hot rock responses and did not worry about low tone hot rocks. Then I set the very unique to the TDI Target Conductivity switch to eliminate low tones and only sound off on low conductivity high tone targets. This made the TDI a real no-brainer to run. Dead quiet, no false signals at all. Then get any high tone at all, and it was always a bullet or shell casing (rare at Moore Creek), some small ferrous trash that reads low conductive, or gold. The ferrous trash that reads low conductive tends to be shallow easy to dig stuff. Being set up this way almost totally eliminates the PI tendency to have a person digging deep, tiring pits only to find a big piece of steel junk.

The only problem I had was people fiddling with or accidently knocking a control out of adjustment. The setting was so perfect I actually considered just gluing the controls in place to prevent people from messing with them! Another problem happens when you loan people stuff to use - it not only gets used it gets abused. Luckily the TDI is able to take a licking and keep on ticking, just like the old ads. This TDI got strapped on the back of an ATV and then the driver forgot about it as he roared through the mud holes and brush. Having too much fun I guess! Not only did the unit get covered in mud he managed to bend the middle rod section. A little careful work with a water hose and a little bending and the detector worked just fine. I eventually ordered a new rod section to replace the bent one.

White's TDI Covered with mud!

I ran the 7.5" coil a bit and found a 1 pennyweight nugget with it. I was surprised at how stable the smaller coil was, as I expected it would be more prone to hitting hot rocks, but instead it seemed to be more immune to the hot rocks than the larger coil. At Moore Creek though the stock 12" coil is the better way to go not so much for extra depth but for ground coverage, which really is the name of the game at the mine. The person that covers the most ground digging the most targets has the best shot at finding the gold at Moore Creek. But for many nugget hunting tasks I think I would very much like using the smaller coil.

Here is Moore Creek visitor Pete W from Paducah, Kentucky. Pete hunted hard with the TDI but was having little luck. I was out with him at one point and was sitting nearby when he got a signal. He started to dig with his scoop but the target was deep, and so I came over with my pick to help. I scooped a pretty deep hole, but when he checked the target was still in the ground. The TDI got this one at respectable depth. So I dug some more and out popped a really good looking nugget! A very nice piece weighing 0.27 ounce that put a huge smile on Pete's face.

Pete W. and TDI gold

Close up of Pete's nugget found with TDI

And here is a great photo of Moore Creek visitor Jens S from Hupstedt, Germany with nuggets he found with the TDI. The larger nugget is 0.62 ounce and the smaller 0.37 ounce. Jens found the smaller nugget first within ten minutes of turning the TDI on for the first time. Jens really liked dredging and highbanking more than metal detecting and so spent most of his time at Moore Creek doing just that. From what I saw though he was a natural with a metal detector and so who knows how he would have done if he had concentrated on that more. He went home with a lot of gold anyway and a very happy visitor to our country, with an experience most will never have.

Jens with 0.37 oz and 0.62 oz gold specimens found with White's TDI

You would be surprised how little detecting I did while at Moore Creek. Running a pay-to-mine operation is a full time job and then some. Still, I did have my chances to get out now and then and having the new TDI around certainly gave me reason.

A couple of our visitors, Keith M and Bob D and I decided to hit some tailing piles downstream and across Moore Creek, making them hard to get to and so less hunted by others. We loaded our detectors and waders up on ATVs and headed down to the general location. After crossing the stream we hiked down to the lowest tailing pile which I've been eying from afar the last couple years. It has a lot of brush on it, and I figured a nugget might be lurking unfound in that brush.

The tailing piles are very steep, and so I hip mounted the White's TDI to keep the weight off my arm while side-hilling. The only issue I found in the brush was a tendency for controls to get knocked off their settings and so I was alert for changes in the detector's response. I found a good ground balance setting that minimized the response from both the positive and negative hot rocks. This ended up being about 8 on this tailing pile. I ran at the gold sensitive 10uS setting and was able to run the gain up to max. I set for a quiet, faint threshold. I do run the Target Conductivity switch on All myself as I prefer to hear the hot rocks and sort them out myself. I do not mind digging a few rocks if need be but usually they have a consistent sound I can learn. In this instance though the TDI was running real nice. There seemed to be less of the bad hot rocks on this side of the valley.

Bob, Keith, and I spaced ourselves around the tailing pile and proceeded to hunt. I started low on one end, hunted around that end, and then worked up the hill into the brush. They were both running Minelabs. Minelabs can be set to run pretty close to each other, but we discovered that the TDI does not play well with Minelab detectors. The TDI does not pick up the Minelabs at all, but the Minelabs go nuts with a TDI anywhere near, and they cannot tune the TDI out at all. So I took pains to stay as far away from both Keith and Bob as possible. I ended up in a little spruce tree thicket on one end of the pile.

Soon I got a nice, clear, high tone signal. A bit of digging revealed a nice 1.93 ounce gold quartz specimen down in the roots! It was a typical Moore Creek "oreo cookie" nugget with a solid gold core sandwiched between two thin layers of quartz. But very solid in the middle - this chunk had a very nice heft. Not only did it make my day (week? month?) but actually paid for that TDI in a single find. It certainly gave me a real warm fuzzy about the TDI being able to make a find like that with it.

We hunted most of the rest of the day and although we found many targets my nugget proved to be the only find of the day. That happens so often it does make me wonder at times. I have seen myself and others bang into a great find like that early on, and then find nothing the rest of the day so often that when it happens now I joke about it. The feeling is if you get a great one like that right off the bat you may as well quit for the day. But of course nobody ever does.

1.93 oz gold nugget found by Steve Herschbach with White's TDI

Here is the rest of the story on the nugget. I have a rule at Moore Creek that any gold our crew finds while we have paying customers in camp goes to the customers. So at the end of the week we had a drawing. Everyone got 5 tickets, and for every ounce of gold a person had found we took away one of their tickets. We wanted to handicap the hot detectorists. Although we had 15 visitors in camp, it was Bob who was with Keith and I when the nugget that got found that won it. Which was nice as he is one of our regular visitors and had not had much luck detecting. There was some pretty serious karma at work that week! Just a reminder, gold was running around $700 per ounce in 2008, so I gave away a $1400 nugget. I did this a lot at Moore Creek and in fact no visitor ever went home without gold. I always found enough hunting on the side to be able and make sure people who got skunked got a going away present. I think I found and gave away about a pound of gold, which must set some kind of record.

I was figuring there is no way anyone is going to beat my 1.93 ounce nugget for awhile. After all, not many nuggets get found over an ounce, and this one is almost two ounces. Well, I figured wrong. After all our clients left for the summer I invited a couple friends up to the mine to hang out while we shut the mine down for the winter. Husband and wife detecting team Bernie and Chris came to Moore Creek for the first time. Both are expert with VLF detectors having found pounds of gold between them with the White's MXT. Pulse induction detecting was new to them however and at Moore Creek I convinced them to set the trusty MXT aside in favor of PI detectors. Well, no worries about these two running new detectors. Bernie and Chris scored some real nice gold. In fact, Chis got the best find of the week with the TDI, and really gorgeous 2.07 ounce gold in quartz specimen. It is actually one of the more attractive pieces I saw found at Moore Creek. Instead of the usual solid layer of gold wafered between quartz this specimens has gold laced evenly and very attractively throughout the quartz. Chris not only beat me for overall weight by a bit but for sure in the specimen good looks department.

2.07 ounce gold specimen found by Chris P with White's TDI at Moore Creek, Alaska

This story is a compilation of various posts made on the internet at the time and finally added to my journal. I wanted to add a lot of missing detail, and in the process it sure brought back a lot of great memories. The Moore Creek gig will go down as the best time of my life. Not only was a lot of gold found, but many great new friends and fabulous adventures were made there. The mine now belongs to other people and the pay-to-mine operation has long since ended, but the memories will be cherished as long as I live.

The White's PulseScan TDI is a detector I still own. It has some interesting features no other detector has and in some ways is an underappreciated machine. I like the easy hip mount capability and the unique Target Conductivity switch in particular. The main problem I see is people using it in locations where a VLF is a better choice, and then complaining the TDI is no better than a VLF. Stuff like that makes me shake my head. If a location is suitable for a VLF by all means use a VLF. Pulse induction detectors like the White's TDI are for locations where the ground or the hot rocks are such that a VLF operator wants to quit in frustration. Ground Balancing PI (GBPI) detectors are meant solely to handle extreme ground or hot rock conditions, and it those conditions do not exist, then the entire reason for using the PI detector also does not exist. In low mineral ground the only real advantage GBPI detectors have is in their ability to run very large coils, and that can aid in finding deep large targets. But if no deep large targets exist to be found a VLF is often the better choice in low mineral ground, especially given the superior ability of a VLF to sort out trash targets. As always it is about using the proper tool for the job, and a location like Moore Creek is a perfect spot for a detector like the White's TDI. You can find more details on the TDI on this website at the White's PulseScan TDI page.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2008 Herschbach Enterprises

People talk about how long it took to find their first nugget with a metal detector. Usually the discussion revolves around how much trash they had to dig before they found their first nugget. Well, I probably come close to setting some kind of record for the number of years involved. My problem was not finding lots of trash, it was not finding gold!

My first nugget hunt in 1973 taught me one thing about detectors at the time... they were nearly worthless for finding gold. I had my first metal detector, a White's Coinmaster 4. These old units could not ground balance, and had very poor sensitivity to small gold, even with the so-called Gold Probe accessory coil. I was panning 1/2 pennyweight nuggets from the little gully pictured at Moore Creek, and found I could not get a reading from those nuggets when they were placed directly under the coil.

My next detector was one of the early White's Goldmasters. I figured I needed a nugget detector instead of a coin detector. Imagine my surprise when I discovered all the Goldmaster was in those days was the Coinmaster circuit board in a larger box! If you are shopping for a used Goldmaster do not buy one of these old ones by mistake. They were blue and about the size of a mailbox. And about as useful for finding gold. I was getting into dredging at the time, and decided detectors were a waste of time for gold.

I got into business in 1976 selling mining gear and as a White's dealer. But my stock answer for people coming in looking for a gold detector was "Don't waste your money, you'll find more gold with a $5 gold pan". That was good advice at the time. We concentrated on selling metal detectors for finding coins and relics.

My bias caused me not to keep up with changes in the technology, however. Reports of a large nugget finds would appear every once in awhile. I chalked them up to "Yeah, sure you can find gold with a detector, if it's big enough"! And the nuggets found were usually pretty big, not something likely to be found in my immediate area.

Steve's First Nugget Hunt 1973
White's Coinmaster 4 with 4" Gold Probe
Moore Creek, Alaska

The first commercially available detector with ground balancing capability was the White's Coinmaster 5 Supreme. I was seriously into coin hunting, and purchased one of these new units. It was a very low frequency detector, and I found to my dismay that it really liked nails. One nice thing about the very old detectors was that they pretty much ignored nails, They Coinmaster 5 loved them and I was finding so many nails I took a dislike to the detector. But the depth of detection was amazing for the detectors of that time.

I sold it to a friend who was a heavy equipment type miner. He found a gold nugget weighing several ounces with it at his mine. This should have clued me in, but once again I chalked it up to being a lucky find of a very large nugget. I went on about my dredging, sluicing, and panning.

Finally in the 1980's I was also selling Compass detectors, and I hauled a Compass X-80 up to my claims and gave it a try. It had the capability, as my tests on smaller gold nuggets revealed it was pretty good. We were selling them now as nugget detectors, and some finds were being made with them. Unfortunately, I was not lucky enough to find any gold with the unit the one time I gave it a try. And it just reinforced my feeling about detectors as being a waste of time.

It was not until June 18, 1989 that I decided to give metal detecting for gold another try. Compass had repackaged the X-80 as a nugget detector called the Gold Scanner Pro. Here is my log entry for that day:

"Went to Crow Creek and used Compass Gold Scanner Pro. Found my first gold nuggets ever with a metal detector! Two nuggets within 10 feet of each other between Area #1 and Area #2 below old tailing pile at lower end. One nugget at 9 grains and the other at 4 grains, total of 13 grains. Also found two bullets."

I was hooked! I COULD find gold with a metal detector. It only took me 16 years to find my first nugget with one!!

I planned my first real nugget hunt. The destination was high in the Wrangell Mountains of Alaska on some bench deposits above a creek named Bonanza Creek. I had been visiting this area for years and had found lots of nice gold sniping the bedrock in the area. It seemed like a perfect spot to try my new detector skills. I used the Compass Gold Scanner Pro and I set my father up with a Fisher Gold Bug. I used the stock 8" round coil on the Compass, and outfitted my father with a 3-3/4" round coil that used to be available for the Gold Bug. We had a weekend to see what we could do, and so off we went on our first real nugget hunt.

Bedrock Exposed by Oldtimers

Bonanza Creek has several bench deposits high above the current creek level. These are remnants of stream deposits left high and dry as the stream eroded deeper into the valley bottom. They can often be spotted as flat areas on the valley sides above gold-bearing creeks. In some areas there is more gold in the bench deposits than in the creek itself. The problem for the oldtimers was in getting water up to these locations to work the gold deposits. Ditches many miles long were often dug to bring water along the valley walls from places father upstream to the deposits.

They usually used "giants", a term for very large water nozzles fed by pipes with water from the ditch systems to wash the gold free of the hillside gravels. Large areas could be worked in this fashion, with the material being funneled into sluice boxes running down the hill. Much gold was lost in these sluicing systems due to the large volumes of material being washed through the boxes. However the best target for the metal detector operator is not the tailing piles, but the large areas of bedrock exposed by these operations. Nuggets lodged in cracks and crevices as the material was being washed down the hill, and original concentrations of gold in the bedrock were often missed.

The only way for the old miners to get this gold would be to tear up all the bedrock and process it. The amount of gold to be had for this extreme extra effort was not much compared to what they would get just going on with their large scale washing operations. And so that gold is left to this day, waiting for someone to find it. Trying to scrape and pan crevices can produce some of this gold, but it is a needle in the haystack kind of search. Metal detectors are the perfect way to locate deposits of gold left in these old workings. The picture above shows a dark area of exposed bedrock we searched with our detectors.

  
Bud Herschbach with Fisher Gold Bug & Steve with Compass Gold Scanner Pro

We actually wasted quite a bit of time on bedrock along the creek before heading up to try the bench areas. We only found a few nuggets, and I now attribute this to the fact that most mining activity goes on near the water. People pan and sluice the material along the edge of the water, and dredgers work in the water. The area nearest the creek is the area receiving the most attention. One of the first things an experienced miner must do when getting into metal detecting is to lose this natural desire to stay near the water. What really makes detectors great is you need no water to find the gold, and so working away from the water actually will increase your odds of making finds overlooked by others. You have no choice in desert areas, but in stream valleys do not let the water distract you. Any exposed bedrock or material from the highest ridge on down has potential.

We started finding gold, but it was one particular hump of a dark slate bedrock that really started producing gold. My years of coin hunting paid off as I have much better detecting habits that my father. I always keep my coil as close as possible to the ground, and do not raise it on the end of my swings. I am methodical and carefully overlap my sweeps if I feel I am in the gold. My father tends to have his coil off the ground a lot, and wander around with no set pattern. The number one thing he could do to improve his finds would be to slow down and develop better coil control. But as he has often noted, he does not have the patience I do with a metal detector. And he makes good finds nonetheless.

Still, technique is important. My father was scanning along up a steep rise in the bedrock. He stepped up the rise with just a couple sweeps over the bedrock. I followed behind, carefully scanning every inch. The bedrock was nearly vertical at one point, and as I scanned the face I got a nice signal. My father was about 20 feet ahead of me when I yelled at him to look at the flat 4 pennyweight nugget I popped out of a crevice in the rock! It turned out to the largest nugget of the weekend, and in fact the largest nugget I had ever found up to that point prospecting for gold.

Gold Found by Bud & Steve - from my notes:

Large Flat Nugget - 4 dwt 2 grain
Fat Pendant Nugget - 2 dwt 8 grain
Dad's Big Nugget - 1 dwt 5 grain
Sitting Bird Nugget - 16 grain
Chunky Nugget - 16 grain
Long Flat Nugget - 14 grain
plus others total of 11 dwt 6 grain
Grand Total 1 oz 4 dwt 12 grain

"Great weather, great gold, GREAT TRIP!"

Gold nuggets Steve found with Compass Gold Scanner Pro

I had a fantastic time. Probably the most fun I'd ever had looking for gold. Metal detecting really appeals to my desire to just get out and walk around the hills. I went nugget hunting regularly after this trip. I tried new machines as they came out, and kept getting better results as the technology improved, allowing me to go back and rehunt old areas many times. My finds close to home really took off when the White's Goldmaster II was introduced, as the local creeks had lots of smaller gold on which the Goldmasters excelled.

Still, gold dredging produced the bulk of my gold yearly. I dredged locally, and large nuggets suitable for detecting were rare, although I did finally dredge a 1 ounce nugget at Crow Creek in 1998. Then in 2000 a few things happened to make me really get serious about nugget hunting.

First, I finally started getting bored with dredging. I had been doing it so many years it was becoming mechanical. It was mostly an equation. Run the 6" dredge for X hours at X location and get X gold. Dredging was also causing me to stay at the same locations for years at a stretch. I wanted to start moving around more and doing more pure prospecting. I was also finding my body was beginning to suffer from the years of cold water dredging. But the most important thing was those big nuggets. I decided that if I really wanted to see lots more really good-sized nuggets I'd better change my tactics. One 1 ounce nugget in 25 years of dredging meant I was going to die before I found a couple more!

So I consciously set dredging aside and concentrated on metal detecting. I sold my 6" dredge and used the funds to buy a Minelab SD2200D. Paired with a White's Goldmaster I figured I could handle most anything. The Goldmasters are very hot on smaller gold, but suffer in highly mineralized ground. The SD2200D is not very good on small gold, but excels on larger gold in the worst of mineralized ground conditions. So the two make an excellent combination for varying gold and ground conditions. Finally, and most importantly, I started contacting miners I've met over the years looking for access to big gold creeks.

The payoff was immediate. I found more pennyweight range nuggets in 2000 than I ever had in one year and found my largest ever with a detector at just over 8 dwt. Then in the summer of 2001 at Ganes Creek, Alaska I found a slug of 1/4 to 3/4 ounce nuggets and my largest nugget ever, a 4.95 ounce gold and quartz nugget. I was one of the happiest guys on the entire planet when that nugget came out of the ground! In 2002 I bettered it with a 6.85 ounce nugget and over 2 pounds of detected gold.

So there you go. It took me the longest time to warm up to these 21st century prospecting methods. But I am ready now to let the past go and put my pan, sluice box, and gold dredge aside to concentrate on this exciting field of electronic prospecting. I'm more excited now about prospecting than I have ever been, and cannot wait for my next opportunity to test my skills in the field.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2002 Herschbach Enterprises

Steve's Mining Journal Index

2013 is a very big year for me. I have decided to retire from my day job and for the immediate future focus on prospecting and writing. I anticipated this for some time and have spent the last couple years trying different things looking for my best options for getting gold. I've decided for 2013 to focus on suction dredging for gold as my best option. My partners and I have ground up in the historic 40 Mile mining district of Alaska on Jack Wade Creek. The creek has been mined for over 100 years so there is no question there is gold there. The question is after all that mining how much can I get there with a suction dredge?

I would not get all that excited over the prospects except for some 100 year type flooding that occurred the summer before last. A lot of bank material which is composed of old tailings fell into and was reconcentrated by the creek. The tailings are not full of gold by any means, but the volume of gravel washed and reconcentrated was considerable. Chances are there are some decent prospects in the area. My last short trip in the fall was to drive up and look the creek over. I decided the stretch of creek below will be the target for a dredging operation in 2013. The long inside curve looks inviting and a stretch of steeper, fast water just downstream will act as a good tailings dump.

The gold in the area is heavy, thick, well worn stuff. Old gold reconcentrated from ancient river channels. Here is a couple ounces I found detecting in the area to give you an idea what the gold looks like. The largest nugget is 17.6 pennyweight (20 pennyweight in a Troy ounce). The stuff is deceptively heavy compared to the quartzy gold I am used to finding and adds up fast. There is a chance we will get into a good quantity of this stuff in deep pockets and crevices in bedrock that got missed in previous mining.

Gold from Jack Wade Creek - largest nugget 17.6 dwt

I am going to partner up with my brother and use a Keene 6218GHM 6" dredge for the main operation. We will generally work split shifts but double up if need be. Long daylight hours in Alaska means we can both get a full days work in each day. I am going to rig it with 30 feet of suction hose and outriggers to carry the extra forward weight of the motor and hose combo. The long hose is not for going deep, it is to allow the dredge to stay in one location while a large area is worked. We should be working well under 10 feet deep at most but that is another area a bit unanswered at the moment. I am hoping maybe 6 feet to bedrock on average but that is nothing more than an educated guess.

The 6218GHM comes with 20 feet of 6" suction hose. I ordered mine with an additional 10 feet of SH6 6" hose. It is important to do this at time of order to get one continuous piece of hose. It is possible to attach two pieces of hose together with a thin steel sleeve (part number SHC6) but this creates a clog point due to the sleeve catching and flipping long flat rocks. It is something I will avoid if possible but sometimes two pieces are preferable due to transportations issues, like stuffing the hose in a Super Cub. There are also cases where it may be desirable to have the flexibility of running 20 feet or 30 feet of hose, so again a splicer is an option.

Keene 6218GMH suction dredge

The PFA5OK outrigger kit consists of two extra marlex pontoons and frame extensions for side mounting the extra floats outboard of the motors. I think I would prefer the floats inline and ahead of the main float assembly as I am not sure I want to make the unit any wider. I have never used the system though and it is all set to go as a kit so it will probably get used as is. I can always modify it later if need be.

I expect we may get high water that keeps us from dredging at times so I have also ordered a Keene 175X12 power sluice with extended 12 ' sluice and 3" dredge attachment. I intend on adding more suction hose and a 3" HydroForce nozzle to vacuum shallow gold bearing gravel from an exposed bench location on the claim. The extra long sluice is not for gold recovery so much as getting sufficient clearance for dumping tailings.

The power sluice motor and pump also serves double duty as a backup unit for the 6" dredge. A 6" can run off a pair of the GX200 P180 pumps that run the highbanker so if a GX270 on the 6" goes down for any reason I can toss this on. Always good to have a backup pump if possible. I am still considering whether to get a frame and float set for the power sluice which would give us a floating 3" dredge for prospecting.

Keene 175X12 Power Sluice with 3" dredge attachment

I filed for the permits this summer while I was busy on other projects so have all that taken care of already. This is federal land and it took several months to get all my permits lined up due to heavy case loads these days so plan in advance on this stuff. The main issue was long term camping which took a bond in this particular case. The days of just going out and camping long term on "public land" are over and anything more than a couple weeks expect that you may need a permit.

So we will be mostly dredging, with some high banking, and also breaks for detecting in the area depending on our mood and weather, etc. We will start mid-June and run an open ended operation. If the gold is good we just keep going until we get froze out but we will probably burn out before then. It all really just depends on gold and weather more than anything.

I am starting pretty fresh equipment wise so will keep you all informed as I go as to thought processes and costs just in case anyone is actually thinking of doing something like this or at least just curious. Old hat for me but not something I have done tons of for awhile so a bit of a switch from detecting. I did get a couple solid weeks of nozzle time on a 4" this summer just to get back in the swing of things. That just made me miss a 6" more than anything. A 6" is a very good production unit for a one or two person operation. Anything smaller I use more for prospecting than mining. I considered an 8" for this operation but decided on a 6" for more flexibility in the future. If the summer pays well enough an 8" may be in the cards for down the road.

So far I am investing $6995 for the 6" and $2745 for the power sluice. The SH6 hose is $20.00 a foot so ten extra feet runs $200.00 and the PFA5OK outrigger kit is $450.00. In for over $10,000.00 so far and barely got started, but that is a big chunk of it. That will probably go in on a 5 year depreciation schedule though that is up to the accountant and new tax changes. I am not going to count claim costs and permitting costs directly as I have several partners in the claims so that all gets spread out over the years we own the claims. The main immediate overhead in that regard will be the 10% the partnership collects for claim expenses and cost recovery. Since I am funding the operation I will probably take another 10% myself to cover wear and tear on equipment and fuel costs. My brother and I will split the remaining 80%. All he needs to do is pony up for travel costs, food, and his drysuit.

Low water on Jack Wade Creek

While I am on the subject let's talk business for a moment. My prospecting is a for profit enterprise, one that has made me a surprising amount of money over the years. As such I run it as a business. I have a business license for Herschbach Enterprises and file a schedule C yearly. It has been a going concern under a couple different names for over 30 years now.

The key is to be serious about running things in a businesslike fashion. I have a business checking account and keep my business spending separate from my personal spending. I have been very low level the last few years but now that I am ramping up in 2013 I am cleaning up the books. I even went so far as to buy Quickbooks and am working on getting everything plugged into that now. Since I am retiring from my regular day job Herschbach Enterprises will now be my main source of income so I need to keep it neat and tidy in case the IRS comes knocking.

It is something rarely discussed, I assume because most people do this as a hobby. Even then if you do it right you can write off the expenses against the profits, but you cannot show a loss. I rarely show a loss myself though in a year where I make a lot of purchases and hold back on gold sales it can happen. However, with the price of gold as high as it is now it does not take much selling to end up showing a profit. In any case, if you are someone who is actually finding any quantity of gold it is something well worth learning about.

Business or Hobby? https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/business-or-hobby-answer-has-implications-for-deductions

Hobby Deductions. https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/is-your-hobby-a-for-profit-endeavor

Placer Mining Business. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-mssp/placer.pdf

Kind of boring stuff but extremely important things that need to thought about and planned for if you want to do it right. Needless to say I am pretty excited about the coming summer though! Now I need to start thinking about which drysuit I want to use. More to come so check back from time to time for updates.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2013 Herschbach Enterprises

This is a follow up of my previous post about finding a couple Mercury dimes in a row with the Equinox. There is important information there about ground conditions and so if you have not read it already now would be a good time.

I was stuck in a race against time because I got a final hardware/pre-production version of Equinox just before freeze-up hit here in Reno. Prior to that I spent very little time having fun detecting - it was all development type work. Once I got the "close to final version" of the hardware I suddenly realized if I wanted to go detecting with Equinox I had better get with the program before the ground froze. With time running out what you are looking at is the results of less than a dozen outings to local parks, maybe 3-4 hours at a time average. The ground actually froze a few weeks ago and so I saved this post just to have something to show during a period of time that I figured I would be out of action.

I am not trying to prove anything per se here, but what I saw convinced me Equinox has that little bit something extra I have been looking for in a coin detector. It is not purely a depth thing but a combination of depth and speed that seems to pull silver out of places where I had not been having much luck for three years with quite a few VLF detectors. Anyway, I figure everyone is starved for somebody to post something of a positive nature and this is my New Year's gift to you all. Click for larger version.

Coins, jewelry, and keys found by Steve with new Minelab Equinox

I wish now I had kept the trash to show because I was cherry picking targets, and that being the case there was very little trash dug for this pile of coins. Way more coins than trash. I mostly just targeted the copper penny/silver range to maximize my time but did go after some nickel signals. As far as I know the target id numbers are locked in now, so I will mention a couple. Nickels hit hard at 16 and for copper/silver I was digging anything that gave me a 28 or higher. Corroded copper, Indian Head pennies, and zinc pennies will generally hit lower than that in the 24 - 27 range but like I say I was cherry picking. (Jan 2018 edit: the numbers have changed - nickels now at 13 and copper pennies/dimes at 25 and higher.)

So we have a large pile of recent vintage coins. Junk jewelry and keys in upper right.

There are 52 "Wheatback" pennies or wheaties as people call them. We all love wheaties, not because they are worth much these days since so many are in poor condition, but because if you are finding wheatback pennies then silver can't be far away. The oldest coins in this batch are in there though - 1911, 1913, and 1918 pennies. My favorite was a 1930 penny found at less than 2 inches next to a picnic table where each swing revealed a couple dozen targets. Literally a carpet of trash. There is stuff hiding in trash and not all that deep at times. A nice little squeak revealed this particular penny in the midst of the dense trash.

The silver though is what grabbed my attention. One of the first places I went was smack in the middle of a picnic table type location that by all rights should have been hunted clean of silver ages ago, and I kind of thought it was using the machines I tried there before. So when a 1936 Quarter popped out almost immediately I was surprised. Every outing I was digging quite a few wheatback pennies, and on nearly every outing a silver coin or two showed up. The 1916 S Barber dime also showed up early, only the second one I have ever dug, so I was pretty thrilled with that. It also was a learning experience because I also found a 1916 S Mercury dime. Until now I had no idea both series were minted in 1916.

Some great old silver coins found by Steve with new Minelab Equinox

The one that really blew me away was the 1945 S Walking Liberty Half Dollar in excellent condition. Again, right in the middle of a picnic area. I got a nice high tone and not all that deep up comes a round lump of clay with a white ring showing around the edge. I thought it was a bottle cap, and so gave the lump a twist and the half dollar popped out. The coin is really in great shape and much to my annoyance I seem to have put a small scrape in the middle of the coin when I twisted the lump of dirt off. Just a great coin though with halves being a rare find these days.

What puzzled me is why it was there less than 8" deep in a location that has no doubt seen hundreds of detectors if not more over the last few decades. I hit that immediate spot hard of course, and it developed that there must have been an old pipe there that had corroded away to nothing. There was a linear zone that wanted to produce quite a few high tone ferrous wrap signals, which tend to hit around 39 very consistently, well above the 28 - 36 range where copper and silver normally hits. I suspect others have detected that half dollar before but wrote it off as a false signal or maybe it was just ferrous masking. Whatever it was, Equinox found it easily. That is what is weird about this machine. I will be shocked if people do not end up making similar reports where you are just shaking your head and thinking "but that coin should not have been there"!

Obviously I found a few more Mercury dimes and some Roosevelt silvers. There is a 1942 P "War Nickel" from when they made nickels with a high silver content since nickel was a strategic metal during WW2. And a 1920 Buffalo nickel. They both hit hard at 16, which is surprising given the difference in composition. Some nickels hit at 15 or 17 but the vast majority are real tight at 16. Equinox is going to be a cherry pickers dream. (Jan 2018 edit: the numbers have changed - nickels now at 13 and copper pennies/dimes at 25 and higher.)

New Minelab Equinox hits the parks for some coin detecting

Anyway, there it is for whatever it is worth. No doubt a few people are thinking "big deal" and that would not surprise me. The only reason I am impressed is the number of hours I have spent with quite a few of the latest and greatest in these same locations, and nothing like this was happening. The main thing I want to communicate is I was not doing anything special, like chasing lots of iffy signals. These with few exceptions were all nice solid, clean signals. Obviously pushing the edge of what the machine will do in this ground, but good signals nonetheless.

Anyone that detects a lot gets quite familiar with their ground and what detectors can do in that ground. We all miss targets, and nearly any ground will give up some good targets to a determined detectorist. The thing is I was no less determined with those other detector models. I only look to prove things to myself, and this little bit of detecting over a couple week span is what convinced me that there is more going on with Equinox than meets the eye. I really am looking forward to others getting these detectors and reporting in because if they give Equinox a chance, I am convinced others are going to have similar experiences. Just remember that Equinox can't make coins appear where none are left to be found. If they are there however, Equinox is going to be the machine I grab from now on to find them. When a detector puts silver in my pocket as easily as happened with me and Equinox, I can't help liking the machine!

This post originated on the DetectorProspector Forum. There might be additional information available there in follow up posts.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2017 Herschbach Enterprises

The weather looked poor Sunday morning, with heavy dark clouds in the sky in Anchorage. I left town and was surprised to have the weather clear as I approached Crow Creek Mine. It was sunny but a bit cool at 9AM when I arrived at the mine. Brian Berkhahn was waiting when I arrived, and Jeff Reed arrived shortly after. We were all there to metal detect for gold, as were several other people that morning.

I had decided to try the Tesoro Lobo SuperTRAQ detector for the day. This unit features automatic ground balance and seemed fairly powerful when I bench tested it. Other items in my kit include a set of headphones, a heavily used pick, plastic scoop for retrieving targets, and a plastic vial for my finds. A short-handle hoe/rake comes in handy for removing leaves and rubble from areas. Finally, leather gloves and bug repellent go in the rucksack, along with something to drink.

Jeff had his trusty Fisher Gold Bug 2, and Brian was sporting a Minelab XT 18000. In general, high frequency detectors work best at Crow Creek. The ground mineralization is very low, hot rocks are rare, and the gold, unfortunately, tends to be small. The White's Goldmasters (50 kHz) are very popular at the mine. I have also seen quite a few Minelab XT 18000 detectors at the mine lately, which can be set at 60 kHz.

Steve with Tesoro SuperTRAQ and 7.8 grain nugget

Crow Creek has been hit hard by people with detectors over the last few years, so the easy finds that can be had by simply scanning the surface are getting rare. Usually a little more work is required at this point. Crow Creek Mine is a large open hydraulic pit over 200 feet deep. It has grown up so much that it resembles a natural stream valley, but digging at any point on the banks of the creek can reveal gold-bearing material. Gold can be found hundreds of feet from the creek. Unfortunately, leaves and roots cover the material now, so a rake or hoe come in handy for trying new areas.

The rest of the crew headed upstream to try some steep banks that tend to have new material slide down them in the spring. I paused to scrape the leaves from a little knoll, which was well away from the creek. I was thrilled when the very first target I got was a 7.8 grain nugget! Usually gold occurs in patches, so it is a good idea to really hit an area if you find a single piece of gold. Twenty nails later, I headed upstream to see how everyone else was doing. It seemed to be the only nugget on the hill. I'm sure there is more gold on that knoll, but it will have to wait for another day.

Jeff was hitting a large slide area well upstream. A few nuggets had been found on the slope, and he had just found a small nugget. I tried the area a bit but had no luck, so I headed for another little bank right next to the creek. Jeff found no more gold, so headed downstream. My search of the bank revealed two small nuggets, 2.4 gr. and 2.3 gr., on a clay layer that headed into the bank. Again it seemed as if the gold ran out, but I am sure there is more there, so I'll be back.

I headed downstream and saw one of the most interesting metal detector finds I can imagine. A large tree had been uprooted in an area known to contain good gold. The root clump was sticking out over the ground, and Jeff was detecting it. We have all heard of gold being found in roots, and I am here to report that Jeff found two gold nuggets over four feet above the ground!

Jeff with Gold Bug 2, Brian with Minelab XT18000, Jeff detecting root wad

I searched the area and only found one more small nugget, a 1.4 grain piece perched on a little ridge-top. That brought my total for the day to 4 nuggets weighing 13.9 grains, or just over 1/2 pennyweight. I am very pleased with the Tesoro Lobo SuperTRAQ. It was very smooth, required no ground balancing, and found a 1.4 grain nugget. I found this surprising as the machine is a 17.5 kHz unit, but I would have to rate its sensitivity as equal to many of the higher frequency models available. It also features a coin-hunting discrimination mode, which makes it one of the most versatile detectors on the market. Finally, I appreciated the light weight of the unit, as my arm was out of shape for long-term detecting.

It was a very pleasant day, with gold found, and nary a mosquito bite. The gold was a bit sparse... Jeff found five nuggets but my four weighed more. Some of the other guys also found a few nuggets, but nobody seemed to be having a hot day. Nugget hunting is much more hit and miss than dredging, so we'll see what future detecting days bring.

Steve's gold for the day (13.9 grains)

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

I decided it would be nice to take a trip to Petersville and do a little exploring. Some miners in the area recently purchased some mining gear from me and invited me up to visit. It turned out that my friend Ben knew them also, so we decided to meet at the Petersville State Recreational Mining Site Saturday morning to try to go find them. We both planned to leave Friday, but our differing schedules made hooking up at Petersville easier than trying to coordinate going up at the same time.

I tried to get off work early, but as usual barely made it out before closing. It is 150 miles to Petersville from Anchorage, and so it was getting dark by the time I pulled into the Recreational Site. I threw my sleeping bag over myself in the front seat of my truck, and went to sleep.

The next morning revealed overcast skys with a little blue showing here and there. I had one of the new Bombardier Traxter ATV’s on a trailer behind my truck, and so after a quick breakfast I got it off the trailer. Ben showed up about that time, and we decided to take a quick exploratory run over towards Cache Creek. I drove the Traxter and Ben followed in his truck. Our real goal was upper Peters Creek, so as we went down the road we kept our eyes open for a side road heading off in the right direction.

After a short while, we decided we must have missed our turn-off and doubled back. We found a road headed the right way, and proceeded on. The road ended up following upper Peters creek into a narrow canyon. We came to a creek crossing followed by a very steep hill that tested both the truck and the Traxter. We both got across the water and up the hill, but Ben got a flat tire somehow in the process.

A short tire change and we were once again on our way. A little side trail ran off to one side, and Ben thought it led to the miner’s camp. It was a good thing Ben was with me, as I would have missed it entirely. The women of the operation were in camp, and after visiting a bit, they led us up to the dredging operation.

The miners had two 4” dredges working in the creek. They were on some shallow bedrock, and reported finding some decent gold, but nothing to get too excited about. The bedrock sure looked nice through that clear water, however, and it made me wish I had my dredge along. Ben did have his, and he took the guys up on an invitation to throw his rig in the water and give it a try.

One 4” dredge was a standard Keene 4” dredge. The other was one of the more creative dredges I have seen in quite a long time. The miner had the frame mounted on a set of axles and ATV tires. He could roll it around and drag it up the creek on gravel bars, and when the water was deep enough the tires actually had enough floatation to keep the setup above water. It looked like a very good dredge for shallow water use.

Dredge On Tire Floatation!

I decided to explore further up the valley on the Traxter. These units are some of the larger and more powerful ATVs available, and driving the machine around was a lot of fun. I drove up the valley as far as I could go and got pretty far up on the hill overlooking the valley. It was a great view, well above tree line. I sure do like alpine country!

I decided to explore down the valley, and ended up following an old ditch line that had been converted into a rough trail. It got to where I was pretty far down below the road, with no end of the trail in sight. Rather than double back, I decided to really put the Traxter to the test and see if I could just head straight up the hill across rough terrain.

Traxter Overlooking Valley

The hill was about as steep as I could negotiate, and rocks covered with moss tossed the machine around quite a bit. I wondered if this was such a wise idea after all! There were many brush patches, and it looked like I might not be able to pick a path all the way to the road. It turned out to be a close thing, but I did find a narrow passage through the brush, and after a heart-stopping last second climb, I found myself back on the road.

I went back up to where the dredging was going on. Not much gold to report, but Ben wanted to spend the night and keep trying Sunday. The thought was tempting, but I was feeling a little under the weather at that point, and so decided I’d head back towards town after some more exploring. I wished everyone good luck and headed back on down the valley.

On the way up the valley, some large mining pits had caught my eye, and I explored them a bit. There was an old pipe system feeding into the pit, and a large triple box sluice down in the middle of the operations. The pipe and some old mining gear appeared to date from the early mining in the area, but the triple box was obviously from a more recent heavy equipment operation.

Old Pipe System     and      Loader Fed Triple Box

I poked around the pit and some gullies exploring, but someone up along the road started firing a gun. They were obviously target practicing, but did not know I was in the area, and I did not know which way they were firing. It made me nervous enough that I cut my explorations short and got back up on the main road. The area looked like it would make for some interesting metal detecting, but I will have to track the claim owner down for permission first.

I made my way back to my truck and loaded up the Traxter. Although I had not found any gold, I have found that these exploratory trips are well worth the time. In fact, I need to do them more often. Once I get looking for gold I tend to stay in a pretty small area. So taking a day now and then and just looking the country over can be a good idea. You never know what new prospects might be waiting just over the next hill.

Postscript: I talked to Ben on Monday and reported that he had found a bit of gold, but not enough that I felt like I had missed out on a major strike. In fact, the miners were anxious to move on to some new ground they had staked farther up the valley. However, it sounds like I missed a great meal at the camp that night!

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2001 Herschbach Enterprises

After returning from Moore Creek in July I put the word out that I was looking for Honda 200 three-wheelers. I was offered one in good condition and bought it, plus another one not running that I purchased for parts. My father came up with a Honda 110 that a friend gave him. Our little fleet was growing. I wanted to make sure that for our assault on the old bulldozer we had plenty of ability to transport people and tools the three miles over the mountain to where the unit was stuck in a bog.

When we acquired Moore Creek some of the equipment we got was actually over the mountain at another creek named Deadwood Creek. In fact, that other location was where the bulldozer was coming from when it got stuck three miles out from our camp. There was another Honda 200 ATV over at that far camp, and so my father and I decided to fly up to Moore Creek, drop off one of our just purchased Hondas, and then fly over the hill and get that three-wheeler.

This proved to be a true Alaska Bush pilot adventure. I’ve flown around Alaska with my father for 40 years now and we have seen some pretty exciting moments in that time. But in recent years usually the flying is uneventful and even downright boring. Every once in awhile though you tackle some new airstrip in a remote location and things can get very interesting, to say the least. This proved to be one of those times.

We crammed a Honda 200 3-wheeler into the Cessna 206 and flew it into Moore Creek. No big deal there. My father had checked out the Deadwood Creek airstrip previously when we had a friend up to Moore Creek with a Super Cub. He figured he could put the 206 in and so we went for it. The strip is dozed over the curve of a hill and grown up with brush. It is always something to be making a landing for the first time on a strip like that, and this was no exception. We hit the ground going uphill, and then had to skid to the left to stay on what appeared to be the best route. You roll up over the crest and down the other side, so forward visibility is limited. We made it but it was one of the more exciting landings I've made with him in some time.

Airstrip at Deadwood Creek, Alaska over the hill from Moore Creek

We explored a bit, and then loaded up the Honda 200 three-wheeler to take over to Moore Creek. The unit appeared to have real low hours but had been sitting in the weather for years. Two tires were flat, and although it would turn over the fuel tank was full of rust and it would not start. Then came the fun part... takeoff. A Cessna 206 with two guys and gear is iffy on this strip. We ran flagging over the hill so we would know which way to go since we could not see over the crest of the hill. Not only does the strip run over the hill but it is not straight. We had to spend an hour breaking brush and even tall grass as it slows you down plowing through it. We rolled the plane on down to the lower end of the strip, which meant a takeoff run up a pretty good slope, leveling at the top, then hopefully getting off the ground as we rolled down the other side.

We had a preference for one direction as there are ridges to clear both ways, but the one way the ridge is farther away. Plus, if we had to abort the crash zone was smoother that way. We would run into downhill sloping brush as opposed to falling into a small valley the other way. No, I'm not kidding, you plan your crash... just in case. Only problem was a tacking tailwind going that way. So we parked and waited a half hour watching a piece of flagging tied in a tree. It finally hung down straight indicating a lull in the breeze, and we went for it.

After all the suspense, we got off with no problem. That, my friends, is what it is like flying small planes in Bush strips in Alaska. This scenario may sound insane to some but it is what you have to do to be able to see and operate in the vast 99% of Alaska that nobody else ever sees. You have to be willing to land on beaches and ridges and marginal airstrips just barely carved out of the wilderness. The secret to success is an old Alaska Bush pilot saying - “There are old pilots and bold pilots but no old bold pilots”. You have to know when to go for it, and when to just give it up and go back home. And dear old Dad has proven he knows how and when to make those calls.

The stage was set for the next attempt to get the old bulldozer back into camp. However, before I would return to Moore Creek I planned on making one last nugget hunt at Ganes Creek. This trip was prompted by Steve Burris finding an incredible 33.85 oz nugget at Ganes in June 2004, right on top of the ground in an area heavily hunted by others in the past, including myself. It was the largest nugget found at Ganes with a detector up until that point, and highlighted just how easy it is to miss nuggets when dealing with an area the size of Ganes Creek. Seeing a picture of the nugget gave me a case of gold fever, and the desire to give Ganes just one more try.

I put the word out I was planning a trip to Ganes Creek, and in short order a group of people signed up to go the same week. Half were local people I know, and the other half were visitors from down south, mostly from Arizona and Nevada. Some of these I knew by reputation and the internet to be knowledgeable nugget hunters and so it had the makings of an interesting week. I planned on meeting my father in McGrath as the group left Ganes Creek and going straight over to Moore Creek rather than returning to Anchorage.

The stuck D9 bulldozer

The Ganes Creek trip is a long story in itself, but one I’ll leave for another time. The short story is that we had delays getting both into Ganes Creek and out due to the smoke from the many forest fires in Alaska that summer. It also became apparent that the years and number of hunters at Ganes Creek have had an effect on the chances of finding nuggets at Ganes Creek. I actually was very pleased with the nuggets I found, but the fact is that most of the visitors from the Lower 48 had pretty poor luck finding gold. In the early days most anyone swinging a detector at Ganes Creek could find a nugget, but at this point I think only the very experienced or very lucky will be finding nuggets in the future at Ganes Creek. It also was obvious that nugget detecting experience elsewhere does not prepare people for nugget hunting tailing piles in Alaska. It is a different game, and requires a different set of skills. Some of the guys from down south were not too happy with their finds… or lack thereof… for the week.

While I found some nice nuggets and had a good week at Ganes Creek, it was with a certain amount of relief that I found myself watching the rest of the group get on the plane in McGrath and head back to civilization. I count among some of the very best times of my life those times when I have been totally on my own in remote locations of Alaska. There is something enlivening about being totally dependent on ones self and the knowledge that there is nobody to bail you out if something goes wrong.

So now what? The smoke from the forest fires prevented my father from making it over the Alaska Range to McGrath to pick me up for the trip to Moore Creek. It was morning still, and I faced the prospect of checking into a hotel and waiting it out. By the time I got supper and breakfast I’d be looking at a $100 bill.

The smoke was thick in the area but had lifted since early morning, and it looked flyable to me. So I wandered over to Magnuson Air and asked Lucky if he thought he could get me to Moore Creek. It costs $250 one way to the mine from McGrath but I figured I’d be getting a $100 discount by not staying in McGrath. Plus, I’d be able to get to work at the mine instead of just killing time. Lucky figured we could make it to Moore Creek, and so I loaded my gear up into the Magnuson 206 and we headed for the mine.

It was actually a nice, sunny day despite the smoke, and the smoke thinned as we got to Moore Creek. We landed at the mine, and then Lucky took off to head back to McGrath. I opened up the camp and did odds and ends work waiting for my father and cousin Bob to arrive. I hung around camp a bit the next morning half expecting them to show up, and was just getting ready to go up and clear trail when they did finally arrive. They had a tale of wandering mountain passes in thick smoke trying to find a way over the Alaska Range that sounded not a bit fun, so I was glad they had made it to the mine safe and sound.

We cleared the last bit of trail to the top of the mountain and so were finally able to drive our three-wheelers all the way to the bulldozer. The trail is actually an existing bulldozer route that has grown up over the years and so along some portions is actually like an old road in the lower elevations but fades to a bare trail above tree line. Once you get above tree line the ridges are rounded and smooth and so it is pretty easy to get around on an ATV.

Using Honda 3-wheelers to run supplies over hill to stuck D9 bulldozer

We took a dual approach to getting the bulldozer unstuck. A combination of trying to dig it out and trying to get the old beast started up. The D9 is a 1950’s era model that uses a small gasoline motor referred to as a “pony motor” for a starter. So first step was to try and get the pony motor started. It uses a 6V car type battery and so we used the ATVs to haul up a battery plus some fresh gas. The first thing we discovered was that the small exhaust pipe sticking straight up out of the top of the dozer had not been covered, and when we cranked the pony motor over water puked up out of the exhaust pipe! We drained what we could, and then ran the battery dead trying to clear water out of the system. The battery did not last any time at all, actually. The old starter motor seemed to just suck it dead in very little time. We spent the rest of the day digging away at the lower rear track where it was sunk in the mud.

If we could get the motor running, we could hopefully use the rear ripper hydraulics to push down and lift the rear of the dozer up, so that logs could be stuffed under the tracks. But since we had more people than we really needed digging seemed to be another approach to take while also keeping busy. The old bulldozer has a cable lift blade in front, which unfortunately cannot be used to do the same thing up front. It can only lift, not push down.

We headed back to camp eventually and put the battery on a charger overnight. Dad and Bob decided to fly over to one of the nearby mines to borrow a jack and returned with a loaned 40 ton jack. Then back up to the dozer for more digging and work. We got the rear corner of the dozer dug out far enough to get the jack under it and this started an effort of putting rocks and timbers under the jack and driving them down into the muck until a solid base was created. It took a lot of work to finally get the rear of the dozer to lift a couple inches. And with that accomplished, we stuck timbers under the rear of the track, which when the jack was let down just sunk into the muck. Over and over we jacked the unit up, stuffed timbers and rocks under the track, and let it down to all sink right back to where we started.

We got the pony motor clear of water but it still would not start before the battery ran dead. And finally after a couple days we ran out of time and had to return to Anchorage.

Lots of digging, lots of work with hydraulic jacks and log sections

This time I returned with my other partner John, along with more batteries as the single battery was not giving us any life before it ran dead, and having to return to camp to charge it overnight was taking too much time. Plus a new jack. I found there was no spark on the pony motor, and so I pulled off the magneto, cleaned up the points, and put it back together. And Pow, Pop, Pop, Pow! Smoke came out and more water came from somewhere and got the plugs wet but at least we had fire! But we ran the batteries dead without the motor actually starting. We spent more time digging, and more time pulling every part of the pony motor apart we could trying to get it to start. It would pop and backfire and do everything but actually run. Finally we gave up and once again we had to return to Anchorage, frustrated by our inability to get the motor running. The dozer was now so dug out that it would most likely drive out of the hole, if only we could get it running. The fall colors were out in full, and winter was coming fast. We needed to do something soon or winter would put things off for another season.

I got a hold of my old friend Tom, who has worked with heavy equipment for many years. He is a very busy person, but he agreed to come up and try and figure out what was up with the pony motor. I was stymied at this point, and was worried about the delay. Overland permits for bulldozer travel off claim blocks can generally only be had in the winter months. The ground is softer in the warmer months and so travel when the ground is frozen protects the ground. If we could not get the dozer running before winter set in, we would most likely lose an entire season. The main limitation in the permits is the requirement that the ground have snow cover. We needed to get the bulldozer onto the claims while the ground was still frozen.

Tom, my father, and I returned to the mine for one last try in early October. The snow could fly at any moment, and we not only wanted to try and get the bulldozer running, but also wanted to stake some more mining claims. We had our hands full, and this was likely to be the last chance with the bulldozer for the season.

We made it to the mine, and settled in for the evening. And awoke the next morning to snow and thick fog. It was only a dusting of snow, but it covered the ground just enough to hide the trail to the bulldozer. Add in the heavy fog, and we were soon basically lost up on top of the mountain trying to find our way to the bulldozer. Luckily I had used my GPS on the previous visit to trace the trail. Even so, what the GPS said argued heavily with what our eyes were seeing. Were it not for the GPS I have doubts we would ever have found the bulldozer that day.

Winter is coming - fresh snow at Moore camp

But find it we did, and Tom proceeded to try and figure out why the pony motor would not start. We had over time eliminated almost every possibility, and when you get right down to it these old motors really are not very complicated. You need fuel, compression, and spark. The only thing that seemed weird was all the backfiring and that the carb would want to blow out backwards instead of pulling air.

There simply seemed to be no options left, when I thought back on my previous work on the motor. Early on I had pulled the magneto apart to clean the points. Did I maybe not put it back together correctly? It is a simple thing to disassemble, but if you are not careful you can put it back together 180 degrees out of where it came apart. I wondered about this for awhile, and finally piped up with “you know, maybe I put the magneto back together backwards”.

So we pulled the magneto off, rotated it 180 degrees, and put it back together. Tom got on the dozer, turned the pony motor over… and it fired right up! I felt a very strange combination of embarrassment at having been the cause of a lot of extra work, and happiness at having finally figured out what the problem was.

Tom let the pony motor run a bit, and after a rough start it smoothed out and sounded just great, albeit loud as heck. Kind of like listening to a shotgun firing 3600 times per minute. Then he engaged the clutch to the main motor, and smoke puffed out the big stack. And puffed, and puffed, and then all the sudden our bulldozer was running!

Smoke coming out of the stack - the D9 starts!!

What an incredible moment! The main engine really sounded good, and Tom let it warm up for some time. Then he gave a pull on a lever, and the blade lifted. We have a ripper unit on the back of the dozer, and had filled the tank with fresh hydraulic fluid. Tom pulled another lever, and the ripper blade lifted up.

Dad and I got all the remaining timbers we had and laid out a parking pad just ahead of the dozer on level ground. We had just enough logs to cover two track lengths. Then the moment of truth arrived, Tom pulled more levers and the bulldozer drove out of the hole.

Whoops and yells and handshakes all around ensued. Tom parked the bulldozer on our logs, and powered her down. We drained and covered everything to the best of our ability for the winter ahead, and left the dozer for the next spring. It was amazing how everything finally happened in so short a period of time, but it was all the hours of preparatory work that made it all seem so easy at the end.

Dozer up and out of the hole, ready to drive to Moore Creek next spring

We did our claim staking, and closed up the camp for winter. The year 2004 at Moore Creek came to an end, and the snows of winter came shortly after we left the mine. Success could not have come any later that year.

Events slowed, but I did get an Overland Permit lined up in anticipation of moving the bulldozer into camp in the spring of 2005. Travel within a claim block is covered under our mining permits, but since the bulldozer was off the claims we needed a permit to bring it into camp. The main limitation was that overland movement had to be while the ground was frozen and covered with snow, and so we were aiming for an early spring operation.

We were planning for April, but the winter of 2004-2005 proved to be one of the heaviest snow years on record. Dad and I flew up to the mine in April, but the dozer had snow drifted over the seat. It was still too early, and so we took advantage of the snow, and asked our friend Mike to fly a load of gear up to the dozer with his Super Cub, which was on skies for the winter. He landed on the hill by the dozer, and left a battery, propane tanks, a heater, and tarps plus some miscellaneous gear. Dad and I planned on flying into Moore Creek just before the snow melted, and so getting that gear to the dozer would have meant lots of snowshoeing. Now we were set.

We monitored the snow situation, and finally flew up in early May in my brother-in-laws Citabria. Our original permit expired the end of April but I was able to get a two week extension due to the extreme snow conditions. There was still a few feet of snow on the ground in places but in most areas there was less than a couple feet. We made some passes over the bulldozer, and I launched sleeping bags and some basic camping supplies out of the plane. I’ve done some of these “bombing runs” before and they are actually kind of fun. Dad does all the work, however. I just hold stuff out the door until he yells “Go”! and I let go of it. With any luck it lands halfway close to the target.

Aerial view from Citabria of snow in the hills in early 2005

We landed at Moore Creek, and hiked up to the dozer on snowshoes. We planned on camping the night, and heating the motor overnight, but it was rather warm (relatively speaking) when we got to the dozer so we went ahead and tried to start her. And amazingly, it fired right up!

I had been studying my D9 bulldozer manuals, but the fact is I have never driven anything even close to one of these monsters. I really had no true idea what I was doing, but just followed the manuals. That worked well enough in getting the unit started, but finally after warming her up I had to make the big move. We loaded up all the tools, batteries and other gear. I held my breath, put it in gear, and engaged the clutch. The next thing I knew I was driving a D9 bulldozer up a mountainside.

I had been warned that no matter how big these things seem, driving into too deep of snow conditions could get you high-centered in short order. The snow was only a foot or two deep, but I could not tell really how deep it was, except for my what seemed like endless trips over the trail on the three-wheelers the previous fall. I just kept her going slow and forged ahead, and after a bit it actually seemed pretty easy. Dad and I both had grins on our faces as well drove along, with all the overnight gear we had pre-staged loaded on the bulldozer unused.

Up the hill I went, and down the other side. Basically just a drive over the hill, and I got to being lulled into how easy it all was. Finally we were on our claims, and camp was only minutes away. I was on cruise control, just enjoying the ride. And then the dozer broke through the crust and muck started churning! Only a heartbeat seemed to pass, but next thing I knew we had come to a stop in the middle of the trail. Apparently the low flat bog areas which we were passing through just before arriving at camp had thawed under the snow. The only good news was that it was still frozen a short distance below, but the dozer was spinning on the frozen muck and could gain no traction to get up and out of the hole we were in.

Still, we had made it 99% of the way into camp, and so could not feel all that bad about the situation. It was only a 10-15 minute hike to camp, and we got a good nights sleep. Then up and back to the dozer the next morning, to get out of our little situation. We took chains, cables, and clamps for camp with us, and a chainsaw. We cleared a bunch of alders ahead of the dozer and laid them down in front of it to make an exit pad. The we cut a big dead spruce and levered it over in front of the tracks with a long pry bar. We took cables and ran then through the tracks and around the log. I fired up the dozer, and when I engaged the clutch the front end climbed up on the log and what seemed an incredible angle. I half closed my eyes, and the front end came up out of the hole, and fell over out and onto the alder pile ahead of the log. We were unstuck and on the first try.

Project a year in the making - D9 finally back at Moore Creek and Steve clearing airstrip

I now was much more cautious heading into camp, as my inattention the day before had got us stuck. If it even threatened to get soft ahead, I drove over the alders next to the trail, which created a natural pad. The next thing I knew I was driving the bulldozer into camp, and when I finally parked it and got off it was one of the happiest days of my life. I literally wanted to kiss the ground! Dad and I hugged and shook hands and slapped each other on the back. In all our years I do not think we have tackled a project that took so long and so much effort as moving this D9 bulldozer into Moore Creek camp. And like all things difficult to achieve, the final success was all that much more satisfying. In all the excitement I forget to take any pictures, but here is a shot of the old girl back in camp later in the year, with me working on clearing and extending the runway.

I have to finish this tale by thanking Bob, John, Tom, Doug, Mike, and most of all my father, Bud Herschbach, for all their hard work and contributions towards getting our bulldozer back to camp. There is no way I could have done it without them. Thanks guys!

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2005 Herschbach Enterprises

Steve's Mining Journal Index

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

The snow has finally melted enough to let me try out my new White's Electronics Goldmaster GMT and several coils. The GMT is my newest nugget detector. I really like the GMT's fast automatic ground balance and advanced iron id capabilities. But most of all it has much better depth of detection on larger gold than my old Fisher Gold Bug 2, and so I'm hoping to eke some deeper nuggets out of some areas, especially some of those places that also have lots of iron trash.

I went to Crow Creek Mine near Anchorage, Alaska. A good local site, but hammered by detectors over the years. It's getting to where you have to dig to find nuggets with a detector rather then just scan the surface. Excavating slowly into an area and checking the material with the detector as you go pays off more often now.

I wanted to try several things. My first plan was to use the Sierra Gold Max coil to carefully scan areas that have been detected before, hoping to find a larger nugget down just a bit deeper than others may have detected. A real long-shot at Crow Creek, but I try it now and then. The reason I say it is a long-shot is that pennyweight plus nuggets are pretty rare at Crow Creek anyway, and betting someone missed them in the heavily searched areas is a poor bet indeed. But you never know unless you try.

There was still a lot of snow at the mine, so I spent the first half of the day with the big coil hitting south facing slopes. The going was as steep as I could handle, and my chest mount setup was welcome. It was steep enough I would find decent footing, then scan in all directions as far as I could reach. Keeping the weight off my arm was a big plus. But a half day of this mountain goat detecting revealed not a single nugget.

Area #1 at Crow Creek Mine, early spring

My arm got tired, and so I put the stock DD coil back on and headed for a little flatter ground. There are lots of brushy areas at Crow Creek that are relatively open right after the snow melts off, but which will be jungle-thick after the new brush grows up in a few weeks. I worked in among the alders hoping for a nugget. The whole area was stripped with hydraulic giants, but the brush has dropped a couple inches decomposed organic cover over the old tailings. Trying to detect through this couple inches of cover means little chance of hitting small gold, but again I was hoping for a larger nugget. But except for a few bullets and some foil, again no gold. There is still too much snow in the underbrush, however, so I'll try some more in a couple weeks.

The GMT worked extremely well with the large coils, and the automatic ground balance worked well at maintaining smooth performance, especially in the organic material and roots in the underbrush area. Extra large coils often have more problems with ground mineralization, and the automatic ground balance looks like the best way to go with the largest coils.

Here is a picture of my tools for the day. My GMT is modified for chest mount use, and so it looks a bit different than the unit most are used to. Since the GMT is not normally convertible to a chest mount I did the conversion myself - details here. I almost always use headphones. My favorite pick for rough terrain is the Hodan walking pick, as its extra long handle is great on hills and for crossing streams. I have a super magnet clamped on the digging head to suck nails out of the ground while I dig. And for finding those little nuggets quickly I always have a nugget scoop stuck in my back pocket. The spare coils go in my rucksack with the camera, bug dope, first aid kit, and snacks. I usually have at least one spare coil along when detecting. Don't forget those coil covers.

Steve's White's GMT, converted to chestmount

By now it was 3:30 PM and I still had no gold to show. My answer for this in the past has been to use my Gold Bug 2 with small coil and scrape into some pay layers. I saw some likely areas in all my prospecting throughout the day, and so I figured it was time to really give the little 6" prototype coil a workout. I've long wanted a small coil for the Goldmasters, and my getting my hands on this experimental small coil was instrumental in my purchasing the new detector.

The first couple spots I tried did not reveal any gold, but the third had a nice little clay layer, and after a few minutes I found my first nugget with my new GMT. In less than two hours I excavated 10 nuggets from the layer, the largest just under a pennyweight, and the smallest a half grain. The ground is very moderate at Crow Creek, and I had no problem running the gain maxed out. I ran the SAT at minimum, and audio boost on. The coil was smooth and quiet, in fact surprisingly so, considering how high I had the sensitivity set.

The big thing about the GMT is the auto ground balance. It works very well, but it really tunes out small nuggets fast when trying to pinpoint them. As long as I scanned it would hit the nuggets just fine on the first pass, but they would tend to fade when trying to zero in on them. I played with both manual balance and automatic quite a bit. It proved easier to just use manual while working a small area like I was, rather than switching back and forth. Switching is very easy, however. Just squeeze the trigger switch and the ground balance "locks" at it's current setting. It would all depend on the ground as to what might be the best method.

Close up of White's GMT converted to chest mount

I found earlier in the day that the automatic would tend to tune out hot rocks and iron targets to varying degrees. As long as the sweeps are wide and the system is getting an average ground reading it signals well on targets. Then when zeroing in on them they tend to fade in distinct ways depending on what the items are. I still need more time with the detector, but I felt like I could sense differences in the way hot rocks, iron trash, and gold responded with the automatic ground balance engaged. It is an extremely fast automatic ground balance, much faster than others I have used, and so it seems to have some interesting properties of its own. I'm looking forward to working with it more.

All in all I ended up feeling the automatic ground balance is well worth having on the GMT, and there are times when I would really like it, particularly when hunting larger gold with the large coils. But at the same time it is very nice to be able to run the GMT in manual balance mode if desired. In moderate ground manual tuning works just fine, and for the tiniest gold I think it is mandatory to be able to manually tweak the ground balance. This is especially handy if you want to run with a slightly positive balance, which is impossible to do with most automatic units. The bottom line is you get the best of both worlds with the GMT. Thanks, White's!

In any case, I found the small coil to be extremely effective, and very much on par with what I've learned to expect from my Gold Bug 2 with small coil. The most remarkable thing about the little coil was how stable it was. I rubbed it and knocked it with nary a false signal. I can see that this little coil is going to get a lot of use in the future, as it's ideal for the normal Crow Creek "dig and detect" method. I hope White's produces a coil like this for the Goldmasters, and am just thrilled that I have one to play with.

Steve's first gold found with White's GMT

So here is the gold. The smallest nuggets are .5 grain, .9 grain, 1.6 grain, and two at 2.1 grains. The largest is 23.4 grains and the next 18.2 grains. Total weight 64 grains, or about 2.5 pennyweight. Not bad for my first outing with a new detector, and a good start to a new detecting season. And now that I've located some new areas to detect at Crow Creek I can't wait to get back and find some more gold!

Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2002 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

My dredging equipment has changed a lot over the last two years. I have been using a Keene 6" dredge with dual 5.5HP Honda pumps for many years. This was great while I concentrated on working a few choice locations, primarily Crow Creek Mine. A 6" dredge is great for production work, but it is too heavy for one guy to be packing around much. It usually took me 14 round trips to pack the entire dredge into any one location.

The problem is that I have been spending years going to the same locations over and over. This is because I've been successful at finding gold at these locations, so why go elsewhere? Most of the vacation time I've been using each year has gone into working these same locations. But much as I hate to say it, I've been getting bored.

I'm sure many people would like to have this particular kind of problem. I've been using 5" and 6" dredges for so long now that the fun and adventure has been fading. It has been turning into a job of sorts, in that I go and and do some heavy labor and get some gold. A certain number of hours dredging produces a certain amount of gold. The deposits I have been working are fairly predictable and I've found lots of nice medium-sized gold, with a few nice nuggets to spice things up.

Unfortunately, this relatively predictable situation has taken a lot of the adventure out of of my mining trips. They are still fun, but just getting gold is not as exciting to me as it used to be. The day was when an ounce of gold in my pan at the end of the day was unimaginable to me. Now I look at it and just figure it was a decent days work.

I've decided to switch directions in my mining efforts. The biggest change is to stop going to the same old places over and over. I've gotten in a rut, and need to break out of it. There are lots of new and exciting spots waiting for me all over Alaska, and I've realized I'm not getting any younger. It's time for me to start visiting new locations around the state.

With that in mind, I need a new goal. Instead of quantity of gold, I'm going to focus on the quality of the gold. More to the point, the size of the gold. I like big nuggets, and I'm going to put more effort into finding them. The Kenai Peninsula areas I have concentrated on for the past 25 years are not the best areas for large nuggets in Alaska. It's time for me to go north. I'll be spending a lot more time metal detecting, and less time dredging.

Steve's old 6" Keene gold dredge and 5" subsurface assembled from Keene parts

This all means my old 6" was too big for my future plans. No more taking two weeks off just to go run the 6". So I sold it last year, and down-sized considerably to a 5" subsurface dredge. After using it a short while, I decided it was still to big for what I wanted. I need a dredge small and light enough to use for one or two day trips. I need to be able to pack it to a location, dredge for a day, and pack it out. The 5" was still a little on the large size, particularly in the amount of room it was taking up in my truck.

So I sold the 5" and proceeded to build a 4" subsurface. The first version was built on a set of floats that proved to be a bit on the small side. The dredge worked well, but tended to nose-dive in fast current. Keene has also come out with a new 4" subsurface dredge tube with a redesigned riffle tray. I went ahead and rebuilt the dredge around the same marlex floats that Keene uses on their 2.5" dredge. The normal Keene frame is needlessly complicated for this application, some I made my own from simple aluminum stock. A primary design goal was that the frame, float, and recovery tube assembly had to fit in the back of my truck fully assembled. I wanted to get away from assembling and disassembling the dredge unless absolutely necessary.

Steve's new 4" subsurface dredge under construction & in back of truck

The new version looks great! Compact, lightweight, simple. The 4HP Honda provides plenty of power while being very fuel efficient. I can mount an air compressor if I need one, but for most of the shallow water dredging I do I can use a mask and snorkel, and forgo the extra hookah gear. Best of all, the unit slides into the back of my truck fully assembled. All I have to do is hook up the hoses. I think I've found my main unit for the next few years. A dredge that will be fun to use for short trips.

My cousin Robert has recently moved to Anchorage, and my cousin Bob was in town visiting my father. We decided to get together for a trip to my claims on Mills Creek. Robert is new to mining, while Bob has been involved in numerous mining adventures in the past. I've been thinking of selling my share of the Mills Creeks claims, but wanted to try one spot out in particular to see how it paid. Jeff had sniped a nice pocket of nuggets on a corner of the creek on one of our past trips, and I've been curious if more gold was waiting to be found there. We also figured to metal detect for gold along the banks on bedrock exposures.

We got my tent set up under a gloomy sky. Winter is on the way, and fresh snow is falling on the mountain tops. After settling in, I spent some time with Bob and Robert detecting for gold along the edges of Mills Creek where bedrock is exposed. We've detected lots of gold here before, but the location is getting picked over, so we had to work extra hard to find those nuggets. We shared my detector and started dropping nuggets in our vials.

Once Bobby and Robert were under way metal detecting, I hauled my dredge down to the creek and got setup. The little 4" is so small compared to what I am used to that it seemed to be no effort at all to carry it around. I was setup in no time at all, and proceeded to work the bedrock area where Jeff had found his gold.

4" subsurface gold dredge at Mills Creek

The bedrock was shallow, but I did not get into any major pockets of gold. There were flakes and a few nuggets scattered along the bedrock, but nothing to get excited about. By the end of the day, I had about a 1/4 ounce of gold to show. I had been hoping for something a little more dramatic, and so was a bit disappointed. The dredge was working great, however, and I was very pleased with it's performance.

If I had found a great paystreak, I probably would have kept going, but the mediocre results made my mind up. I decided to sell my share of the claims and more on to greener pastures. I pulled my dredge out of the creek and packed it back to camp.

I spent the rest of the weekend detecting with Bob and Robert. Bob seemed to be finding chunkier gold, but I was getting more nuggets. I finally ended up with 62 nuggets metal detecting, in addition to the gold I found dredging. Bob found 50 nuggets, while Robert only found seven. Since this was his first mining experience he was quite pleased, however.

121 Gold Nuggets Found Metal Detecting

My nuggets are the ones in the bottom of the picture; Bob's are in the upper right hand corner. Robert found the seven to the left. A very successful weekend, with fun had by all. We tore down camp and stuffed everything possible into my truck and headed back to town.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

The owner of the High Grade lode mine in Hatcher Pass stopped by the store. He was interested in buying a metal detector to aid in hardrock prospecting. I’ve done a bit of this before, and realize how hard it can be for a beginner to get results. I offered to meet him at the mine last Sunday to demonstrate what I could do on his mine dump. If he liked what he saw, great. If not, he would save the price of a detector, and I would still get a fun trip out of town.

I took my to the mine under gathering clouds. When chasing tiny gold enclosed in quartz a high frequency detector like the White's Goldmaster with a small coil is the way to go. The High Grade is up behind the Independence and Gold Cord mines at Hatcher Pass. The High Grade was named because it literally produced some very high-grade ore. The veins were narrow, however, and the mine only produced a limited amount of ore.

The dump had so much iron trash in it that I found it easier to simply pick up quartz samples and wave them over the detector search coil. The ore in Hatcher Pass is relatively clean quartz with free gold. The gold does tend to associate with pyrite, so any quartz with reddish staining or obvious sulphides is worth extra attention. The pyrite here is non-conductive, and so will be ignored by the detector. Many very rich samples, such as those pictured, have little or no pyrite; so all quartz should be detected. I have seen gold in perfectly pure, white quartz in the area.

In less than an hour I found eight pieces of quartz that gave obvious signals. Some had visible gold, while others were giving signals from gold totally enclosed within the quartz. Unfortunately, rain began to fall, and then it REALLY began to fall. I was not prepared for rain, but we had proven the point… the detector worked very well on the ore. I headed on home.

I left the ore with the owner. BLM is putting the squeeze on him, so I figure he needs all the samples he can get. The ore pictured below is from the Fern Mine, also in Hatcher Pass. I obtained it from a geologist that worked the mine years ago. It is shot through with gold, and is a good example of what might be found by a lucky prospector in the Hatcher Pass area. It exhibits black streaking that is often associated with the better ore in the area.

High Grade Mine, Hatcher Pass, Alaska

An excellent source of additional information is Hatcher Pass Gold by Ron Wendt. Ron tells about all the mines in the area, and includes many maps and photos. The book is out of print but can be found used. ee also the USGS report for the area - Geology and Ore Deposits of the Willow Creek Mining District, Alaska (1954).

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.

How was the gold deposited at Hatcher Pass? What follows is a simplified view of gold deposition. In reality is this is all theory, and entire books are devoted to the many theories of how gold deposits form. So what I am presenting below is a layman's view of a commonly accepted theory... not a "fact". Still, the theory works well enough to be used to predict where gold occurs.

Gold most commonly occurs in quartz veins. The quartz and gold were deposited within crevices and fractures in rock far below the earth by circulating hot water. You will see the term "hydrothermal" a lot. hydro = water + thermal = hot. Most gold was formed by hydrothermal processes. Note that most quartz veins do not contain gold, so quartz alone means little.

So we need two things... rock with crevices and fractures, and a source of hot, mineral laden water. The classic gold deposit is the hardrock mine area at Hatcher Pass north of Anchorage. A large mass of molten rock, in this case granite, rose towards the surface from far below. This kind of activity tends to result in a pattern of fractures or faults in the surrounding rock as this molten mass forces it's way upward.

When this mass of molten rock cools, it shrinks, and more fractures form within this rock as it cools. What finally results is a "granitic intrusive", another term you will see often when reading about gold deposits. The hardrock deposits at Hatcher Pass are a were formed around a granitic intrusive.

As the molten rock cools, water seeping down from the surface reaches the zone of newly introduced minerals and heat. Water that is extremely hot and under pressure can dissolve many minerals that we think of as insoluble, especially when some of the dissolved minerals cause the solution to become even more corrosive.

The water, now mineral-laden and hot, rises back towards the surface. As it circulates through the crevices and faults in the rock it deposits many of these minerals. Much of the mineralization is simply because the solution is cooling, and so can no longer keep the minerals in solution. Often, in the case of rich mineral deposits, the solution comes into contact with another type of mineral that causes a chemical reaction. The classic mineral in this case is limestone. Many of these solutions are acidic, and when they come into contact with limestone, the acidity is neutralized, and the mineral drop out of solution. Many very rich mineral deposits have been found where limestone comes into contact with other rock types.

Gold ore from Fern Mine, Hatcher Pass, Willow Creek Mining District, Alaska

In the case of Hatcher Pass, the deposit follows the classic example. There was a rounded mass of granite far underground. Fractures formed in the top of the granite, and in the other rocks immediately above and around the granite. Hot water solutions deposited quartz and gold in these fractures. Ages of erosion exposed the top of the granite and the fractures to the surface. Erosion released the gold from the veins and deposited some of it in the streams and rivers in the valley. The rest remained in the hardrock veins, to later be discovered and mined.

Very common in this scenario also, is the concept that the gold veins have a limited depth. The gold veins tend to occur just above and within the upper layer of the granitic mass. As erosion (or mining) extends downwards below a certain level, the gold deposits tend to thin out and disappear. A situation arises where areas that have extensive gold in the streams often have little in the rock (it all eroded out) and areas where the stream deposits are poor will often be associated with very rich hardrock mines (most of the gold is still in the rock). Again, a generality.

Granitic intrusives are common along major fault lines. Maps can readily be had of faults and their related intrusives, and it is no surprise these tend to coincide with many of the major gold regions of the world.

Volcanoes are another process where by molten rock rises to the surface, surrounding rocks are fractured, and circulating waters deposits minerals, including gold, in these fractures. The oldest hardrock mine in Alaska is the Apollo Mine on Shumagin Island in the Aleutians, near Sand Point. This and other gold deposits in the Aleutians and the Alaska Range are volcanic in origin. The Aleutians are a "volcanic chain", a long string of islands that are actually volcanoes.

There are many other types of gold deposits, and many variations on these types. The best reference I have seen on the subject is "The Geochemistry of Gold and its Deposits" by R. W. Boyle, (1979) Geological Survey of Canada, Bulletin 280, 584 pages.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

Many people have seen the ad copy in the Minelab GPZ 7000 brochure where I am quoted about how amazing the new GPZ 7000 is. Now you get to hear the rest of the story. This is a more detailed version of an email I sent to Minelab last fall regarding the new GPZ 7000. The background is I had been using the GPZ prototype for some time, but was underwhelmed. I was initially put off by the weight, and frankly it was just not my trusty old GPX 5000, and I was slow to shift gears. Yes, the machine performed, but I had not seen anything that particularly knocked my socks off, and had not been shy in saying so to Minelab.

I had an opportunity to return to a location in northern Nevada I had hunted gold previously in 2013. On that visit a portion of hillside was pointed out as the location of several nice nugget finds, including some delicate specimen gold. I did what any prospector would do and concentrated on hunting this area hard with my GPX 5000. I knew I was dealing with an area hunted hard with previous Minelab PI detectors and hot VLF detectors like the Fisher Gold Bug 2. I was the first there with a GPX 5000 however so figured I was going to find something others had missed. I was running a 14” x 9” Nugget Finder mono and set it up in Sharp at Gain of 16 which is a reasonably hot setting.

I was disappointed to find nothing but bullets, and so I switched to a used White’s GMT I had just acquired. This high frequency VLF detector was able to find two small and very porous gold specimens. Having found these, I again scoured the area but there appeared to be nothing else to find. I was not the only person to detect this location of course and so I just figured it was pretty well detected out.

Delicate Nevada gold specimen found by Steve with White's GMT

The Minelab SDC 2300 came out in 2014, and Chris Ralph and I both had units which we were using with great success on gold the GPX was weak on. Small, porous, prickly gold. An invite came to visit the property again in the fall of 2014, and Chris and I figured the SDC would be just the thing to succeed where the GPX 5000 had failed.

We were field testing the GPZ 7000 prototype also by this time. Chris was tied up but I had a chance to leave earlier, and camped out a couple days in Humboldt County hunting with the GPZ. I was really pleased finding just shy of a half ounce (15.5 grams) of nice gold, including a solid 6 pennyweight (9.4 gram) nugget which was my largest with the GPZ to date. I was now starting to warm to the machine which seemed particularly well suited to the wide open spaces of northern Nevada.

15.5 grams of Nevada gold found by Steve with GPZ 7000 prototype - largest 9 grams

The GPZ was of course a super secret project at that point, and so when I met Chris at the miner’s claims I had it carefully stowed away, and pretty much forgot about it. The plan was to hunt with the SDC detectors.

I pointed out the location where I had hunted with the GPX and GMT to Chris Ralph so he could give it a go with the SDC. Frankly, I did not think he would find a lot at this point, but the new SDC 2300 certainly had a chance of making some finds there. I hunted another hot spot nearby, and my own SDC 2300 found four or five nice little specimen pieces. I was really pleased when Chris showed up and showed me two fat specimen pieces, weighing about one quarter ounce in total. Everyone was very impressed with the SDC 2300, and the gold it was finding in areas hunted over and over with PI detectors, and hot VLF detectors like the Fisher Gold Bug 2.

The Minelab GPZ 7000 brochure quote by Steve

We stayed the night but Chris had to leave the next day and it was good he went home with gold in his pocket. One of the claim owners also left, and it was down to just me and one claim partner. I stayed and hunted, finding another small specimen with the SDC 2300. I went a couple hours with no finds, and decided to wander over to the area where Chris had scored to see if I could do anything there. The claim owner and I puttered around awhile there then he decided it was time to go back to camp and grab some lunch.

I was about to get going again with the SDC 2300 when I realized I had the new GPZ prototype still in my truck. The claim owner was over the hill out of sight, and since he had just left me I figured it was pretty safe to get GPZ out and give it a quick go. So I went back to my truck, switched out detectors, and headed to where Chris had marked his gold finds.

Chris had hunted right where I had found the two specimens the year before with the GMT. I was a bit surprised I had missed two nearly 1/8th oz pieces, but they were deeper than the GMT was going. His two specimens were found only ten feet apart, and I could tell he had hammered the location. Every square inch of the dusty ground was covered with footprints. I fired up the GPZ and gave it a few swings, and was surprised to almost immediately get a nice signal exactly between the two little rock piles marking his find locations. I gave a few digs and revealed a nice specimen weighing about 3 grams!

I know I had been over this location with a GPX 5000 and a GMT. Chris is very methodical when on a patch, and I know the SDC 2300 is more capable than the GPX 5000 when it comes to small specimen gold. How could this be? I suddenly realized I had something very special indeed in my hands.

I wandered down slope, and right at the bottom of the hill where it started to flatten out I got another signal, and another couple gram specimen. Then only about 20 feet away I got another one. Now I was really getting excited. Less than ten feet away I got a real boomer signal, but it proved to be a bullet. Then a few feet, and another large signal. I dug deep into the hardpan, and knew at that point it has to be gold. I dug carefully so as not to damage it, and finally recovered a solid lump quite a few inches down. It was an 11.2 gram or just over one third ounce gold specimen!

Gold specimens fresh out of the ground perched on GPZ 7000

The property owners were very gracious, and had told Chris and I we could keep all the gold we found. I appreciated that, but I also know that is easy to say when you do not think people will find very much, and the owners thought the ground pretty well detected. I was thinking at that point I needed to give them a share of the gold, but truthfully I did not want to part with this big lump, so I told myself I needed to find more gold. The problem was time was running out and I was worried the claim owner might come looking for me soon, and see me with the GPZ. So I started scanning with 7000 as fast as if I was in a VLF competition hunt. My goal now was to just cover as much of this area as I could in a short amount of time.

Apparently speed does not hurt the GPZ all that much, because in short order I found another couple gram specimen. More frantic scanning, and another nice piece popped out of the ground. This was crazy – I know I had hunted this area! I expanded the area of the hunt, but the gold seemed to be on a very tight line heading down the slope. Some time passed, and another two or three gram specimen saw the light of day.

Now I was getting really worried the claim owner would show up and see me with the GPZ. I had a pouch full of gold specimens, and was really amped up at that point. I had not found that many large chunks of gold that fast in very many years. To say I was stunned would be an understatement. I had to quit though, and so I hunted up the slope so I could go back and show the claim owner my finds, and bring him back to hunt some more. I just figured I would put the GPZ away, and go back to using the SDC 2300.

I made a bee line up the hill to where my truck was parked, swinging all the way, when I got another good signal. I dug and it got louder. And louder. I was into the hard material now and knew it had to be gold, so I slowed up and worked the edges of the hole carefully. The last thing I wanted to do was ruin a nice specimen. Finally, about a foot down I grabbed a handful of loosened soil that screamed when I waved it over the coil, and I felt a lump drop into my other hand when I went to separate it. This one was at least twice as large as the big one I found earlier!!

0.79 ounce gold specimen just rinsed, found by Steve with Minelab GPZ 7000

I was having a Eureka Moment. This whole experience was mind blowing. I was finding gold right and left as if this location had never seen a detector before. The GPZ 7000 was working some serious electronic magic, and it seemed it was particularly effective on porous specimen gold at depth that other detectors have a hard time seeing. The GPZ 7000 was hitting this stuff not with weak, but with strong signals, like the SDC but with a coil size much larger than that on the SDC 2300. It was able to not only detect the kind of gold once only found with hot VLF detectors, but hit it at depths far exceeding what one of the best hot VLF detectors, the White’s GMT, could attain in this soil.

I was literally shaking I was so excited. The large specimen looked to be all gold, with no rock showing, but was very porous in appearance. Not like steel wool but more like a lot of tiny pieces of gold all lightly stuck together. I could tell it was going to be spectacular when cleaned up, and it later weighed in at just over 24 grams or nearly eight tenths of an ounce. I decided then and there I had found the chunk I would give to the property owners. They certainly deserved it and I still had about an ounce of specimen gold I could take home with me.

Steve's share of GPZ gold after initial cleaning - 0.85 ounce

Photo emailed to Steve of 0.79 ounce specimen after cleaning

People may wonder at this a bit that I would volunteer this piece up when I did not have to, but I believe in taking care of people that take care of me. The day I was having was as good as it gets for metal detecting. I just found 1.6 ounces of gold in less than three hours, was on cloud nine, and wanted everyone to share as much as possible in that experience. To say the property owners were surprised and appreciative would be the understatement of the century. It really just does not get better than that. All this happiness and great times were facilitated through the magic of metal detecting and the extreme capability of one detector in particular. Not to be overlooked however is the SDC 2300, which also shined very much along with the GPZ. My only regret is that I could not tell the claim owners the complete story at that time. Sorry friends, I hope you understand, but now you know the rest of the story!

This article started as a thread on the DetectorProspector Forum. Extra information and details may be found there.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2015 Herschbach Enterprises

Steve's Mining Journal Index

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

I have had the new Minelab SDC 2300 to Alaska earlier this summer and found it to be an excellent detector for Alaska's rainy weather and typically smaller gold nuggets. Details here and here. Now I have had a chance to give it a go on some intensely mineralized ground in California. Chris Ralph turned me on to this location. The bedrock is highly mineralized to start with, and past forest fires have baked some of the bedrock. This can actually change the alignment of the magnetic particles in the rock, making them even harder for a metal detector to handle.

The other thing about this place is the gold is close to the source, generally small but with very sharp edges and crystal faces. The combination of very high mineralization and small gold made this a great place to run the SDC 2300.

As I discovered previously the Minelab SDC 2300 is absurdly easy to use, especially in ground that is very difficult to handle with other detectors. The SDC uses a fast variant of the GPX 5000 Fine Gold timing that is able to ignore most ground and hot rocks entirely with almost no tuning involved. Basically you set the sensitivity level and just start detecting. Ground balance is full on automatic ground tracking, so that aspect of the detector handles itself.

Minelab SDC 2300 Compact Waterproof Metal Detector

The gold is very close to the source as can be seen from the nature of the gold in the photos. Gold is relatively delicate and cannot travel far from the source without rounding of sharp edges and faces occurring. The ground itself is very mineralized loaded with lots of magnetite lumps. Yet I was able to easily run my SDC 2300 on a sensitivity level of 4 for general hunting and I ran it at max of 5 when actually on a gold patch. The SDC basically exhibits no EMI noise and I was easily able to work with Chris only 50 feet away. There is little to no ground noise either. What you do get at higher sensitivity levels is noise introduced in the high gain circuitry that exhibits itself as what Jonathan refers to as a "sparky" threshold sound. Yet it is something you become accustomed to easily and the fact that such tiny nuggets stand out with no problem illustrates that.

People really are just missing the point on the SDC. It is not that it will find gold other detectors will not find, though in some cases that may be the case. The real thing here is that it does it easily and quickly with no fuss or muss, no special expertise, tuning, or coils needed.

Steve with waterproof headphones using SDC in shortest rod collapsed configuration on hillside

As you can see in the photo I am using the new waterproof headphones for the SDC 2300. They fit my head better than the stock headphones, sound just fine, and have a much stouter cord that will be less prone to failure. Minelab should just make these the stock headphones with the SDC 2300.

I also really appreciate the ability to rapidly adjust the SDC rod length and coil angle for any situation. It can be run extra short for hillside hunting, or the coil can be laid out flat as a pancake for shoving under the brush. I hunted a shelf at waist height by running the coil flat and shoving it across the shelf back and forth in front of me.

My last couple days of detecting with the SDC came to 5.3 grams recovered. The largest nugget is 0.67 grams. The smallest weighed on my freshly calibrated digital powder scale at 0.7 grains or 0.045 grams!

5.3 grams beautiful California gold Steve found with Minelab SDC 2300

Tiny SDC gold - 0.7 grains found with Minelab SDC 2300

I think the Minelab SDC 2300 is a great little unit. The more I use it, the more impressed I am. I have a several day backpacking trip into a remote location coming up, and have never been there before. Due to packing a tent, food, etc to cover several days, I have to choose what to take. My GPX 5000? Maybe Gold Bug Pro? How about the Gold Bug 2? Garrett ATX? Nope, they all stay home. I think the SDC has the best shot at producing gold for me so it goes and the rest stay. I do not know how to make it any clearer than that and so that is about all I am going to say on the subject going forward unless specifically asked a question. Seems like a lot of angst out there over the SDC 2300 for some reason so I think I will just keep my head down and go nugget detecting!

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2014 Herschbach Enterprises

It is winter in Alaska! Maybe not by the calendar, but certainly by the snow on the ground and the ice on the water. Jeff Reed and I decided to make one last mining trip for the season. Snow is falling at low elevations now, but only a few inches have accumulated on the ground. We decided to take a gamble and see if we could drive back into our claims at Mills Creek. There was a chance, however, that we would find too much snow on the road to get back in. The only way to know was to drive down and find out. We decided to take both our trucks, just in case one of us got stuck. We headed out early under cloudy skis. On the way through Portage we passed a cow moose and her calf breaking ice in a pond next to the highway.

I met Jeff at the gravel pit next to the highway where our access road starts out. We decided to take it easy driving in. There was only two or three inches of snow on the road, but that can be enough to cause problems on steep hills. We did not think it wise to be too aggressive getting in, as we might not make it up a couple of the hills coming back out. The drive in, however, proved to be no problem. We arrived at my campsite on the claims just above tree line to find a winter wonderland.

Our plan was to take advantage of the low water conditions to snipe for gold on shallow bedrock. Our claims have quite a bit of exposed bedrock, and relatively coarse gold. Sniping consists of the use of simple hand tools to recover pockets of gold, usually from bedrock cracks and crevices. This is more commonly done above water, but can also be done underwater with the aid of a wetsuit (down south) or drysuits in Alaska. A prospector outfitted with a suit, mask, and snorkel can examine bedrock underwater in search of concentrations of gold. The gold is then recovered using simple tools, such as small pry bars and suction guns. The best (perhaps only) book exclusively on the subject is Underwater Sniping for Gold by Sam Radding & Jim Garlock.

Moose crossing pond, and Steve with Kirby

Gearing up for underwater sniping in Alaska is kind of like preparing for battle. Jeff got into his AMDS drysuit while I donned my Harvey's drysuit. We have tried every kind of kneepad imaginable over the years, but never found anything that really stays put in fast water. I finally came up with my own solution years ago, which is to wear an oversized pair of work pants. I sew carpet to the knees with fishing line. The trick is to get a pair of pants with wide enough legs that you can easily slide them on over the drysuit. This may mean a rather large waist size, so I usually use a bungee cord for a belt. I have been using miners moss for the kneepads lately. It does not last quite as long as the regular sluice box carpeting I used to use, but is soft and cushy on my knees. This solution not only protects the knees of the suit, but the entire lower half of the suit. Jeff has adopted the idea, but is a bit more stylish in that he uses a weight belt for his pants!

Next comes the hoods with under caps. A good neoprene drysuit hood, like that made by Harvey's, is all that is needed, but we both use Henderson Ice Caps also. The ice cap is a thin under (or over) neoprene hood used in addition to the regular hood that covers your face completely, except for the eyes and a small opening for the mouth. Once a mask, snorkel, and gloves are put on, the only part of your body touching the water is your lips. The gloves can be five-fingered for some people, but three-fingered mitts are warmer in extreme conditions. I coat the entire working area of my gloves with a thin coat of Aqua Seal brand sealant. A little of this stuff goes a long way. Too thick an application will result in a glove that is stiff and tiring to use.

Jeff & Steve suit up

Our sniping kits are similar. I use a cheap nylon rucksack to carry the gear. I have an 18" chisel-edged pry bar and a large screwdriver for prying crevices. I also have a small screwdriver, some very large crevice tweezers, a set of fine point tweezers, and a snuffer bottle. The main tool is a suction bulb. These are similar to the snuffer bottle idea, but with a squeeze bulb and a larger intake tube. I sometimes bring along a larger unit made out of a modified grease gun, but find the little bulb unit gets the most use. Finally, I include a 10" gold pan and a large plastic vial in my kit.

The process of sniping is actually simple, and can be a lot of fun. You can recover quite a bit of gold by sniping in itself, but it serves an even more important role as a prospecting method to locate future dredging ground. In areas where dredging is prohibited, sniping may offer the only way to recover gold from some streams and rivers.

The picture shows the area we were in. There is bedrock outcropping on both banks and in the creek. I usually leave everything in my rucksack on my back, except for the 18" pry bar. I jump in the water and thoroughly examine all the bedrock I can get at. If there is a bit of sand and gravel on the bedrock, it can be scraped aside and "fanned" away by waving a hand at it rapidly underwater. Any interesting crevices, no matter how small, should be investigated with the pry bar. Other tools can be pulled out as needed. When any gold is located, the snuffer bottle or suction bulb is used to recover it.

I spent quite a bit of time in the area around the falls, finding a bit of gold here and there, but no major concentrations. Jeff wandered on down the creek, and I followed a little later. He had his head stuck in a pool behind a rock, and indicated he was finding some nice gold.

I kept scouting around, finding an occasional flake, but a good crevice eluded me. It is possible to find single crevices that will produce a few pennyweights of gold, and sometimes a hot set of crevices can produce an ounce or more of gold. This area is at the upper reaches of the coarse gold deposits on Mills Creek, however, and the gold is a bit sparse.

I looked up the creek, and Jeff still had his head in the same pool. I knew something was up... he would not stay put unless the gold was good. I came up, and with a big smile he dumped what he had so far in his pan. A few pennyweights of chunky gold looked back up at me from his pan, and I must admit I was a bit jealous. I had only little flakes to show in return. Jeff indicated the pocket was working out, though, and pretty soon he headed downstream.

Mills Creek freezing up, and Jeff's gold

We continued on, but neither of us got into any other hot pockets. Jeff saw a couple of spots he wants to come back and check next summer. My main goal is to put my dredge on the corner where Jeff located the best gold of the day. It is in the area I am actively working, just upstream of my last dredging location. There may be more gold under the deeper overburden, or it may simply be a single pocket of gold, now worked out. I'll have to wait for next summer to find out.

So ends my gold mining for 1999. Overall, it was not one of my more productive summers for total gold found, but for fun it was tops, as I think my entries for the summer show. A determined dredger can work through the winter, but frankly I am not so gung-ho as to fight the cold for a few ounces of gold. Better to wait for summer to return again.

Jeff ended up with about 1/4 ounce of nice nuggets for the day. I had a fairly pitiful showing of small flakes and a half pennyweight nugget. I would have liked to finish the year with a bit more of a bang, but so it goes. This is two trips in a row that Jeff has kicked my fanny in gold production, so I can't wait for next year and a chance to show him up in return. The gold will wait under snow and ice for us until then!

Steve's Gold from Crow Creek & Mills Creek 1999
Largest Nugget 5.4 Pennyweight

P.S. I get a lot of comments on the color of the gold in my photos. Please keep in mind these are digital photos, and have often been lightened (as in the photos above) or darkened. Most gold around Anchorage is about 85% pure, and had a nice yellow color, but is much paler than much of the California gold I have seen. Crow Creek Mine gold is of lower purity, usually 70-75%, and so has a lighter color than the Mills Creek gold on the right. I have some gold from Crow Creek that has enough silver in it to qualify as "white gold" or more properly, electrum.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 1999 Herschbach Enterprises

This discovery was made earlier in 2016 but I did not get around to publishing details about it until now. I was detecting near some small hydraulic pits in California and wandering around in the area below one of the pits. At first I thought I was on virgin ground but the ground slowly revealed itself as a tailing outwash area from the pit above. The material is now so overgrown with trees and covered with a thick layer of duff (pine needles, bark, branches) that it gives the appearance of unmined ground.

I got a massive boomer signal on the GPZ and I honestly thought it was a can. A quick dig with my pick revealed instead a large chunk of gold and quartz. The first sight of the nearly 9 ounce piece about stunned me but I soon determined that what I had found was mostly quartz, but still, a pretty nice find. There are around a couple ounces of gold embedded throughout the white quartz. In theory this is the largest "gold nugget" I have ever found, but obviously the fact it is mostly quartz takes a little of the shine off that. Still, absolutely no complaints from this kid on making this find!

The large specimen was obviously washed through whatever sluice and riffle system the oldtimers were employing, and washed down to end up resting on top of the tailing outwash fan. At one time it was just sitting there in plain view, although it would have taken a sharp eye to have spotted the gold if a person was just walking by. Then a forest grew on the tailings and a century of pine needles and branches fell and obscured the piece.

Steve at location where 8.75 ounce gold specimen was found

I of course had visions of even more finds to be made in this apparently overlooked location, but very diligent hunting for quite a few hours turned up nothing but some trash and one little bit of rock with gold in it.

In Australia specimens like this are usually just crushed (dollied) and the gold panned out. We have a better market for specimen gold and so this could be sold as is. Unfortunately the mass of quartz hides most of the contained gold so this is not a prime specimen. It would be better with less quartz showing more of the gold. If the quartz were pure white it also would be more valuable but it has darker mineral inclusions. Still, I have considered slicing it up to see if any good cabochon material can be obtained for jewelry purposes. I have also considered just soaking it in Whink as an experiment to see how many months it would take for very weak hydrofluoric acid to completely dissolve the quartz, leaving loose crystalline gold. For now doing nothing has been the easy option.

Close up of 8.75 ounce gold specimen found by Steve Herschbach

I would like to say the Minelab GPZ 7000 had something to do with my finding this specimen, but the truth is I think there is enough lumpy gold in it that nearly any decent detector would have found it. The GPZ 7000 is remarkably sensitive to specimen gold containing finely dispersed gold, but that is not a problem with this specimen. The warning for some however is that as a shallow and very loud response it is easy to assume a trash target like a can. Always be aware that there are still large gold nuggets and specimens out there at very shallow depths, and the faint "zip-zip" sound so many ears are trained to find can initially be thrown off by what seems to be a junk signal. I seriously thought I was excavating a can so that I could properly dispose of it! I get irritated by all the aluminum cans I see discarded when I am out detecting and end up packing them all out. I wish I could say the same for all the steel cans and trash I find, but that simply is not practical, though I haul out what I can.

The California Mother Lode country is criss-crossed with gold-bearing quartz veins large and small. Most were too small to be developed into mines and many were small enough to be completely overlooked. Even quartz veins that for the most part are barren may have one small section that is rich in gold. What this means is that chunks of quartz like this can be found almost anywhere in Mother Lode country.

Clark, William B., “Gold Districts of California;” Bulletin 193, California Division of Mines and Geology Sacramento, California, 1970

This article originated as a post on the DetectorProspector Forum. Additional details may might be found there in follow up posts.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2015 Herschbach Enterprises

This year has not been going exactly as I imagined it would. My stated goal for the year was to set a new record for days in the field detecting. So far however, it has been anything but that. No complaint - I have been devoting myself to visiting family and other things that took precedence over prospecting. Weather has also been a bit dodgy this spring leading me to sit out things a little waiting for better conditions.

What time I have had for prospecting has mainly been spent in northern Nevada. I am really taken with the desert and am very partial to the sagebrush and grassland country. It reminds me a lot of the time I spent in Australia with huge wide open spaces to wander. I enjoy the idea that gold can be found nearly anyplace, the exact opposite of Alaska, and I love just wandering from valley bottom to hill top because, well, you just never know. There is some old and interesting geology here that leaves nuggets in what might seem to be pretty unlikely locations. I did find one nice little patch that produced about half my gold this spring, but the rest were just strangely random isolated nuggets. I would find one and get all excited, then after several hours of methodically gridding the area wonder why that one nugget ended up there all alone. My largest nugget, at 3/4 oz, was just such a find. I wandered out of what looked to be the "good area" and just lucked into this nugget all by itself on a hillside far above the valley floor. Where did it come from? Why nothing else near it?

I like to wander around freely but due to the nature of the gold deposits I am relying heavily on the GPZ 7000 map screen and GPS track to attack areas in chunks. I just start someplace and then use the GPS mapping screen to fill in all the pixels as completely as I am able in a given area. My goal is to completely hunt that area and then write it off forever as being hunted. Each hunt area is dumped to X-Change building my master map of hunted areas. I am approaching it much like building a jigsaw puzzle, each planned hunt taking in a segment and filling it completely. I still like to wander around a lot but the main focus is long term - the many years I have ahead of me hunting these areas. I could just do what I have always done and hunt piecemeal but I decided it is time to switch gears and get more methodical about things. I figure there is a lot of that random "scattered gold" out there and that a slower long term goal to gather it up is a major part of my plan going forward. Using GPS mapping is key to getting good coverage while eliminating the chance I might waste time hunting and rehunting the same locations over the years.

The GPZ is also critical to this effort as I have great confidence in its ability to sniff out almost any gold that finds its way under the coil. Small gold, flat gold, wire gold, deep gold - the GPZ is my gold vacuum. All detectors miss gold, including the GPZ. But right now if I have to hunt an area once and once only, and have my best shot at finding what might be there, I do not know of a better option for me than the GPZ 7000. One detector, one coil, one pass over the ground ever - what are you going to use?

Steve's Minelab GPZ 7000 going deep for the gold!

If gold is found a person of course has the luxury of coming back with different coils and different detectors and trying to find gold missed before. The problem is finding that first nugget. If it does not get found, you just wander on, never knowing that maybe you just missed a great patch, for the lack of finding that first, most important nugget. I am convinced there are many undiscovered patches out there still. The patches with the big easy to find solid gold may be very rare now, but "weak" patches comprised of smaller, or deeper, and harder to find specimen type gold surely exist. They will be found by people hunting outside the commonly known popular areas. That is what I have been doing. Hunting locations where other prospectors are rarely if ever seen. I honestly think I have been a bit lucky as of late but the methodology is sound and it is what I will be doing for as long as I have left to swing a detector.

GPZ 7000 gold fresh out of the ground

I continue to follow the various posts around the world about the GPZ 7000 and people's experiences with it. Mine are pretty boring. I turn the machine on, maybe do a quick ground balance routine, and go detecting. I may not even go through the ground balance motions. I just turn it on and pick up from where I left off the previous day. I usually run in High Yield, Normal Ground, Gain of 12, Smoothing Off, Ground Tracking On. I leave most audio settings alone. The detector will often run noisy with these settings, especially in alkali locations. I may lower the threshold to 20 to knock out some excess noise, or just lower the overall volume level using my headphones. The GPZ lacks a master volume control that lowers all sounds at once, and so benefits from the use of an external booster with master volume control. The problem for me is that is one more battery operated gizmo, and so I often just use my headphones instead to gain the overall volume control I crave. I tend to run my detectors noisy but like it to be quiet/noisy not loud/noisy.

2.14 ounces of nice Nevada gold found by Steve with Minelab GPZ 7000

Beautiful 3/4 ounce gold nugget found in northern Nevada by Steve with GPZ 7000

When the ground responses get a bit much, as is the case with ground salt, I react more by slowing down and modifying my swing than changing detector settings. So far I would say about half the gold I found was pulled out of fairly high salt response ground with the attendant moaning/groaning or hee/haw responses the GPZ produces in that type of ground. That seems to be a show stopper for a lot of people but I don't pay much attention to it myself. I have this theory that killing those responses might kill my gold finding capability on this ground to a certain extent, as I know some of these locations have seen other detectors that ignored the salt. They also missed the gold. Coincidence? Maybe. I have plans for more experiments regarding this but have had a hard time tearing myself away from my limited detecting time to do more comparative tests. Later.

Anyway, I have quietly picked up just over a couple ounces of gold with my GPZ 7000 so far this spring. The largest nugget is 3/4 oz and there are several other nice pieces I am very happy with. Nice solid, clean gold, my kind of stuff. An odd mix from very worn appearing to rough. I am unfortunately getting waylaid again with things I must attend to before I can go prospecting again and so I decided I may as well post this update now. It could be weeks before I get out prospecting again. Until then, here are some happy pictures to enjoy!

This article started as a thread on the DetectorProspector Forum. Additional information may be found there in follow up posts.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2015 Herschbach Enterprises

I finally went out and found my first gold nuggets with the new DEUS elliptical high frequency coil. I want to emphasize that I am a newbie on the XP Deus. Although I purchased an 11" Deus V3.2 model almost two years ago, it was with the express purpose of being able to test the V4 update with the new high frequency coil options for gold prospecting. I decided I was better off just starting fresh with version 4.0 before really digging in and learning the detector. I do get the hang of detectors quickly but this does show what can be done by somebody who went out barely knowing the machine.

The other catch is that I picked a location that favors the Deus with relatively mild soil for a gold location, so mild I could run the machine full out to get the maximum possible sensitivity with the machine. These results are not going to be as easy to obtain in extreme mineral ground. You have to start someplace however and being new to the machine I wanted to give myself someplace easy to start. Finally, the goal here was to find the smallest gold I could so for the purposes of this report - smaller is better.

These nuggets were recovered over the course of a day. Ten nuggets, 4.7 grains total weight. There are 480 grains per Troy ounce and with an average weight of less than half a grain I think you can agree this is some pretty small stuff. The smallest bits are probably near 1/10th grain or 1/4800th of a Troy ounce. Click picture for larger version.

Ten nuggets, 4.7 grains total weight, found by Steve with Deus HF elliptical coil

The new HF elliptical coil running at 74 kHz is clearly in the same league as the 71 kHz Fisher Gold Bug 2,  45 kHz Minelab Gold Monster, 56 kHz Makro Gold Racer, and 48 kHz White's GMT. However, the devil is in the details and it will be some time before I sort out how the machines compare under more difficult and varied conditions.

Again, I am not an expert with the Deus and so the settings I mention are not to be taken as "the best" or anything like that. I was actually gold prospecting so the primary focus was to find gold, not to test every possible combination of settings on the Deus. With 10 program options and numerous settings that will be a longer term project. I obviously wanted to try the Gold Field program 10. After a little experimenting I settled on the GM Power program 2 as an alternate disc mode to try. Getting from program 10 to program 2 is only a couple button pushes, so I bounced back and forth between the two programs and tweaked settings higher as I found targets and could compare readings.

Gold Field is a threshold based all metal mode with what I find to be a rather pleasant digitized buzz. That's me of course, others may differ on that point. I was able to run sensitivity full out at 99. All my work was done at 74 khz, the default highest frequency setting without trying to push it higher via the offset. I figure the coil is tuned at 74 khz and so stuck with that for now. Manual ground balance about 84.

GM Power I got sensitivity to 94 with only minor falsing. I reduced reactivity (similar to SAT for you nugget hunters) to 0 from the default of 2 and ran the audio response (audio boost) up to 7 (max).

Both modes exhibit just a little touch sensitivity at these high gain levels. This might be tamed with the ground notch but I have not fooled with that yet and it did not bother me at all anyway.

What I found was Gold Field has a softer response in general but that my boosted version of GM Power banged hard on the little bits. Not unlike going from all metal mode on the Gold Bug 2 to the Iron Disc mode. Instead of faint threshold variations you get a strong "beep". The difference is that the Gold Bug 2 Iron Disc mode has an obvious loss in sensitivity. The Deus by comparison in this particular situation actually seemed to work better in GM Power mode, but that is mainly the boosted audio at work.

I left the disc settings at the defaults for GM Power which worked well - low tone iron, higher tones non-ferrous. I ran the IAR (iron reject) in Gold Field at 2. This was just enough to cause ferrous to break up. Higher settings would blank most ferrous completely but getting to aggressive can also eliminate weak gold signals. The ferrous discrimination worked very well in both programs. GM Power in particular was pretty awesome in the nail pits with iron tones firing off like a machine gun. I bumped reactivity back to 2 in the dense trash.

Anyway, this is a very preliminary report and so no point getting too deep into it as I will probably modify my opinions and settings as I get more time on the machine. Right now this is a high price option if all you need is a prospecting unit, but for a person wanting one machine to do everything XP just kicked it up a notch. If they introduce a dedicated gold unit at a lower price similar to the Depar DPR 600 it would be very competitive. For now this is an option for somebody that wants a detector for more than just gold prospecting since the Deus is a superb coin, relic, and jewelry detector.

Steve's XP Deus with HF elliptical coil - it collapses to fit in that rucksack!

The elliptical coil and rod assembly is just 1 lb 13 oz (1.8 lbs) and so a true featherweight. At 5' 11" I have to run it fully extended and at that it does flex a bit, but I did not find that bothersome at all. A solid coil cover will be good as there are too many coil edges that want to hang up on rubble and sticks. A minor quibble however as the machine is a joy to handle, especially when reaching uphill waist high and higher. A great unit for poking in and around bushes and other obstructions. The coil is hotter at the tips which also helps in poking into tight locations.

Early days but the final word is that I am happy with how this coil performs on small gold nuggets after all the wait. Time will tell how it handles the really bad ground and how it fares directly against some of the competition as other people report in. As always giving it time and waiting for a consensus opinion from many users to develop is a wise policy with any new detector.

This article originated as a post on the DetectorProspector Forum. There might be additional information there in follow up posts.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2017 Herschbach Enterprises