A large placer mining operation that has produced many large gold nuggets has been made available to the public for a fee, and this week saw the first group of ten people visiting the claims. Steve Houston with White's Electronics, Fred Brust with Fisher Research, Fred's grandson Brian, John Pulling, the local Fisher representative, and myself flew into Ganes Creek Tuesday morning. I had convinced the owners of the mine that it would be a good public relations move to have to factory representatives visit the mine.

The big news on arriving was that Bob(AK), who had not found any nuggets the first two days, has just scored a 5.81 ounce and 5.62 ounce nuggets in the same day! So there goes my record of a 4.95 ounce nugget, and my single day record of 8.41 ounces. Bob blew them both away at the same time. His White's Goldmaster V/SAT paid for itself many times over.

Most everyone had gold, but a few people did not. Everyone seemed happy, however, as large nuggets were being found. And when our little plane load of "celebrities" showed up everyone was out hunting gold. So much for our celebrity status.

More gold had been found right in camp, so we gave it a quick try, but soon we decided to head upstream to a spot I had in mind from my last visit. My big goal was for my guys to find some gold before we left, as we only had the two days.

A large ditch had been dug at one location, and I thought the material piled up next to the ditch looked interesting. We hit the material along the ditch, except for John, who got right down in the bottom, since the water had dried up.

It was not long before John yells up "I've got one"! That always helps raise spirits, and everyone got even busier. Fred got a target and proceeded to dig it, while Steve and I worked nearby. It was deep, and Fred was cussing the junk he was probably digging. Steve later remarked that Fred was down to his elbow in the hole. Then I heard a whoop and Fred got up with a big smile. He had a real nice nugget that looked about 3 ounces, but later weighed in at 1.48 ounces due to the quartz in it. It was about the size and shape of a walnut, and is the largest nugget he has ever found.

Fred Brust and Brian with 1.48 ounce nugget found with Fisher Gold Strike detector

And less than 15 minutes later Steve lets out a yell. A big 3.25 ounce nugget, pretty solid gold, and lots of character. It was also the largest nugget Steve has found, and better yet, larger than the nuggets his regular hunting buddies have found.

Steve Houston with 3.25 ounce gold nugget

John found a couple more nuggets, including a 1/2 ounce nugget, his largest to date, and then the nuggets stopped. We all wandered off in different directions, and I finally found a 0.23 ounce nugget wandering up the ridge of a large tailing pile. And that was it for the day. We continued after lunch at other locations, and late into the evening after dinner at other spots, and came up dry. The others were having luck that day though and the nugget count climbed.

We slept in a bit, but got a decent start. We were all rooting for Brian to find a nugget. Everyone else was happy, including myself. Fred, John, and Steve had already found their largest nuggets ever, and I was just along for the ride.

We went downstream, and covered lots of ground. My record hot streak had sure come to an abrupt end... now I could not find any gold at all. Just goes to show how in tailing piles where the nuggets are randomly scattered that luck is a big factor, and on my last visit I was exceptionally lucky. Finally John came up with a really solid 2.21 ounce nugget; a real beauty. I decided I could not go a day with no gold, so went up to the top of the Windsock Pile where we had found numerous nuggets Memorial Day weekend, and put my detector in all-metal mode. Up came several nuggets, the largest 1.2 pennyweight. I had gold for the day.

John Pulling with 2.21 ounce gold nugget

And that ended up being that. We hunted until late, but found no more gold. Brian was a bit disappointed, but still had lots of fun, and a smile on his face. He was happy to see his uncle find a nugget, which is nice to see. Our little visit was deemed a resounding success. Just the visit itself is an adventure for people from out-of-state, and Steve commented repeatedly about the small plane ride. Bush flying is an adventure in itself!

More nuggets came in from the main group, and when we left only two people had no gold, and of those one was not putting in many hours. Large nuggets when I left were:

5.81 oz Bob(AK)
5.62 oz Bob(AK)
3.01 oz Harold(FL)
2.98 oz Todd(AK)
1.85 oz Stephen
1.22 oz Todd(AK)
1.16 oz Bill(AK)
1.12 oz Bill(AK)
1.11 oz Todd(AK)
.89 oz Bob(GA)
.79 oz Zooka
plus
3.25 oz Steve Houston
2.21 oz John Pulling
1.48 oz Fred Brust

Bob(AK) 5.81 oz "Goldfinger" nugget and 5.62 oz "Heart Throb" gold specimen

And me? My largest nugget the two days was .23 ounce. My lucky streak finally petered out. But then again it was not long ago I would have considered a .23 oz nugget to be a monster. I guess I'm getting spoiled.

Numerous smaller nuggets were found by the visitors. Everyone seemed happy, even the guy with no gold. He always had a smile on his face. One interesting fact is that not one person in the first group has any real prior nugget hunting experience. I was surprised to find most had never done it or considered themselves novices. You'd think some pros would have jumped at this first. Maybe the pros have places they can go already for less money. What makes Ganes exceptional is anyone who can come up with the money can visit.

So what are my current thoughts on the chances of finding gold at Ganes Creek? Well, the chances of finding large nuggets is great... most everyone is scoring in that regard. But it is pretty much a crapshoot, with large spells of patient scanning and trash digging punctuated by large nugget finds.

All involved agree good iron discrimination is a must, but do not overdo it. The only guy without gold so far is using an Explorer, and has it really tuned to reject iron. In theory, he has it set up ok, but no gold so far. Bob(GA) had no gold, and when I checked he had his disc cranked way too high. He'd probably walked over nuggets. After setting it lower, he scored several nuggets in one day.

But the biggest factors are patience, persistence, and perseverance. It is needle in a haystack work, and you can go for two days, like Bob, then get two 5 oz nuggets in one day, like he did. You may get lucky right off the bat, like my group, or go days without a big nugget. You have to put the coil over a big nugget, and the more ground you cover, the greater your chances are. Next week the troops return and we will finally get other thoughts than mine on Ganes Creek.

The real proof of Ganes Creek will lie in the second group. I still must assure everyone that the area involved is vast, and all the detecting going on is random wandering - "hit and run" detecting. The nuggets are still out there. Obviously some of the easier pickings are being covered, so a little more effort will have to go into it. That, and Doug will push dirt around if the results seem to be thinning out. I've asked him to hold off until that happens, however, as we will only get one chance to see the tailings undisturbed. After they get flattened out a certain magic will be lost.

And for what it is worth, Fred Brust and Steve Houston, who have both been around, promptly declared Ganes a "once in a lifetime opportunity" The term came up repeatedly. Steve was already figuring out which friends to get together for a return visit.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright 2002 Herschbach Enterprises

It is a fact that a lot of the very best mining ground is already claimed. The diligent prospector can find new ground, or careful study of claims records can sometimes reveal a claim that has lapsed and can be restaked. These methods are time-consuming, and the ground acquired is still not usually the best. Excellent mining ground tends to be claimed, and these claims rarely lapse.

This leaves working out permission to access claims, whether on percentage or lease deals, or the outright purchase of mining claims. When it comes to purchase, the problem becomes money. When that good deal arises, money can be all that is lacking.

In 1997 a group of mining claims on Mills Creek on the Kenai Peninsula came up for sale. This creek is one of the better producers historically on the Kenai Peninsula, and so attracted my attention. Unfortunately, I did not have the funds to buy the claims outright, and so did not pursue them.

Luckily, some friends, also excited about the claims, decided that a group of us should pool our money to buy the claims. The idea was discussed, possible pitfalls worked out, and the purchase proceeded. So it was that I am now a member of the Mills Creek Cooperative. We made a group purchase of the claims, and agreed upon a set of rules governing the member's use of the claims. A written agreement of this sort is very important, so that minor (or major) misunderstandings can hopefully be avoided.

Last summer some basic exploratory mining took place, and it was found that the ground contained good, reasonably coarse gold. Match head size nuggets are common, with nuggets up to several pennyweights found. I'll backtrack and add last years Mills Creek experiences to this Journal some time in the future.

One of the agreements about our claims is that each dredger must mark a 300 foot stretch of creek as his current site of operations. These sites are first-come, first-serve, and are good as long as they are worked at least once each thirty days. I had let my old site lapse last fall, and decided it was time to pick a new dredging area for the year. My friend Darrell, who has recently arrived in Alaska, has never mined for gold before, so I invited him along for a little mining and camping.

Camp at Mills Creek

An old mining road leads several miles off the highway to our claims. This small road is normally designated as non-motorized access only, but our permits for the claims allow us to use vehicles on the road. This is very important, as the distance and elevation change would make bringing in equipment very difficult otherwise. It also provides a small measure of security, as non-miners are not allowed to access the claims with motorized equipment, somewhat reducing the problem of theft. The above photo is of my normal camp on the lower portion of our claims, where one branch of the road ends as it is pinched between the creek and a cliff.

I marked off a 300 foot stretch of creek upstream, in a section where the water is forced through a small, vertical rockwall gorge. The water is fast and furious at this point, and it will not allow me to dredge until water levels drop in the next couple of months. This is fine, as it will allow me time to pack my equipment in, and do a little trail work. I'm hoping the bedrock gorge may have some nice pockets of gold. We sniped gold both above and below the section late last fall. The water in the gorge itself was deeper than we could check out with hand tools alone, so only a dredge will tell how good it is.

Marshall & Lyle's worksite          and           Al & Kenny in the water

Several of my partners were actively trying new ground in the lower, more open portion of the creek. All the work to date is being done with 4" and 5" dredges, with plans for a 6" dredge in the near future. I am currently planning on using a 4" subsurface dredge in the gorge.

A few hours of panning bedrock exposures along the creek produced minimal results. Darrell and I then switched to metal detecting an area that had decent results last summer. Exposed bedrock along one side of the creek had produced numerous nuggets, but was fairly well picked over. A couple hours detecting located a dozen nuggets that were missed, however. This resulted in Darrell going home with a couple of pennyweight of nice nuggets, not bad for a first time mining trip.

Gold putting a smile on Darrell's face!

Everyone got gold, but no fantastic finds were made. Everyone was getting setup for the first time this summer, and getting the bugs worked out of the operations. I don't intend to do any real dredging myself until September, when water levels start to come down, but may get tempted to come up sooner. We'll just have to see what develops.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 1999 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

Well, I'm back from 8 days at Moore Creek. It was a great trip, and one from which I have returned with a certain feeling of relief. The fact is that I got myself and my partners into this property based on my knowledge of the ground from old reports and previous visits. But until now all the gold I've ever found at Moore Creek amounts to about an ounce. Everything in the old records told me the gold should be there, but we had just not had much luck finding anything significant. But I've also not spent much time trying.

My father flew out with my cousin Bob and I flew out with our friend Mike. We had lots of other stuff to do while out there this week. We staked some more claims, cleared brush... even put up a real windsock on the runway! We also did some test work panning, highbanking, and a little dredging. But I finally did make time to do plenty of detecting this trip.

The result was more gold than I've ever found in a week before. Just over 23 ounces of chunky nuggets - almost two Troy pounds of gold! My fear that just maybe the old-timers had done a better job than I thought have now been relieved.

I can attribute the success in no small part to my Minelab GP 3000. I've used the Minelabs for a few years, but had never found the spot to really clean up with one. Either the gold would be too small, like around Anchorage, or way too much trash, like at Ganes Creek. I did have some success in the Fortymile but did not get into those multi-ounce nuggets that really add up.

Old mine tailings and pond at Moore Creek, Alaska

At Moore Creek I've finally found a place where my Minelab really sings. Good sized gold, minimal trash (except a few areas), and ground VLF detectors do poorly on. The bedrock and ground matrix is a fairly neutral shale rock. But mixed with the shale are both very positive and very negative hot rocks. A combination that generates a tremendous amount of noise from a VLF detector.

The only way machines like the my Fisher Gold Bug 2 or my father's Tesoro Lobo would work quietly would be to use the iron id modes. This would more or less eliminate the false signals from the rocks. But any gold under or very near the rocks would be lost and performance is not what it could be.

I ran my GP 3000 with the Coiltek 12"x24" mono coil, giving me a double edge. Not only does the Minelab ignore and see through the various hot rocks, the big coil covers more ground and gets better depth on large nuggets than smaller coils. The GP 3000 is not an inexpensive machine, but I paid for it several times over last week. It will be getting a lot more use at Moore Creek in the future.

3.47 ounce gold specimen found with Minelab GP 3000 - fresh out of the ground with rinse in nearby pond

A closer view of 3.47 oz gold specimen from Moore Creek - my first chunk over an ounce at Moore Creek

As you can see from photos below the nuggets are very coarse and many contain lots of quartz. Quite a few are sections of quartz vein shot through the centers with cores of nearly solid gold. The largest nugget, the white piece in the upper right hand corner, pretty much looks like a quartz rock seen from either side. But seen on edge it has a 1/2" thick layer of gold running through it. I'll be doing specific gravity tests on many of these nuggets to find out the gold to quartz ratios and will report them here later. The total weight of that particular piece is 3.47 Troy ounces.

My favorite nugget is probably the 3.15 ounce piece pictured below. It has darker quartz that runs from deep reddish brown to almost black. Between the color and the pitting it looks a lot like a gold meteorite. It's thicker and rounder than the other gold and appears to come from a different source. The 3.5 ounce specimen above is more typical of Moore Creek - a thick layer of gold with a skin of white quartz on two sides. These are chunks of extremely rich gold veins that have broken out of the source nearby and are now scattered down the creek.

3.15 ounce gold specimen found at Moore Creek with GP 3000

The weather was great, the mosquitoes not bad, and the gold fantastic. It's certainly enhanced our feelings about the claims, as at least some of the tailing piles obviously have some significant gold in them. Some of them may be worth reprocessing.

Here is the Coiltek 12"x24" UFO coil along with a 0.55 ounce nugget I just excavated. It really puts a smile on my face digging these things up! The UFO coil is very nice. Very light for it's size due to the open spoke design. In brush you need the coil cover (comes with) to avoid hanging up on sticks. My favorite thing about it is that it pinpoints like a dream. Just drag the tip of the coil pointed straight down over the target and you get a sharp signal off the tip. The narrow design works better in the excavated holes than the round coils.

24" x 12" Coiltek "UFO" mono coil for Minelab detectors

I actually found almost all iron gave a low tone with the unit as opposed to a high tone for the gold, but a large enough nugget will also give a low tone, so I just dig it all. Luckily, this is not too much of a burden at Moore Creek. I only abandoned one target giving me a low tone since the last few were all iron, but I'll go back and get it someday when I'm not as tired. The combo ignored 99% of the hot rocks, but some were so hot compared to the ground I got a faint signal with the mono coil. Luckily these were always shallow isolated rocks that needed no more than a kick to eliminate them.

I can't overemphasize enough how this really is a dream of a lifetime for me... and I know it is for many. I've been involved in various mining claims since the 1970's, but it was on local creeks like Stetson Creek, Cooper Creek, Canyon Creek, and then Mills Creek. They were all "working man's claims" suitable for dredging but just not the kinds of places that are destined to knock your socks off with gold. Good stuff, but you really have to work for it. And the chances of finding "the big one" are nil. In all my years on the Kenai Peninsula I have found only one nugget that is just shy of an ounce.

No, what I've always wanted was someplace that I might find larger gold, and someplace I might really be able to mine. I've come close a couple times, and in fact nearly ended up with Moore Creek back in 1998. It would have involved taking advantage of a paperwork snafu by the legitimate owners, and so I backed off. It has paid off as it was my actions at that time that has finally put the property in my hands now. On good terms with all involved. After over 30 years of searching and dreaming it looks like I've found that magic place. I have to tell you that last week, as I sat on top of a tailing pile in the sun with a pocket full of nuggets... well, the feeling was truly indescribable.

Anyway, hopefully some of you that do not have the opportunity that I have had can at least live a bit of the dream as I keep the story going. Or maybe it will motivate a few to keep pursuing the dream!

Are there mining claims for sale? Well, there always are claims for sale. Most people, including myself, would probably prefer to stake our own claims. The problem is finding good ground open to staking. It's easy to find "OK" ground to stake, but to find real serious mining ground, like a Moore Creek, just sitting open waiting to be claimed is very difficult. Difficult as in time consuming. You basically have to make a job of claims research and constantly looking for a prime piece of ground to lapse for some weird reason, like the owner dying with no heir. But most really good ground stays under claim and in many cases stays within families for generations.

Long story short is that buying good ground will get you there quicker. The problem there is of course money. Good ground does not come cheap. In mining claims you often do not get what you pay for. Many poor and worthless claims are sold for way too much money on a regular basis. On the other hand you will have to pay well to get good ground. In that sense you do get what you pay for.

Frankly, that has been part of my problem. If I had been offered Moore Creek even just a few years ago I would not have had the money, although I still could have found others to invest to make it happen. Despite being a business owner I really am just a working stiff making a living, and running two daughters through college had me totally broke until very recently. I've just been getting my head above water, so the offer to sell came at the right time for me. Even so I needed others as this kind of stuff just costs way more than I have to spend by myself. I'm not willing to disclose what we paid for the property, but all I will say is that you'd better be prepared to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for decent claims with equipment. And if you are looking at patented ground, do not be surprised to be looking at millions of dollars.

Detecting tailing piles - note parallel paths walked on piles from top to bottom - "corkscrewing"

You can find mining claims listed for sale online at Mining Claims For Sale to get an idea of price ranges. In general, claims in the Anchorage area that are suitable for small scale dredging and such, the kind of ground where you might get an ounce of gold in a day once in a while with a 4" or 5" dredge, run from about $5000 to $15,000 per 20 acre claim. I've bought into a couple of these type claims in the past and was happy with the results.

As soon as you start talking larger properties with real potential for heavy equipment mining the sky is the limit. It varies wildly due to things like how rich the ground is, access issues, potential restrictions on mining, amount of equipment included, etc. Patented ground, which is in fact private property, carries the biggest premium, as you can use it for more than just mining.

One big thing to really watch these days is the "mining restrictions" issue. The Mills Creek claims where good ole Bob(AK) is getting all the beautiful gold have real potential for heavy equipment mining. I think a little hoe and trommel operation in there could make a good go of it. The problem is a rabid anti-mining attitude in the Chugach National Forest. In theory those folks are supposed to support mining under the multi-use concept of our National Forests. That is the way it was as recently as 20 years ago. But it seems they have decided National Forest means National Park, and I've heard lots of stories of small miners being bullied and lied to in the last few years. A guy that knows the law and is willing to stand his ground could mine in the Forest, but they would be waiting to pounce on the smallest error.

The feeling today is that State mining claims are the way to go, because Alaska still looks to mining for revenue and jobs. The attitude varies somewhat depending on who is governor, but in general at its worst it is still better than the Feds. The only place Federal claims may be ok are those way out in the middle of unrestricted BLM administered land.

I do have to note on partnerships - they can work. In fact, I've always had partners on all the claims I've been involved with. It helps to know the people, but do not rely on that. A good set of written rules, agreed on in advance by all, can go a long way towards avoiding problems. Do not avoid discussing hard issues, like what to do about a disagreeable partner. If these things are not clearly spelled out in advance you can expect trouble. Even then you may have trouble, but with a formal set of rules that is agreed upon, signed, notarized, etc. you have a legally binding contract to handle disputes.

The good news is that the process of developing such a set of rules will bring all involved to a common understanding and avoid the problems. Most issues simply develop due to a lack of understanding between partners about certain issues.

Here is a simple example. I have three partners. I have by far the most experience nugget detecting. It can be expected I will find more gold detecting. I actually worried about being too successful, and so a guideline I came up with is:

1. 50% of all gold found with a detector goes into the "group claims fund". Division is by weight as decided by the finder.

2. 25% of all gold found by motorized equipment such as dredges or highbankers goes into the group fund.

3. All gold found hand mining, such as in panning or sluicing, may be kept by the finder.

The rules apply to everyone, including visitors like my cousin. Although in his case (he found a 1/2 ounce nugget) I'm covering his percentage out of my finds.

Now why would I come up with a deal like this when I know I'm likely to find the most gold detecting? Fairness. Be fair with your partners. We all have invested equal sums, but we all have varying abilities and time. If partner A looks on while partner B is finding a bunch of gold on "his" claims and partner A is getting nothing... well, let's just say that smells like potential trouble to me.

So I find about two pounds of gold. One pound of my choosing will go in the claims fund. As a group we decide what to do with the fund. We could split it later four ways, in which case I get 25% back. More likely we will sell out of it to raise funds for claim and permit fees and other expenses.

This system in a way costs me potential gold finds I may make. But I simply feel better knowing everyone is seeing benefits from their investment. It makes people happy to see the other guy succeed, rather than laying the groundwork for possible resentment. And let's face it, the tables could turn, I could be busy on other projects, and still seeing some gold come my way from a partner who scores at the claims.

In the other claim partnerships I've been in it's been keep all you find, and that can work well also. Or all gold can go in the pot, expenses covered, profits split. You just have to look at the particular situation and really do your best to be fair to all involved. Look out for partners that are totally in it for themselves... they will be trouble. Everyone in a partnership needs to be looking out for the group. You want team players, and as miners are rugged individualists this is the root of most problems.

Just over 23 ounces gold specimens found by Steve with GP 3000 at Moore Creek, Alaska

One other stipulation is that since we are truly and seriously doing exploration and evaluation, all finds must be noted as to location, nature of deposit, amount found, etc. I'm collecting and mapping this info, and already know of several particular tailing piles that I believe have literally hundreds of ounces of gold in them. Information collected like this is of immense value and should not be overlooked. If you get a group of partners that get competitive and secretive about their finds this kind of information will be difficult to develop.

Testing is what it is all about. I'm amazed at how many people just get ground and start mining. And then are surprised when they go broke. Real mining should never commence until proper testing has proven it will pay. Too many miners figure the expense of testing is throwing money away they could just use for mining. But to commence mining without proper testing is not mining... it's gambling.

Here is another guideline regarding buying mining claims. Never invest a single dollar that you cannot afford to just walk away from. Especially in partnerships. Failure is a lot less painful if you are not hocked to the hilt. Partnerships are easier to handle if you always know you can just walk away from a bad situation.

But enough of that talk. We are off and running on our new claims at Moore Creek. Everything looks great so far, what with a pile of chunky gold specimens recovered already. There is a lot of work to do yet, and a lot more test work remains before we really know just how much potential the ground holds. I cannot help be be optimistic at this point that we are really onto something at Moore Creek.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2003 Herschbach Enterprises

It has certainly been a busy year for me so far, with not near as much detecting time as I would like. Still, I have been getting out a little and thought it was time to share a few photos.

My first couple bits were found with the Minelab Gold Monster 1000 on some scouting runs. I am liking this detector as a grab and go unit for checking areas out quickly. I am not trying to hunt for max performance but instead looking to cover a lot of ground quickly to check things out. I have learned the GM1000 auto sensitivity actually suits me well for this. I just fire up the detector in all metal mode, full volume, and start with auto sensitivity set at Auto+1. Then I just start swinging. If noise intrudes (usually in salt areas) I will back down to Auto+0 (there are just two Auto settings available Auto and Auto+1).

Once the GM1000 gets out and about people will no doubt note the Auto settings are not the hottest. Which is why I like them. The GM1000 is a super hot machine already, so I am looking more for stability than anything else, and know it will pop hard on any small nuggets I get over. If I were pounding a patch hard I would use manual sensitivity and push it high, but that would introduce noise and require more careful hunting. For me however the GM1000 serves best as a lightweight quick and dirty way to check new areas - just grab and go.

I posted previously about finding a nugget using Auto sensitivity which is where I learned how useful the setting is. Here are two small nuggets located using Auto+1. Both nuggets banged hard, one at maybe an inch and the other at about three inches. I am not trying to promote or to push the use of this setting, I am simply reporting what I am doing and you can decide for yourself if it is useful for you.

Minelab Gold Monster 1000 out in northern Nevada

0.1 gram and 0.4 gram nuggets found with Minelab Gold Monster 1000 running in Auto+1 sensitivity

I did finally get a GPZ 19 coil for my GPZ 7000 and it was time to give it a go. I tried one area I had hunted before in case a larger deeper nugget was lurking. My first lesson with the GPZ 19 was not how large and deep a nugget it can find but how small and shallow! The only thing I had missed and left to find was this less than 0.1 gram nugget. It was practically on the surface and so gave a small warble when it got close to the coil winding. I was surprised and impressed the coil can find gold this small.

The next location is the one I scouted with the GM1000 and found the 0.4 gram nugget. The spot got my interest so I went back with the GPZ 7000 and 14" coil to hunt it. Turns out it was a nice little patch with some chunky gold! The ground was deep so I mounted up the GPZ 19 and hunted it again. I did come up with one nugget I missed before, whether from sloppy detecting or just a little too deep I do not know. It was a little 1.2 grammer at around a foot down. I continued hunting outside my area and came up with another at 1.3 grams.

Minelab GPZ 7000 outfitted with new GPZ 19" search coil

First nugget found with GPZ 19, amazingly small for such a large coil at less than 0.1 gram

I had removed the Minelab skid plate that came with the coil and replaced it with the closed Nugget Finder cover. I like this cover for uneven ground as it does not get hung up of rocks and sticks as much, but it does rapidly collect a pile of debris!

The GPZ 19 is perfect for collecting loose debris when equipped with full bottom scuff cover

The coil did false if banged on a rock and would require care in rocky ground, though I was running it as hot as ever so that contributes to it. I usually hunt grassy and sagebrush country and it does well here just gliding on the grass, though if the grass is deep it will ride up on it above the ground. Still, the larger size gave me this feeling that I had a little extra insurance in that regard and so I used it to hunt over low brush where it might reveal nuggets hidden when others went around the brush. False signals from banging a rock aside I do think the coil actually runs a bit smoother with my Insanely Hot settings.

Hip Stick rigged up for use with the GPZ 7000 and 19" search coil

The GPZ19 is slightly too heavy for me for general use in hilly terrain and too large for a lot of the sagebrush areas. It is just the ticket however for covering large open terrain and that is where it will see the most use with me in the future, or for pounding old deep patches. The extra pound was not quite as bad as I was expecting and in flatter ground just my regular bungee setup sufficed as long as the coil rode on the ground. I did try out the Hip Stick though and think it a better option for long hours with this coil.

24 grams gold, all found with GPZ 7000 & GPZ 19 coil except a couple small bits

Well, lots of info there I hope people can get some use out of. It's always nice to be out prospecting whether or not I find any gold - but gold does help! 24 grams or about 3/4 ounce with largest nugget 4.5 grams or just shy of three pennyweight.

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2017 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

I've wanted a Minelab SD2200D metal detector since last summer. I almost purchased one last year, but shied away at the last moment. The reason is that I have hard a hard time justifying the detector for the areas I normally hunt. The SD excels on larger gold, especially in highly mineralized ground. The areas I frequent have low mineralization and small gold, unfortunately, so I was not able to convince myself the SD would help me much under those conditions.

I resolved this by promising myself I would get out of my rut, and make a concerted effort to get to more locations, particularly those that might offer a chance of finding a large nugget with a metal detector. My mining buddy Jeff Reed feels the same way... we both want to find some nuggets weighing over an ounce. We are trying to cram as many trips to remote sites as possible into the short Alaskan summer. The main investment is getting the time, and I want to have my bases covered detector-wise, so I have added an SD2200D to my detector cabinet. It will supplement, not replace, my Gold Bug 2. I also purchased a number of Coiltek accessory coils.

When setup to test run in Anchorage, my new SD had a strongly wavering threshold. It did function, though, and I assumed this was normal, as all the new units we have in stock do the same. It was a kind of "warble". Then I got the unit home and gave it try in my front yard. It would barely work! I remembered a problem I had at my house with a couple years before with a Fisher Gold Bug. A guy a couple houses down has a serious ham radio setup. It killed the Gold Bug, and was having the same effect on the SD. The machine seemed to work, but would barely pick up it's own battery! I decided it must be the ham radio unit, and decided not to worry about it. It did start me wondering about the uneven threshold, however, and I was curious to see how it would do out of town.

I decided to make a trip to Crow Creek Mine to play with the machine. I truly did not expect to find any gold with the SD2200D, however, as the creek has had thousands of detectors on it. It has been getting hard to find much gold by simply scanning the surface; you need to dig into the material to expose deeper gold. In the back of my mind I did hope it might find a larger, deeper nugget that had been missed, but realistically I figured to dig nails and bullets. When I go setup for small gold, I always find gold. When I go with large coils looking for large nuggets, I often get skunked. Still, I had seen my friend Will Holden find a nice nugget on his first outing with a Minelab SD2200D last spring at Crow Creek.

Steve's new Minelab SD2200D

When I arrived at Crow Creek I was pleasantly surprised. The threshold got much quieter and very smooth. The detection depth increased over my tests in town. It turns out that electrical interference in Anchorage is rather severe, and that the Minelab SD2200D units will only function well if removed from town. I suspect the radio installations at our Elmendorf AFB may be the source of the interference. So if you get a new SD, and it seems it has performance problems with the audio, be sure to consider that it may be radio interference in the area before you complain to your dealer.

The photo above shows my standard outfit. My new SD2200D outfitted with a Coiltek 14" monoloop search coil, a set of Gray Ghost headphones, a Hodan pick, a cut-down garden hoe, a plastic scoop to recover targets, and a wide-mouth plastic vial for those nuggets. The battery for the SD2200D is carried in a little pack on your back, which has an extra pocket for a cold drink and mosquito repellent.

I took the machine to the very head of the claims. This area is mostly virgin ground, and so has less trash. It has produced some coarser gold, but finds have been sparse. I decided to start at the top and patiently work my way downstream into areas with more gold, but more nails. The SD was smooth and quiet, but I hit only a couple of targets in several hours of careful scanning of cut banks. No trash, but no gold either.

I finally approached the middle of the claims. Many of the larger nuggets found at Crow Creek have come from this area, but it is heavily infested with nails and other trash. I started hitting some nails and bullets. Many of the nails were at depths exceeding a foot, requiring that rather deep and time-consuming holes be excavated. I don't mind this much, it is just part of the game. The SD does have a type of discrimination, but I dug all targets to get used to the detector and what it could do.

Typical trash targets found with SD2200D

The monoloop coil was absolutely steady, and I did hit a couple of bullet fragments with it that would have weighed about a half pennyweight if they were nuggets. The main item of interest was a type of rock found at Crow Creek. The hard rock mines upstream have shed some chunks of ore that are found in the creek. It is a wild mix of arsenopyrite, pyrite, galena, chalcopyrite, sphalerite, and even a little free gold. The sulphide mix normally gives a VERY strong signal from a White's Goldmaster. They are a type of positive "hot rock", in other words they respond with a positive signal similar to metal. The SD ignored them entirely.

The day wore on, and I still had found no gold. I decided it was time to find something to take home, so I got my Gold Bug 2 out of my truck and hit the hill. I had the 6" coil on it, and hit some holes where people had obviously been getting some gold. I managed to eke out 30 small nuggets that had been missed. They were all smaller than the Minelab could hit with the 14" coil, with a total weight of just over a pennyweight. The nice thing about going for the small stuff is that you rarely go home empty handed.

Thirty little nuggets found with Gold Bug 2

The real tests are upcoming. The SD2200D will see my claims on Mills Creek this fall. I am working on a drive-in trip north to Petersville the weekend of the 4th of July. The area has extensive heavy equipment workings and hotter mineralization. I have never worked there, so it will be fun. I am also working on a fly-in trip to some old hunting areas in the Wrangell Mountains. I have pulled thousands of nuggets from the location, up to 1/3 oz in size, but the big one has eluded me. One to three ounce nuggets were common there in the old days, and some of the ground is very iron mineralized. I'm hoping the SD will find the big one I have missed. I also have hopes for other areas, but summers are so short here it is hard to pack it all in. I will be posting results of all these trips on this site as they occur, so stay tuned.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

It sure is nice to know gold miners who own bulldozers! My nugget detecting buddy Jeff and I made a very successful and enjoyable trip to the Fortymile country of Eastcentral Alaska last year. Check out the story here. Judd and Gail had invited us to come back and now with summer waning I figured we had better get with the program.

I had mentioned to the miners that my father is a pilot with a Cessna 206. But imagine my surprise when I contacted the Judd and was told "I built you an airstrip"! It seems Judd had been thinking about it for some time, and so all of the sudden we had the ability to pop up for a short weekend visit rather than having to travel overland like before. Judd's brother actually made the first landing on the airstrip with a Super Cub so we were to be the second plane into the new strip.

I contacted my father and set the trip up. Luckily he is always game for adventures to new places, and I was surprised to find he had never been in the Fortymile over the years. So he was raring to go, and Jeff was certainly in for another try! So finally the day came and I picked Jeff up and drove out to meet my father out at Big Lake.

We left under cloudy skies, and the weather through the passes was questionable. But we decided to just go and see. Our route pretty much followed the Glenn Highway east out of Anchorage heading up past Matanuska Glacier. Sure enough, as we approached the top of the pass at Gunsight Mountain the clouds were down on the ground. But there is an airstrip at Gunsight Mountain Lodge next to the highway, so we set down and walked over to the Lodge to wait. Finally the clouds lifted enough to let us through and we were on our way.

Fortymile River near mouth of Napoleon Creek

The weather cleared on the other side of the pass, and by the time we got to the town of Chicken, Alaska on the Taylor Highway it was sunny, blue skies. Chicken is an old mining town and is still surrounded by active mining claims. The first thing you see driving into Chicken is the Goldpanner Gift Shop & RV Park that forms the hub of the basic supply center for the area. It is the only place you can get gas, diesel, and propane in Chicken. There is plenty of RV parking at this site. George is still actively mining the area, and is a large-scale heavy equipment operator. There is a big pile of paydirt stacked up next to the store where you can pan for gold free of charge. Make sure you stop by and visit if you are in the area. Another place to visit is the Chicken Gold Camp which features the old Pedro gold dredge along with gold panning, RV Park, cafe, gift shop, and more. Also nearby is "downtown Chicken" which is Greg and Sue Wiren's bar, gift shop, cafe, and salmon bake.

We landed at the Chicken airstrip to redistribute our load before heading into the mine. As we came in to land we circled over the Chicken Creek mining operation, and I was able to get a photo of the operations. The ground is opened up and overburden piled to the sides. This will be used later to cover over the mined area as part of the recovery process. The ground is mined in a very methodical fashion. A strip of ground is being excavated moving to the right in the photo, and the recovery system is set up to dump tailings into the previous strip of mined ground. All the water is recirculated so there is no discharge into the creek. The gold at Chicken is quite small, but it is relatively consistent and so production is fairly reliable. A very professional operation.

Commercial gold mining on Chicken Creek, Alaska

We departed Chicken and made the short hop over to the mine. The approach up the river and then up into the short side valley left little room for error. I did not like the looks of it in that if we missed our approach there was barely enough room to power back up out of the little valley. Dear ole' Dad seemed unconcerned, however. His main worry was the actual condition of the strip itself. Since it was so new there might be soft spots or large rocks to cause trouble as we touched down. But the landing was rather anticlimactic. We just glided on in and landed with plenty of room to spare. We taxied over to park and got out and met Judd and Gail.

These are some of the nicest folks in the world. Judd and Gail have mined in the Fortymile for many years, and have what is truly a family mining operation. Judd operates the equipment but is also a mechanic par excellence and keeps the equipment in prime running condition. All his equipment looked in fine condition compared to some of the worn out stuff I've seen some miners using. Gail is truly a "miner Mom" who keeps the whole operation running by tending the books and very often by also running the backhoe. Sons Derek and David also help out, and so the family truly represent what small Alaskan mining operations are all about. Hard working families earning a living from the land in the middle of Alaska's wild country.

They have found many large nuggets, including a 17 ounce whopper that Judd located with a Fisher Gold Bug detector in the course of mining. Judd keeps a detector on his bulldozer to help decide where and how much farther to excavate. The gold they find is like much of the gold in the Fortymile. It is in very smooth, well-worn nuggets yet they are thick and generally weigh much more than one would guess. Most of the gold has little or no quartz in it. The gold makes great jewelry because it is so clean.

Plane on the strip and From left: Derek , yours truly, Gail, David, and Judd

We visited awhile, but as we only had a couple days we were chomping at the bit to go find a little gold. Both my father and Jeff were sporting the Tesoro Lobo SuperTRAQ and I had my Minelab SD2200D. From my experience the year before I had settled on the Coiltek 14" mono coil as my favorite search coil. It seems to hit pretty small nuggets and yet have very good depth of detection. Many people consider this to be one of the better coils for the Minelab detectors. Jeff and my father were both initially running the round 11" DD accessory coil on the Lobos.

We headed up the hill to the old bench deposit workings. A bench deposit is a remnant of old stream channel materials deposited in an earlier era when the stream has not eroded down as far into the underlying rock. So bench deposits are above the current stream level, sometimes hundreds of feet higher. They can also be deposits laid down by other streams that ran in different directions than the current stream channel, and so they can be very unpredictable. When in gold country, any gravels exposed at any elevation above the current stream should be examined with a metal detector. These areas hold great potential, as their distance from water means they were difficult to work, and were often overlooked. Only the richest bench deposits could be worked in the early days.

We were all pretty excited to hit the bench as we knew there was gold there from the summer before. But this time I guess I was not playing fair. The ground there is fairly mineralized, and although the Lobo is a good detector, it simply was no match for my Minelab SD2200D with 14" coil. PI (pulse induction) detectors are at their best in mineralized ground as they are less affected than standard nugget detectors by the ground conditions. PI detectors are also able to effectively employ much larger search coils, which gives an added advantage on larger gold.

Now, Jeff is a very competent detectorist and he has at many times in the past found more gold than I on our trips together. But in this case I had him hopelessly outclassed equipment-wise. The gold on the bench seemed to be just barely out of reach of the Lobos 11" coils yet readily within reach of the 14" coil I was sporting. Jeff reported that the nuggets he was finding were barely discernible, while the ones I found rang loud and clear. But what really demoralized Jeff was that after he had carefully detected a chunk of ground I could just walk over and find nuggets deeper down he had missed. While he and my father both found a few nuggets, I was getting the lions share. Jeff actually finally just sat down and watched me, which I have never seen him ever do. I felt kind of guilty and tried to cheer him into keeping at it, but he just gave up! I ended up with about a dozen nuggets weighing around an ounce total. The largest nugget was 7.3 pennyweight or just over 1/3 ounce (20 pennyweight per troy ounce).

Jeff searching the bench, and 7.3 dwt nugget found with SD2200D

The next day started out a bit foggy but the fog soon burned off to reveal a beautiful fall day. We spent the day wandering all over the place exploring and detecting. We had to stop and visit the current mining cut, but Judd reported they were not into very good gold at the moment. We detected around in the immediate area looking for nuggets that had been missed. I did come up with one in particular that was buried dead center under a rather good-sized rock. I was quite impressed with that one... the SD2200D just saw right through the mineralized cobble to see the nugget below. A very amazing metal detector indeed.

Judd was running the dozer while Gail used the backhoe to feed their new recovery system. Judd built it himself and it is quite the little unit. All self-contained and easy to move around, with a cute little monitor mounted over the tail end of the sluice to help blast tailings away as they build up. Quite the efficient setup and Judd seemed quite justifiably proud of it. I got a kick out of watching Gail run the equipment as she is simply not what people envision when they imagine an Alaskan gold miner running heavy equipment! We gave the few nuggets we found to Judd and Gail as anything in the current mining area is their paycheck.

Gail with the equipment, and portion of creek recovered from previous mining operations

Like most mining in Alaska today the operation recycles it's water and the ground is recontoured and planted after mining is completed. The lower portion of the creek is very much like a park, with open grassy fields interspersed with small ponds. Alaska's fast growing brush has begun to pop up everywhere and in a few years this will all be very grown over. I kind of like it the way it is right now... very open and pretty. It's perfect moose pasture, and they are often seen wading in the ponds, probably enjoying the respite from the mosquitoes afforded by the open areas. Of course, being the nutty detectorist I am, all I can think of when I see an area like this is the many nuggets that were probably reburied and are now beyond the reach of my metal detector. In fact the detecting here is very limited by the fact that so much of the ground has been recovered.

There are some very old bench workings along one side of the creek, where many rocks have been laboriously stacked by hand. We had found a few nuggets here before, and so we switched to small coils to search to exposed bedrock. My father had wandered off down the creek to the Fortymile River in search of some fishing. I was having no success at all but it was very nice out, in fact, it was almost too hot in the direct sun. Derek was with Jeff and they were working up the hill way above me up near the brush line. All of the sudden I hear some whooping from Derek. Jeff had come up with a good-sized nugget!

I wandered up into their immediate area and tried around the bushes, and finally found a small nugget. Nothing to brag about, but I certainly was in no position to complain. I like to see everybody finding gold so that we are all having a share of the action. At this point I was as happy to see my father and Jeff finding the gold. And so the day continued, with a nugget here and a nugget there, but no real bonanzas. We tried some more old workings up near the cabin as the light finally began to fade. I finally tired of the mosquitoes which tend to really come out after the sun set. So I wandered back into the cabin. Jeff and my father had worked up an old side channel behind the cabin, where the mosquitoes were particularly ferocious. I figured they could just go have their fun without me!

Dad finally wanders in and I ask him how he did. He holds out his hand and drops a 1/2 ounce nugget into my hand! I could not believe it. He had been running the Tesoro Lobo with the small 7" elliptical coil as he decided he really did not like the 11" coil. The small coil gives sharper signals and works in nooks and crannies better. This was fortunate as when he worked up into the gully he found a little pocket in the bedrock. Getting the coil down in there produced the signal, and out popped the nugget. It is a very nice elongated piece that he has since had made up into a pendant for one of our relatives down south. I had taken a picture of it for this story, but have been unable to locate the photo so far. I hope to add it here in the future. In any case, it turned out to be the big nugget of the trip, as we had to leave the next morning. My father ended up with big nugget bragging rights literally at the very last minute. He ended up having this nugget made into a pendant for my cousin Rosie.

Bud's half ounce nugget on chain, and Steve's nuggets from trip

While Jeff did well, I had found the bulk of the weight for the trip. I ended up with 31 pennyweight or just over 1.5 ounces of nice chunky nuggets. The largest was the 7.3 pennyweight piece. Together with my gold from the previous summer I have 3.5 ounces of Fortymile gold. It really is pretty stuff, and remarkably heavy compared to the gold I am used to finding over the years. The 31 pennyweight is all in just 21 nuggets. Their thickness and lack of quartz makes them add up faster than gold from many other sites in Alaska. I'd like to say it was because I'm such a hot detectorist that I found the most nuggets, but this was truly a case of my "cheating" by having superior equipment for the particular conditions. If the goal is big gold nuggets in heavily mineralized ground, nothing beats the Minelab SD/GP series of detectors. But as my father proved once again, any detector can find the gold, and nothing pays off like perseverance!

Steve's nuggets from last two trips (about 3.5 oz total), all found with Minelab SD2200D detector

We said our goodbyes the next morning, once again thankful for the warm Alaskan hospitality shown us by this remarkable Alaskan family.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2001 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

Every once in awhile our company is awarded a trip by one vendor or another for setting a sales record or some other goal. So it was that Honda Power Equipment sent my partner Dudley and I on a short trip to Cabo San Lucas for a dealer meeting. Yeah, I know... rough duty! And yes, we did not work as much as enjoy ourselves while there. But I was plenty busy and so did not spend as much time detecting as I would on a vacation trip. Still, the trip offered me a chance to give the new Minelab X-Terra 50 a spin. Since part of my job is selling detectors I actually have to bear the heavy responsibility of using new detectors when they come out so I can speak knowledgeably about them.

The X-Terra 50 really is perfect for this kind of trip. One where detecting is mostly a "maybe" thing and so I just want a machine I can bring along that will not take much room. Not to pick on other brands, and in fact I am a White's fan if anything, but my MXT and DFX seem designed to not fit nicely in a suitcase. They stick out every which way and take up a lot of space. So part of the reason I liked the X-Terra the instant I got my hands on one was it looked like the perfect travel unit. It easily packs in a normal size carry-on bag. I do not like to check baggage when on trips like this and so space is at a premium for me. The X-Terra 50 made it easy for me to get everything I needed for this trip into two carry-on bags. Nice!

We stayed at the Sheraton in Cabo. Normally I would hit the water with my Surf PI Pro on a trip like this, but this location has a huge surf and undertow such that people do not swim in the water, at least none but a few very brave souls. If I got in the water I'd be more concerned with not drowning than detecting and so that normally lucrative type of detecting was not to be had here. I do 100 times better in the water than on the dry beach, but that is what I had here and so you go ahead and make do with what you have. Since dry beach was the deal the X-Terra replaced my Surf PI for this trip.

Minelab X-Terra 50 packs easily into a standard airline carry on bag

The beach is made up of decomposed granite and has a few layers of black sand in it. It balanced out at "3" pretty well. In all-metal and at full sensitivity the machine constantly puttered out low tone sounds and readings of -9 on the readout. Being a single frequency unit with no salt setting this constant low background readings of -9 are attributable to a combination of the mineralized ground and the salt. Lowering sensitivity to eliminate the signals had too much effect for me. The sounds did not go away until the max setting of 20 was reduced to about 10. Running at full 20 and then setting -9 to reject made the machine totally silent with no loss of sensitivity and so setting -9 to reject looks to be in effect the "salt setting" on the X-Terra 50 for this location.

The X-Terra 50 like many detectors aimed at the general market is locked into discrimination modes. This means that even if you set the detector to pick up everything, the signal is still being filtered. The process is "detect, identify, report". If you set it to report all items, the identify process is still going on. Top notch detectors used mainly for gold nugget detecting always offer an unfiltered "All Metal" mode that is distinctly different then the so-called all metal mode on units like the X-Terra 50. In a true all metal mode the process is "detect, report". The filtering is completely removed and this results in more sensitivity to small items and better depth of detection. The penalty is you truly dig it all but for high value targets it is often worth it.

It is important to note that the X-Terra 50 has three levels of ferrous rejection, -3, -6, and -9. The X-Terra 30 has only one, -4. This means I can set the X-Terra 50 to reject salt readings at this particular beach and still get small non-ferrous targets that tend to read as -3 or -6. The X-Terra 30 lumps them all together into -4 and so on this basis alone I think the X-Terra 50 handles salt beaches better when looking for tiny items. More on this later. Being able to ground balance was also critical to being able to run at high sensitivity. Going just up or down one notch on the ground balance generated far more noise, as I found when I tried to run either slightly negative or slightly positive on the ground balance.

The beach at Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

One thing you must keep in mind here... I run my machines on the ragged edge of sensitivity and so they run noisy and erratic. I am ok with this and it is not a reflection on the detector. In fact I do not like machines that do not allow for what would be termed "too much" sensitivity or gain. Sometimes the manufacturers are looking out for us and so do not allow a machine to be cranked up too high, as it often is not a good idea. Works for me though, and the X-Terra was able to run at full-out setting of 20 here and run quite well. The machine was actually very quiet, almost weirdly so if I set -9 to reject. But the high sensitivity level was reflected in erratic target id with lots of "bounce".

I ran most of the time either wide open with even -9 set to accept and so listening to a constant low level puttering that at low volume levels was not all that unpleasant, or with -9 set to reject. I pretty much just wanted to dig everything to see what readings I got and how small the targets might be that I could hit. I know from experience that almost any detector will call tiny non-ferrous items ferrous... one of the lies discriminating systems foist on us and that cost us lots of little gold targets when we set for ferrous rejection. About the only machine I halfway trust on this issue is my Gold Bug 2, and I even managed to find a small gold nugget once that the Gold Bug 2 insisted was iron, so even it can be fooled.

The more iron mineralization in the ground, the more likely machines are to lie about small non-ferrous items, and unfortunately the X-Terra 50 is no different. Maybe the 18.75 kHz coil will help but tiny non-ferrous items commonly read -3 or -6, although they will usually "bounce" to a higher reading and tone also. They also will bounce to -9. So when I ran the X-Terra 50 with -6 and -3 rejected, small non-ferrous items (usually foil) might be detected or might not on a single sweep. If you are lucky, you get a low mid tone, but if you are unlucky the item may go negative and so get missed. But accepting non-ferrous all items beep, and then a few sweeps over the items will either reveal it to remain consistently negative and low tone and so is iron, or it will bounce and chirp higher tone and number now and then. Those that do tend to be tiny non-ferrous items.

This beach was not a big treasure chest. The people were pretty low key, just sitting in the sun, so not lots of activity to generate jewelry losses. And on top of that I'm certain I'm not the first guy to detect this beach. Finds were pretty sparse, but find stuff I did. And digging it all, it was naturally mostly junk.

Bottle caps all read ferrous but often spiked to a high 45 beep. I do not think I'd dig many bottle caps with the X-Terra if I did not want to. They all were very distinctive readings. Other than the bottle caps, most items read where I would expect, but all my readings were very bouncy. Solid locks were very rare. So coins would bounce around at higher numbers, tabs would bounce around in the middle tones, and foils would bounce around in mid and lo tones and plus and negative numbers. In other words, do not look for solid id locks on a mineralized beach soaked in salt water with the sensitivity cranked up. Surprised? I was not.

Junk items recovered while detecting

The bottom line here is simple. The X-Terra 50 actually worked very well for me on this beach. No, I did not bury targets and measure depths. I was just detecting. But I did not feel I was using a machine giving me shallow performance. I dug coins at easy 6-8 inch depths, and pop can halves at over a foot. Performance for a single frequency machine seemed just fine to me.

What seemed exceptional, truly, was the small item sensitivity. I hit lots of tiny foil strips and a few small pieces of broken silver jewelry that really impressed me. One target, a thin jump ring with a gap in it should not have been detectable with a 7.5 kHz machine with a 9" coil. I'm still surprised I hit that thing! The depths on these tiny targets were around an inch or less, and up to a couple inches for slightly larger but still very small pieces of foil, but the sensitivity of the X-Terra 50 to small items is impressive.

If I could have one wish, it would be that the all-metal mode on the X-Terra 50 was a threshold based single tone. You can take any of the two disc modes and by setting all segments to accept get exactly the same thing as the all-metal mode. Beeps on everything, in four tones. I feel the all-metal mode should have been a threshold based single tone setting to make for a better small item mode. I tried running in pinpoint, but it detunes too rapidly to be used as a search mode. Having an all-metal mode that offers some kind of functionality beyond a disc mode with all segments set to accept would have helped for this type of detecting. The machine obviously does work, and does hit the tiny targets anyway, but they are bouncy between lo and mid-lo tone and so a single tone at least would work a bit better for me. In practice it was fine, however. Just get a tiny bloopy-beep, and make sure you have a plastic nugget scoop to isolate and recover it! I quit using my sifter and switched to the scoop right away as these tiny targets just fell though the holes in my sifter. It was more like nugget detecting than coin detecting.

I can only speculate what smaller coils might do, and what higher frequency coils might do. Put a small 18.75 kHz coil on this unit and it may rival some of the best gold nugget detectors on the market for small gold sensitivity. I have no doubt from what I saw under these adverse conditions that I can go find gold nuggets with an X-Terra 50, as is out of the box with 7.5 kHz 9" coil. This detector is hot on small items. 

In summary, I found the X-Terra 50 to be a fine beach unit. It sure will not outperform my White's Surf PI Pro for depth so do not bother telling me how your multi frequency machine will probably get better performance on a salt beach than the X-Terra. Because my PI unit will probably beat your dual or multi frequency unit also when it comes to depth. I'm not telling everyone to go and run out and get an X-Terra for beach detecting. What I am saying here is that if you own one you sure will not be disappointed in it if you get it on a saltwater beach now and then. As single frequency machines go I thought it did great. And at a better location with more activity I have no doubt I can hit smaller gold targets with the X-Terra 50 than people are going to get with most beach units, or at least up in the drier sand.

It has been said before and some have tried to take it as a negative but it is not - the X-Terra is a fun metal detector to use. But I'm the kind of guy that thinks digging small foil is fun so one must question my opinions on what is fun!

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. I have seen some posts about the X-Terra lower rod being too long. It never seemed that way to me, but this time I paid particular attention. I am 5'11" and I stand up fairly straight. I ran the X-Terra the third notch up this whole trip, which leaves two longer settings and three shorter settings. If anything the length is perfect for me with adjustment either way. So while I can understand how the more vertically challenged may feel, it looks like Minelab had me in mind when they designed the lower rod. One of those areas where you cannot please everyone, apparently.

Coins and jewelry bits found with Minelab X-Terra 50 on beach at Cabo

I've been running lots of trash, common coins, and rings under my XT50. Here is a general chart. Important - these are air tests. In the ground readings will often shift lower.

Tone - VDI - Items 

Very Hi 45 Steel Halves, Dollars 
Very Hi 42 Quarters, Large Silver Rings 
High .... 39 Silver Rings 
High .... 36 Penny/Dime, Small Silver Rings 
High .... 33 Indian Head Penny 
High .... 30 Zinc Penny, Indian Head Penny 
High .... 27 Screw Cap, Indian Head Penny, Large Aluminum 
Medium 24 Heavy Square Tabs, $5 Gold, Very Large Men's Rings 
Medium 21 Large Pull Tabs, Large Men's Rings 
Medium 18 Pull Tabs Men's Rings 
Medium 15 Small Pull Tabs, Erasers, Small Men's Rings 
Medium 12 Light Square Tabs, Nickels, Erasers, Beavertails, Large Women's Rings 
Medium 09 Beavertails, Heavy Foil, Erasers, Medium Women's Rings 
Medium 06 Medium Foil, Small Women's Rings 
Medium 03 Light Foil, Small Jewelry 
Low ..... -3 Wire, Pins, Very Small Jewelry (Post Earrings, Thin Chains)
Low ..... -6 Nails 
Low ..... -9 Hot Rock, Large Iron

Notes - 45 is more often a junk indication than the very rare dollar or half. Men's rings fall mostly into 21 followed by 24. Women's rings are heavy in 6 and 9 followed by 12. 18 is the heavy pull tab range and sparse on rings (too high for most women's rings, too low for most men's). 15 also has fewer rings but also less junk. All these observations are only true for my area and mix of targets and so must be taken with a large grain of salt, are are only intended as an aid to those just starting out. You can get junk in any segment, and good finds in any segment!

Here is a simplified version, a combination of most likely targets and "wishful thinking". 21 is more likely to be a large pull tab, but it is the hottest number for men's rings, at least out of my collection. 18 might be a ring, but fewer fall there than in lower or higher numbers, and it is very heavy in common pull tabs.

45 Steel 
42 Quarter 
39 Silver 
36 Penny/Dime 
33 IH Penny 
30 Zinc Penny 
27 Screw Cap 
24 Large Men's Ring 
21 Men's Ring 
18 Large Tab 
15 Small Tab 
12 Nickel 
09 Women's Ring 
06 Small Women's Ring 
03 Foil 
-3 Wire 
-6 Nails 
-9 Hot Rock

Update 2011: Not very long after the X-Terra 50 came out with the X-Terra 70. This irritated a lot of people who thought the X-Terra 50 was going to be the top-end unit. The X-Terra 70 offered the true all metal mode that the X-Terra 50 lacked, making it a superior detector for gold nugget detecting in particular. The X-Terra 70 was later replaced by the Minelab X-Terra 705, a detector I currently own. It is a very good light weight detector for all around use.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2006 Herschbach Enterprises

I've had people ask me about removing the quartz on Moore Creek gold specimens. Much of the gold found at Moore Creek has a lot of quartz attached. Some of it is very attractive as it, but much of it is just rocks with gold in it. I've thought that it would be unlikely that the enclosed gold would be continuous enough to end up with large gold nuggets but that instead you might end up with a pile of smaller gold. I have not bothered to ever put it to the test to find out.

Ken (he of the 32.2 oz nugget) had about a pound of Moore Creek specimens that he went ahead and had soaked in hydrofluoric acid. Before you think of doing this yourself this is some very dangerous stuff indeed. Ken paid to have it done by a professional. Much to my surprise nearly all the specimens proved to be solid gold inside. The quartz in most cases was hiding fairly solid gold cores. The gold was real rough after having the quartz removed, so Ken ran it awhile in a rock tumbler to smooth it up a bit. It came out looking great in my opinion.

Moore Creek gold specimens found by Steve Herschbach

He did end up with a some small stuff but not as much as I would have thought. Some formulations of Whink brand rust remover are a very weak solution of hydrofluoric acid, and I have been told that if you just let specimens soak in this long enough, refreshing the solution periodically, that similar results can be obtained. Whink is sold over the counter in grocery stores so can't be all that dangerous to handle, but still use appropriate caution if you attempt this. Acid is still acid, no matter how weak. More information on cleaning gold nuggets and specimens.

Moore Creek gold specimens treated with acid to remove quartz

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2009 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

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 have been out gold prospecting with the Garrett ATX recently and wanted to share my latest thoughts on the unit. That, and show off a particularly nice nugget I just found with the detector!

I got my ATX right at a year ago. The machine has easily paid for itself and remains one of my favorite detectors. With all the other new detectors I have been using lately I have not had it out enough however, and so I have made an effort to start using it again the last few weeks.

I guess my constant prospecting these days is making me tougher as I have no problem using the ATX for long hours with no extra support. Still, for long days I like to use a bungee support off the shoulder of my Camelback style rucksack. Garret was kind enough to send me a set of scuff covers for my coils, and I find the solid scuff cover for the stock coil to be very helpful. It prevents the coil from hanging up in stubble and in northern Nevada allows me to let the coil just ride on the ground. There usually is just a little grass or weeds that act as a buffer for smooth riding. If I get directly on hard rock surface I still pick up some coil falsing but not so much as when the bare coil edges would catch on rocks. The only issue with the solid cover is that it collects debris and must be shaken clean on occasion. I think I will get another scuff cover or even just a flat piece of plastic to fix in place over the top to prevent this from happening.

I have been using the headphone adapter so I can run the ATX with my Sun Ray Pro Gold headphones, which sound a bit better to my ear than the supplied headphones. The Garrett headphones are pretty good but I would rather keep them available for backup use. I have toyed with the idea of using my B&Z booster along with a shoulder mounted external speaker but have not quite got around to trying that yet. I think that would be preferable for long hours in very quiet locations. I like to hear what is going on around me.

Related to that, I normally run the ATX with a very faint threshold. I have also experimented a bit with running it set just barely quiet, and for patch hunting wandering around I am thinking I may do this more often. The performance edge lost is minimal, and I do enjoy the solitude and silence. Many days detecting for me is nothing more or less than a wonderful long hike over the hills in the middle of nowhere. No headphones and no threshold buzz just might be something I do more of in the future. I know, I should be preaching the opposite but my primary goal these days is enjoying myself and those little things make a difference. Being able to hear a wild horse in the distance or a coyote howl is important to me.

Garrett ATX waterproof pulse induction (PI) metal detector

I usually dig it all but I do like the ferrous check function on the ATX. It can only be trusted on targets I really know to be junk anyway - nice loud surface signals. But maybe, just maybe that signal is a large shallow nugget! It is nice to push the button and get a solid ferrous indication from the ATX allowing me to work more efficiently in areas with lots of surface nails and other ferrous trash. I don't trust it on weak signals however, especially in very mineralized ground.

The waterproof part is nice but really not needed. What I do appreciate is being able to collapse the unit down into a compact package and toss it in my truck. That the ATX uses rechargeable AA batteries is also a bonus because I am starting to standardize on them. All other things being equal I try to get detectors or accessory items that use AA batteries, and I have a lot of AA batteries and chargers due to this. This makes having plenty of extras available for use in the ATX very simple and cost effective.

The bottom line is the Garrett ATX is a very capable nugget detector with good performance on a wide range of target sizes. I appreciate the solid, stable performance. I have got no problem going out and finding gold with the ATX. Better yet, I use the ATX for more than nugget detecting. It is my preferred water hunting detector and so in that regard a true bargain.

Northern Nevada Outback

I was just out and hunting an area where I picked up a few nuggets with other detectors recently. I got the ATX out of the truck and wandered down to the wash. I had barely really got the unit ground balanced up and the soil I was walking on just looked like sandy mud with grass growing on it, so I decided to walk upstream a bit for a better location. I got a whisper of ground noise as I walked and a couple steps later stopped and thought "hmmmm... was that really a ground noise?" It had that little something and I was just assuming I did not have the ground balance spot on yet. I backed up and checked, and sure enough there was a soft signal in the grass. I gave a little dig and came up with a 0.7 gram nugget.

Well ok then, that was more like it. I started to work the immediate location and just six feet away got a largish signal, probably trash. I dug a bit and it was still in the hole. So I gave it a vigorous scoop and up pops a mud covered nugget. A large nugget! It later weighed in at 26.3 grams or 0.85 Troy ounces.

0.85 Troy ounce gold nugget found by Steve with Garrett ATX

I was ecstatic. I have to tell you that nugget really means a lot to me. Why? Because the location I was hunting was nothing anyone pointed out to me. I was running around looking at some old prospects and had a theory going on the geology and where the gold was coming from. I decided the location would be good on my own just based on what I was seeing, and I scored a really great nugget. The satisfaction of figuring things out and making a good call means more to me than the nugget. It is what real prospecting is all about. The fact that it is also one of the nicest nuggets I have found so far in Nevada certainly does not hurt though. It is a beauty, solid and chunky with a nice kind of flat matte finish.

A bunch of hunting later and I scored another small 0.6 gram nugget, for a total of three nuggets and 27.6 grams with the Garrett ATX. I am sure there is more gold waiting out there to be found so can't wait to get back at it. Just a great time in great country, and I have to say I am not missing being in Alaska at all. This beats being in cold rain ate alive by bugs any time.

Nevada gold nuggets found with Garrett ATX

I am getting ready to have a major weeding out of detectors and accessories. My collection of gear has ballooned too far in excess of what I need, and in 2015 I want to just focus on detecting instead of detectors, if you catch my drift. I need a few good machines to cover the bases for my varied detecting needs, but all the rest need to go. I am not much on clutter. One thing I do know for sure though, and that is that the Garrett ATX has earned a permanent spot in my collection. In particular I plan on being on California storm watch this winter, and at the first sign of major beach action I am grabbing the ATX and heading for the coast. The California beach boys will be seeing a new face this winter. And I am very sure there are many more nugget hunts in the future for me and the Garrett ATX.

This article originated as a thread on the Detectorprospector Forum and more information may be found there in later posts.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2014 Herschbach Enterprises

I held off on posting about this one for a bit while I got around to some unfinished business. Since my move from Alaska I have been slow to get another safe deposit box set up. I have always had one for my gold and other important valuables. The problem with posting about this stuff on the internet is it can attract the wrong kind of attention. This is something I would encourage everyone to think about. Now that all my gold and other goodies are residing at Wells Fargo I feel a little more free to post about this.

Chris Ralph and I were prospecting in Northern California not too long ago. I was running the Nokta FORS Gold and concentrating on some areas littered with square nails, cable bits, rusted cans, and other ferrous junk. There were places the Nokta running in dual tone DI2 mode sounded like a machine gun from ferrous low tones. I would go along with the detector going "putt - putt - putt - putt - putt - beep - putt" and on hearing that beep, stop to dig a bullet or some other non-ferrous item.

The weather was a bit wet but not unpleasant; kind of brings the forest smells out and makes for softer walking. I was afraid we were going to get rained out but it keep just on the edge of really starting up. There was not much sign of detecting, no doubt due to all the trash. Chris was off hitting some bedrock with his detector while I wandered around in the trees and duff overlying the old tailing materials.

There was a bit of a mound around the base of a tree and I swept around it getting ferrous tones, when all of the sudden I get a strong non-ferrous beep. I looked down at the target id displayed on the end of the FORS Gold handle and it was showing 82. I thought "That's odd, a coin." I was still not tuned in one what the numbers meant exactly on the Nokta but on a typical 1-100 scale an 82 would be something like a penny or a dime. I have yet to find a really decent old coin since moving south, so I thought I was maybe going to dig some nice silver.

I gave a couple digs and was surprised to see nothing pop up. Hmmm... must be bigger, deeper. So I open the hole up and dig deeper, and this dirty gray lump pops out of the ground.

Dirty lump hides spectacular gold specimen

My exact thought "you have got to be kidding me!" It was a filthy lump but I knew instantly it was gold. I could not believe my good fortune. I got out my water bottle and washed it off a bit and saw gold and large chunks of white quartz - I had found something really special. After cleaning it ended up as 1.83 ounces of stunning gold and quartz that would do a museum proud. Just a really spectacular specimen, the best I have ever found. I won't claim that only the Nokta would have found it because any good detector would have. Yet I do think this is a case where a good discriminating VLF detector proved to be of benefit in approaching an area that might cause most pulse induction operators to wander off in another direction.

I cleaned the nugget by giving it a couple trips through my ultrasonic cleaner and picking the roots out with tweezers. An ultrasonic cleaner is perfect for these types of specimens with deeps pits and crevices. Other than that it has not been treated with acid or anything.

Anyway, this is a fabulous chunk of gold and quartz. One thing that strikes me repeatedly while detecting in Nevada and California is how much nicer the gold is that that I used to find in Alaska. The gold here is generally purer with a richer, more butter yellow color. Many Alaska nuggets are higher in silver content and therefore have paler gold. The quartz in the gold here also tends to be cleaner and whiter. A lot of Alaska gold quartz specimens are discolored with gray and brown quartz variations.

This does matter not just for appearance but for value. Large nuggets and specimen gold can command premiums over the value of the gold content, but that premium is based almost entirely on appearance. It a nutshell, the better a specimen looks, the more it’s worth. There are quite a few places in the western U.S. that produce extremely high quality specimen gold that can fetch premiums many times over the basic gold value.

Alaska, not so much. I have no doubt the quality of my finds had improved since leaving Alaska. This specimen easily eclipses anything I ever found in Alaska for overall beauty. Just a terrific find, one of my best ever!

This article was originally posted on the DetectorProspector Forum and additional commentary may be found there in follow up posts.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2014 Herschbach Enterprises

I finally got my dredge completely out of Crow Creek canyon this weekend. Water conditions in the canyon forced me to don my drysuit; I did not feel comfortable trying to cross the creek in waders while carrying a six foot long sluice box over my head. I was tempted to leave the last items until the water dropped in the fall, but I already had a buyer for the dredge, and so had to get it out. After carefully fording the sluice, suction hose, and other gear up the canyon to the base of the cable pullout, I stripped out of my drysuit. Then came numerous trips in and out of the canyon, attaching gear to the pulley system, then climbing up and pulling it out. By the time I finally got it all out to the parking lot, I was ready for a break.

Sluice headed up cable

The pictures below explain why I dredge Crow Creek in the early spring and late fall. It has been a dry summer, but since Crow Creek is fed by a small glacier and snowfields, it remains at flood stage all summer. The water is fast enough to be barely crossable, and is gray with glacial silt. Compared with the slow moving, clear water of spring and fall, it is simply not worth fighting the season. In particular, the inability to see the material means more worthless material is dredged, and more frustrating hose clogs occur. Still, there are those who work the creek in the summer and do well; they simply have more patience than I have.

Crow Creek on July 10, and back on April 24

I decided I had to find at least a little gold before I went home, so I grabbed my trusty metal detector and headed up the creek. Mine owner Sean Toohey was working with a backhoe up the creek grooming a place for a GPAA mining party the next weekend. He was also scouting for a place to mine in the future.

A rather obvious (to my eye, at least) layer of cobbles was cutting across a bank exposed by floods a couple of years ago. A looser cobble layer rests on a finer grained, and much tougher lower layer. The fine-grained lower layer is much older, and formed a false bedrock surface for the more recent upper streambed layer. At one time Crow Creek itself was running up at this higher point, and the cobble layer represents the bottom of this now high and dry deposit. Remnants of older streambed material, perched above and parallel to the existing steam are referred to as "benches" or "high bench deposits". Often a flattened area on the banks above the current creek can indicate a bench deposit, but often times material sliding downhill from above bury the deposits so that they are not immediately obvious. Such is the case at this location.

Old streambed layers exposed at Crow Creek

I checked the exposure with my detector, and was not too surprised when I had found three small nuggets in less than ten minutes. They all were at the base of the cobble layer, on top of the fine-grained layer. They were also of a chunkier character than the gold found in the canyon downstream, having been subject to less stream action since being released from the gold veins upstream.

The two larger pieces are 4 grains each, while the smaller piece is a 1 grain nugget, for a total of 9 grains. Not much, but not bad for ten minutes. Sean promptly declared the location "Steve's Bench" and made plans to expose the hillside with the backhoe in the future. Chances are the deposit is limited in extent, but one never knows until a little digging is done. In any case, the area bears more attention from metal detector users and others.

Three nuggets

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

Unseasonably cold weather continues in Southcentral Alaska. The snow at Crow Creek Mine was still 1-2 feet deep Saturday morning, and minor amounts of snow were actually coming down as I arrived at the creek! The good news is that if it was warmer, then the snow melt would cause the creek to be higher and muddier. Even with the cool weather, the creek was up slightly and a little murky, as the photo above shows. The creek did completely open up over the week, and the snow bridges are all gone now.

My dredging was rather uneventful this weekend, and a little on the short side time-wise. I wanted to get home a little early each day because of Mother's Day (good idea to let my wife know I do exist) so I got in about 5 actual hours of dredging each day. This was okay on Saturday, as I picked up a little coarser gold and still managed to get about an ounce. The short hours worked caught up with me Sunday.

I was approaching a small set of rapids with some fast moving, boiling water. The creek was widening slightly at this point, so I decided to tackle the fast moving water by diverting the water to the right and then working up the left side. You can see the small diversion dam in the photo above at the head of the dredge excavation. The idea is to work a channel up the left hand side, then divert the water into the new channel. The material on the right hand side of the creek may then be worked, without having to deal with the fast moving water. Unfortunately, I worked outside the paystreak somewhat, which is more or less centered on the middle of the creek along this stretch. I only picked up .7 oz. Sunday, short of my normal daily goal of 1 ounce. If I had put in that extra couple of hours, I no doubt would have made my goal. This puts the total for the weekend at 1.7 ounces, and the 5 day dredging total 5.8 ounces. I'll have to work my regular hours again next weekend to move the average back up.

1.7 Ounces of Gold from Crow Creek

So where is all this gold coming from? The ultimate source is a group of historic hardrock mines at the head of Crow Creek valley, discovered around 1909. Two of these, the Monarch and the Jewel mines, produced a total of about 5,000 ounces of gold by 1947. These mines consist of thin irregular quartz veins carrying arsenopyrite, chalcopyrite, galena, sphalerite, pyrrhotite, molybdenite, pyrite, magnetite, and of course, gold and silver. This is a common type of gold ore in Alaska, in that it has a little bit of everything... gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc, iron, and arsenic. The veins are in the graywacke and slate bedrock typical of the Kenai peninsula, are are grouped around some small quartz diorite masses that intrude the surrounding bedrock. The mines do not seem particularly rich, but are listed as having a high mineral potential by the former Bureau of Mines.

Gold eroded from these and other gold-bearing veins was deposited in Crow Creek, mostly before the last glacial advance. Crow Creek is very unique, in that the advancing glaciers did not totally disperse the gold deposits, but instead buried them and left much of the old deposits intact. The original miners on Crow Creek discovered the presence of several deeply buried canyons, and excavated most of these. These deposits were very rich, with material with up to 6 ounces of gold per yard of gravel recorded. A yard of that gravel discovered today would be worth almost $2000. (2011 Update: Over $10,000!) The original bed of Crow Creek exists as a dry channel directly below the Crow Creek parking lot. The creek is now flowing through one of the old excavated channels far lower than the dry channel. Over 250 feet of material was removed to excavate the old channels. Despite the visions of environmental havoc this may cause one to imagine, the excavation has fully grown back such a profusion of trees and other vegetation that most visitors believe they are standing in a natural valley, not a large man-made excavation.

The upper portion of Crow Creek Mine has many exposures of virgin gold-bearing material on both banks of the creek, as well as tailings redeposited along the creek itself. This area is open to the general public for a fee and produces the larger gold nuggets found at Crow Creek Mine. Nuggets of up to 1/4 ounce are fairly common, with nuggets of up to 1 ounce sometimes found. The largest nugget recorded from Crow Creek weighed 3.37 ounces. Almost all the nuggets found with metal detectors come from the upper area. I have found thousands of nuggets metal detecting in the upper area, the largest weighing 7 dwt. and numerous 1-5 dwt. pieces.

The old canyon on the lower claims where I am dredging was mostly mined out, but the waste material form the upper workings was dumped into the canyon. Gold was lost in the tailings due to the large volume nature of the hydraulic mining methods used, and the gold has been concentrated by floods over the years into workable deposits. The gold is more consistent then in the upper areas, but overall of a much smaller size. Larger nuggets are very rare in the tailings, although I did find several, including a beautiful 1 ounce specimen last year. I do find pieces of up to a pennyweight on a regular basis, such as the one in the photo above, in the canyon material.

1 Ounce Nugget found at Crow Creek in 1998 by Steve Herschbach

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 1999 Herschbach Enterprises

I took Darrell to Mills Creek earlier in the year on his first mining trip. His girlfriend Juli has now arrived in Anchorage, and we decided it would be fun for the three of us to run down to Crow Creek to look for her first gold. Temperatures are reaching freezing at night in Alaska now, and the water levels are dropping. We decided to use a sluice box to dig at water line, hopefully exposing gold-bearing material that is normally underwater in the summer.

Snow started to fall as we approached Crow Creek, and a light dusting covered the ground when we reached the mine. Luckily we were prepared for the cold and it just added to the fun.

We carried the gear to the creek and looked for a likely location. We all grabbed gold pans, and I showed Darrell and Juli how to sample for gold. It always makes sense to do a little checking with gold pans before setting up a sluice box. We dug small holes behind larger rocks at the water's edge up and down the creek. For awhile it was just a flake or two per pan, but I finally got a decent showing against one bank. I set up the sluice while Darrell and Juli panned for gold.

We were using Keene's A51 sluice, a very popular three foot model. The trick to setting up a sluice is to find some fast water. Most people set up a sluice with water running too slow. There seems to be a general fear of washing the gold away. I tend to set my sluice on the fast side. I may lose a few fines, but in areas where the gold has some size, it is more important to run a good volume of material. I try to set my sluice so that when a 14" pan of material with rocks less than 2" in size is dumped in everything just runs through. Like I said, I'm sure I lose some fines or flat flakes, but I feel I more than make up in volume with larger gold. If you have to toss every little pebble out by hand it slows you down too much.

I always tell people to look at how a 2" dredge sluice runs... rocks 1.5" in diameter run through completely on their own. The A51 is about the same size as a 2" dredge sluice and should be run about the same way, unless you have nothing but fine gold. If that is the case, then the material should be screened and the sluice run slower to enhance fine gold recovery. I'm sure some would argue, but I simply find that if I shovel more yards through my box then the next guy, then I also usually get more gold.

Darrell & Julie at first sluicing location & sluice set up

Here is another way to look at it. Let's say we are looking at 4 yards of material that runs an incredible 1/2 ounce per yard. You are determined not to lose any gold, so you first screen the material to 1/2" minus, then run it carefully through your sluice. By the end of the day, you manage to process one yard, and get an impossible 100% of the gold. You end up with 1/2 ounce.

I work the same time you do, but I dump directly to my box, discarding only rocks larger than 2" in diameter. I run my box faster and deeper to move these larger rocks through. As a result I lose 25% of the gold since a lot of it is fine and flaky. But my increased volume allows me to process two full yards of material. I end up with 3/4 ounce of gold to your 1/2 ounce.

To add insult to injury, we return the next day. There is one yard of this incredibly rich material left. We both go after it; you manage to process another 1/3 yard while I move the remaining 2/3 yard. Your final weekend total is .83 ounce of gold, while my weekend of work nets me 1.25 ounce of gold.

The bottom line - from any theoretical 100% recovery position, if you double your volume of material the recovery percentage would have to drop to 50% or less to end up with less gold. My observation is that most recreational miners are under-utilizing their equipment for fear of losing gold, or just plain not working hard enough. So my advice is "you want more gold, move more dirt"! The only time this is likely to be a losing proposition is if the gold is exceptionally fine and/or flaky. It is also for miners with limited time. If you have lots of time, and limited reserves of material, (or are commercial!) then increased attention to recovery rates makes more sense.

Juli's nugget & Darrell at second sluicing location

Before I get a firestorm of email about this (recovery rates are a type of religion with miners) let me just note that this is a suggestion based on what seems to work for me, nothing more. I'm the kind of guy who tosses the bit of fines left in my pan back, so it can grow! Besides, I made all the numbers up in my example. It just all depends on your situation, and if this got you to think about it, then I've achieved my goal. If you are happy with the gold you are getting, then by all means keep on at it. Back to the story...

Darrell and I fed the sluice while Juli worked on her panning. We kept seeing smaller gold showing up in the sluice, but nothing too large. Then Juli came up with her first nugget. It was larger than anything we had found in the sluice so far, about the size of a watermelon seed. Not too bad for her first nugget! In fact, it turned out to be the largest nugget of the day.

Cleanups from first & second locations

The site we were at did not seem to be paying out all that well, just lots of fines, so we went back to prospecting with pans. I located a spot behind a large boulder about 100 feet downstream that produced a dozen pieces of gold in a pan, so we moved on down. The gold was in a layer just at waterline, and seemed fairly rich. Again, however, the gold was pretty small stuff, with no real nuggets. We worked another couple of hours, and then called it quits as our backs began to get stiff. It is much harder to run a small sluice than a 6" dredge in my opinion! We panned out the sluice and were rewarded with between two and three pennyweight of medium and fine sized gold. Juli thoroughly enjoyed her first gold mining trip, and fun was had by all.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 1999 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

I met up with forum member Condor on Thursday and as promised he took me for a heck of a hike in steep terrain. We got in and pitched camp and that was it for the day. Friday through Monday we shinnied up bedrock chutes and bushwacked through the hills trying to get to old mine workings. This high Sierra 1800's stuff is well grown over and I am learning just how impenetrable the vegetation can get here. Alaska it can get slow going but there is nothing that will actually stop you dead in your tracks. Looks like I need to get a mini chainsaw.

We basically detected in the morning and evening with a little siesta in the main heat of the day. Those old pits can be like big dry, dusty ovens. Only real issue was that Condor had a new SDC 2300 and a new charger system and batteries and there seemed to be issues with the batteries. I had my three pre-charged sets of rechargeables and a couple sets of alkaline batteries. Between what I had in extras plus what he could get charged off his solar panel we did just fine and had power to spare but he needs to sort out what is going on with his batteries. I found a set of my batteries easily got me through a day and maybe a little more so I see no need for me to deal with solar charging unless I am out for more than five days, which honestly I doubt I will be doing.

My Minelab SDC 2300 takes a break

A look at the ground

The gold was sparse and scattered but I did finally hit a mini patch of a few chunky nuggets on the edge of a small pit where material looks to have sluiced over a small bedrock outcrop. My largest was a couple pennyweight and I ended up with 11.2 grams or 7.1 dwt for four days of detecting. I'm happy with a couple grams a day average so I am pleased with the result. Condor got a bit less due to my hitting that little patch. Main thing was hooking back up with old friends, seeing new terrain, and getting my gear sorted out. My boots, sufficient for normal terrain, let me down in hours of near vertical. My toes kept cramming into the ends and I will not be surprised if I lose both big toenails. I have good Alaska mountain boots but they are probably too hot for most of this stuff so a new pair of boots may be in order. Other than that I was fairly happy with my setup.

My mini gold patch

11.2 grams or 7.1 pennyweight of nice chunky gold!

The SDCs once again proved their worth. Man, this ground was hot!! Serpentine bedrock, with patches of red soil on it that must have been at least 50% magnetite by content. The SDC would want to groan if moved too fast but that was easily remedied by simply doing what we are supposed to and going slow. Worse was when getting what appeared to be a faint signal, and then after scratching off the surface the ground would light up with many faint signals in the disturbed magnetite. It was like it was magnetically aligned resting undisturbed in place but once disturbed the ground responses became mixed. A VLF would be totally dead in this stuff. It actually was a bit like what Chris Ralph and I ran into in a couple very small places and in this case it was more widespread. That all said, I generally was able to easily hunt in sensitivity level "3" very effectively and smoothly, with only small foot or two square areas making me slow way down and see what was up.

Tons of bullets, piles of nails, and basically no sign of prior detecting to speak of. I can see why between the terrain and the ground conditions. It really was a kind of textbook case for having the SDC 2300.

Thanks Condor!! Great little trip, great hanging out with you and catching up on our lives. See you again soon!

This story was promoted from a DetectorProspector Forum thread where more information and discussion may be found.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2014 Herschbach Enterprises

Spring has sprung! I'm off to a slow start this season. Other commitments have kept me busy this spring, so I have not made my annual spring dredging trip this year. The short window of opportunity for low, clear water has already passed as water levels rise with the temperatures. It has been a rather cool spring in Southcentral Alaska, and as a result the snow is staying a little later than usual this year. My first trip to Crow Creek Mine just prior to the Memorial Day holiday revealed snow patches along the creek still. The mine is open for business, however, and many of the local miners were at the mine as I surveyed the area.

I had left my little 4" subsurface dredge down in the canyon in the fall, hoping to use it early in the spring before the water came up. Since that time has passed, my first order of business was to get the dredge out of the canyon before the water gets any higher. I waited too long to haul out last spring, and the water rose to the point I could not ford the stream safely while carrying gear. I had to scale the canyon walls up a much less pleasant exit route, and did not want to repeat the experience this year.

I've also taken a change of direction in my future mining plans. I've spent quite a few years mining the same locations, and want to start prospecting new areas. In particular, I want to spend more time metal detecting, looking for "the big one" so to speak. I've downsized my dredging equipment for now, having sold my 6" dredge last summer, and my 5" earlier this spring. I plan to upgrade my 4" subsurface with a better set of floats and a longer recovery box, and use it as my main unit for the time being. I won't be moving the volume, and so will take a hit in overall production. I'm hoping to stay more mobile and try and target a little larger gold than the quantities of smaller gold I have been getting. I guess I'm willing to trade quality for quantity for now. We'll see how this pays off. At the very least, I'll have new spots to write about for this Journal!

Late Snow at Crow Creek

I climbed on down to where I left my dredge last fall. I've learned from past experience that deep snow can really bury a dredge, so I try to leave them upright against a rock face or under a tree. This is not a problem now, since the snow is about gone. The dredge was fine, and the water conditions nice, so I decided to do a little dredging as I hauled the unit upstream.

I set up where Darryl, Juli, and I had done a little sluicing last fall. The location was at the water's edge, and will be under two to three feet of fast moving water within a few weeks. It is the edge of a paystreak I had bypassed a few years ago, and from the sluicing we did last fall I figured I could pick up a little gold with no effort.

Check my June 24th Journal entry from last summer if you are unfamiliar with subsurface dredges. The recovery system is underwater, which lowers the horsepower requirements, which in turn allows for smaller floats. My little 4" dredge only weighs about 90 pounds. I can pack it in two loads. Frames, floats, and sluice in one load, 4HP Honda and hoses in another load. Ideal for sites such as this. The downside is greater loss rates for fine and flaky gold, but they are not as bad as some people think. I have had so much interest in these units that I am writing a magazine article up on them at this time.

Dredge stashed along bank and in water at work

I worked behind a large rock along the edge of a gravel bar, or should I call it a rock bar? Not much gravel in this canyon! After an hour or a little more I cleaned up, and found I had just over 2 pennyweights of small gold, or just over a tenth of an ounce. At that rate, I could have easily got about a half ounce by the end of the day. The problem, again, was that the water was coming up as the sun rose in the sky, and I still needed to get the dredge out. I decided to bite the bullet and pack it out. Besides, I had brought my metal detector along, and wanted to do a little nugget detecting before the day was out. It only took about two hours to pack the dredge out, thanks to the lightweight design. It was a far cry from packing the old larger dredges out.

Close up of tiny riffle tray, and gold recovered

I still had some time left, so as planned I grabbed my metal detector and headed up the creek. I scouted around the exposed areas from the previous summer, but only found some surface trash. It is getting very difficult to find gold at Crow Creek by just swinging your detector. It has been hit hard by a lot of people with metal detectors. The best way to get any gold with a detector at this point is to move some dirt around.

One nice thing about early spring is that you can see ground features that will be obscured by brush and leaves later in the season. I saw a little ridge back in the brush along a gully about 500 feet from the creek that looked interesting. The area had been stripped clean with hydraulic water cannons years before. Sometimes a lot of gold was left right on the surface, but now a thick layer of leaves covers the ground. The layer is thin on banks, and I like to scrape the thin covering off to get at the old wash layer below. The slope of the bank helps when pulling the leaves and surface material down the hill.

I cleared the side of the gully a bit, and was immediately rewarded with a couple small signals from the Gold Bug 2. I was using the 6" accessory coil, which is very hot on small gold. The nuggets were small, only about a grain each, but it was gold! I continued to work the site, but the gold was small, and on the surface only. Leftovers from the old washing operations. I moved to another location farther up the hill where someone had dug under a tree. I got another signal in the back of the hole, and turned up another small nugget. One more scoop and the last guy would have got it. I cleaned up the hole and enlarged it a little, but only turned up a few more small nuggets.

Small overgrown bank and small nuggets recovered from it

The day was wearing out, and the sun going behind the hill. The mosquitoes started to get more active, and I had put in a long day, so I decided to head on home. I ended up with 15 little nuggets using the detector. They ranged from .5 grain to 1.5 grain and totaled a half pennyweight. Along with the dredge gold, I had 2.5 pennyweights for the day, and had my dredge out of the canyon. Not a bad start for the season, and all of summer is ahead!

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

The July 2016 issue of the ICMJ magazine contains an article I wrote reprising my 2011 trip to Australia to hunt gold with Chris Ralph and Jonathan Porter. Subscribers can view the article online.

There was of course a lot more to say about the trip than was contained in the article, and in particular I have a lot more photos to share. I kept a diary while on the trip, and this thread is intended to provide a much more detailed look at the trip. I will keep posting on this thread in a serial fashion similar to what I did with my Alaska gold adventures with my diary providing daily details.

It all started in 2010 at the old AMDS Adventure Forum when I made this post on a thread:

"Hi murph,

You know, for many years it was my dream to go hunt nuggets in Australia. I got Doug Stone's books and read everything else I could and dreamed of those monster nuggets.

But as years went by I read between the lines and figured it is a tough go to find the big nuggets in Australia these days. The fact is you only read about people making finds, but plenty of visitors to Oz find no gold. There is always the home team advantage. It is not so much what you know as who you know, and I'll always have a tremendous advantage in Alaska just because I've lived here all my life. Though I do have a few contacts in Oz that might give me a leg up on the average visitor. Still, it may be that my chance to visit Australia is coming as my circumstances have taken a turn for the better. So maybe in a couple years?"

That in turn generated a response from famed Australian gold prospector Jonathan Porter:

"Steve I will tell you this, if you ever decide to visit Australia it would be my pleasure to show you around. There is still plenty of potential here in Australia, the auriferous areas are just too extensive and in some cases very inaccessible so there just has to be good nugget patches waiting for someone gutsy enough to come along and swing their coil over that first lump. I intend to get into some tiger country this year and could do with a good partner who doesn't need a gold fix every day, interested? - JP"

It turns out that JP and ICMJ Associate editor Chris Ralph had been discussing the possibility of a joint prospecting trip in Australia. I had met Chris previously when I had invited him up to visit my Moore Creek pay-to-mine operation several years earlier. A few messages were passed back and forth offline, and I was fortunate enough to be invited to join in on the adventure. Trying to pick the best time as regards weather was a big priority, and it was decided that the fall of 2011 would be the best bet for putting a trip together. Australia is in the southern hemisphere, and so the seasons are the reverse of what we experience in the United States. Our fall is their spring and we timed it to hit cooler temperatures that would be warming while we were there. Jonathan's advice was critical here. We wanted several weeks to give it a good go and decided the entire month of September 2011 would work well. That gave us plenty of time to plan and make arrangements so we put it on our calendars.

This adventure is continued on the DetectorProspector Forum as a series of posts - see here for the full story.

I spent a couple months in Alaska prospecting for gold in the summer of 2014. That adventure was chronicled as it happened here on the forum at Steve's 2014 Alaska Gold Adventure. It was a great trip and a great adventure, but when I told it I relayed the fact that it was actually part two of the story. Part one happened in 2013 and for reasons you will now discover I kept quiet about it until now.

Those interested in the logistics of making the trip to Alaska and details on where I stayed, etc. will find all that covered in the 2014 story so I will not repeat that stuff here.

2013 was a momentous year for me. My business partner and I had sold the business we started together in 1976 to our employees in 2010. My partner immediately retired but I stayed on a few years to oversee the transition. Things seemed to be going well enough that I announced my retirement to take place in the spring of 2013. My wife and I had purchased a new home in Reno, Nevada and so plans were made to sell our home in Alaska and move south.

At the same time, some partners and I had acquired some mining claims on Jack Wade Creek in the Fortymile country near Chicken. Alaska. My plan was to move my wife south then spend the summer gold dredging with my brother. The disaster struck. I screwed up the paperwork and the claims were lost. That mess was described online at Making Lemonade Out of Lemons and I even wrote an article for the ICMJ about it. I was not to be deterred however and made plans instead to go metal detecting for the summer. Unfortunately, my brother also had a change of plans and so was unable to make the trip with me. Just as well as I ended up having my hands full.

The house sale was in progress and time running out so I boxed and palleted everything we wanted to keep and shipped it south. Then I loaded my wife and dogs up in the car and drove them to Reno. Next I flew back to Alaska and had a last big garage sale. I sold everything I could by the afternoon and out a FREE sign on what was left. Worked great - the house was empty, I cleaned it up, and pretty much left it to the realtors at that point. Finally, on June 16th I jumped in my fully loaded truck and headed for the Fortymile!

On the way up just past the town of Palmer on the way to the town of Glenallen you pass Sheep Mountain in the Talkeetna Mountains. It is a very colorful, mineralized peak and it was a beautiful sunny day so I stopped and took this photo.

Sheep Mountain, Alaska

From the USGS ARDF file at http://mrdata.usgs.gov/ardf/show-ardf.php?ardf_num=AN080

Early Jurassic greenstone and minor interbedded sandstone and shale is intruded by numerous mafic dikes and at least one body of unmineralized Jurassic granite. Greenstone has been hydrothermally altered and contains at least 6 separate gypsiferous deposits in altered zones along joints and shear zones. Deposits composed of pods and stringers of gypsum, quartz, alunite, kaolin minerals, pyrite and serpentine minerals (Eckhart, 1953). The gypsum-bearing material averages 25 to 30 percent gypsum, with a maximum of 50 percent.

In addition also reported from same general area are: (1) small irregular quartz-calcite-epidote veins in greenstone containing chalcopyrite, malachite, azurite and possibly bornite and chalcocite (Berg and Cobb, 1967); (2) disseminated chalcopyrite in greenstone over 5 ft thick zone subparallel to bedding (Martin and Mertie, 1914); (3) trace gold in samples of pyritic greenstone (Berg and Cobb, 1967); and (4) minor anomalous concentrations of copper and gold associated with some of the alteration zones and nearby veins (MacKevett and Holloway, 1977).

Large area of south flank of Sheep Mountain is stained dark red from oxidation of pyrite in greenstone (Berg and Cobb, 1967). Oxidation of Cu minerals.

The gypsiferous material averages 25 to 30 percent gypsum, with a maximum of 50 percent. The six deposits indicated and inferred reserves contain about 659,000 short tons of gypsum material, of which about 50 tons of this material had been mined (Eckhart, 1953). In addition, about 55 tons of clay was mined for the manufacture of fire brick and boiler lining. Samples of pyritic greenstone assayed trace gold (Berg and Cobb, 1967), and nearby veins in alteration zones show concentrations of copper and gold (MacKevett and Holloway, 1977).

We did a talk radio show for many, many years at our company. The latest of several "radio personalities" to work with us on the show was Kurt Haider. He had expressed an interest in metal detecting so I invited him up to look for gold. I met him along the way just before we got to Glenallen and headed on to Tok for a bite to eat at Fast Eddie's. Then on to Chicken and finally Walker Fork Campground by evening. This is a very nice, well maintained BLM campground at the mouth of Jack Wade Creek where it dumps into the Walker Fork of the Fortymile River. The campground hosts this summer were a very nice couple named Pat and Sandy.

Walker Fork Campground

Steve's Camp at Walker Fork Campground

The next morning Kurt and I ran up the creek to find Bernie and Chris Pendergast. They were spending the summer camped along Jack Wade Creek prospecting and I was anxious to see how they had been doing. Not bad, they already had over an ounce of gold found before we arrived, and that got Kurt and I all fired up to go look for gold. I had told Kurt, a total newbie, that I had a sure thing. We were going to hit a bedrock area I had detected the previous summer and where I had found a lot of nice fat little nuggets. There was rubble and little piles of dirt, and I thought all it would take is moving the rubble and dirt aside and we were sure to find gold I had missed. We got started after lunch on a steep slope where it was easy to just rake material off and then check with a detector.

Kurt Looking For Gold With White's MXT Pro

The location turned out to not be very good, but Kurt did manage to find one little nugget, his first ever. He was real happy about that! We did not work at it all that long though with the late start, and Chris and Bernie had invited us over for moose stew. Chris is a fantastic cook so we enjoyed both the stew and a DVD packed full of Ganes Creek photos from the couples adventures there. Finally we called it a night and headed back to our camp.

Now time to get serious! Kurt and I grabbed the picks and rakes and spent the whole day tearing into some berms left behind by the miners bulldozers on the bedrock bench area. I just knew we were going to find gold for sure. We would both do hard labor for awhile, then I would put Kurt on the ground with my Gold Bug 2.

Working Bedrock With the Gold Bug 2

We worked a couple hours. Nothing. No big deal, just need to move a little more. Nothing. More digging and scraping. Nothing! I would have bet $100 we were not only going to find gold there but do pretty well. The spot had produced quite a few nuggets before and I had refused to believe we couple possibly had cleaned it out. But by the end of the day it was a total bust. We finally just wandered around a bit detecting and I lucked into a little 3 grain nugget. What a letdown. No big deal for me but I was really wanting Kurt to do well and this was not working out anything like I had thought it would.

The next and last day for Kurt we decided to hook up with Bernie and just give it a go like we normally do. And that means hitting the bushes and tailing piles wandering around looking for gold. Kurt had his MXT Pro and Bernie and I our GPX 5000 detectors, so we had a horsepower advantage for sure. Still, I was hopeful as we put Kurt on the best spot that Bernie knew of from his extra time before us.

Bernie Pendergast and His Trusty Minelab GPX 5000

Very first beep, Bernie digs up a 3 pennyweight nugget! Yeehaw, we are going to find gold!! We all hunt away, with Bernie and I checking in with Kurt periodically. Kurt, it seems, just was not destined to have any beginners luck at all; Bernie and I each found a couple 1-2 gram nuggets by the end of the day but Kurt came up dry.

I was feeling kind of bummed out but Kurt insisted he was having a huge adventure, and come to find out he rarely ever got out of town at all, so this really was a big adventure for him. I just wish he could have found more gold, but he was up early and headed back to town the next morning. I was on my own now, so I rigged my GPX 5000 up with my Nugget Finder 16" mono coil and hit the tailing piles. All day. For no gold. However, just by myself that is really no big deal at all. It happens all the time and I do not think anything of it. If anything, the pressure was off trying to help a friend find gold, so it was a relaxing day wandering around.

Saturday, June 22 started out sunny with a few clouds. There were some tailing piles across the creek I had been wanting to detect. I had hit them a bit the year before and just dug trash, but had not put in more than a couple hours at it. Still, they looked real good and I had been thinking about them all winter and decided it was time to give them a go. I started out with my GPX 5000 but immediately got into some old rusted metal, like decomposed and shredded can fragments. I just was not in the mood for it that morning, so went back to the truck and got out my Fisher F75. The F75 had done well for me in the past hunting trashy tailing piles and was along on the trip for that reason.

I got near the top of the pile with the F75 and on getting a signal looked down and saw a dig hole full of leaves. I try to recover all my trash and get frustrated when I find holes with junk in them. The signal though was flaky, not a distinct trash signal, so I figured I may as well see what the other person left in the hole. I gave a quick scoop with my pick, and gold pops out of the hole!

I am not sure if the person was using a VLF and the specimen gave a trash signal, so they left it after half digging it, or maybe they were using a Minelab, and the signal just sounded "too big" so they left it for trash. Too big indeed, they walked away from a 2.37 ounce gold specimen! To say I was stunned would be a vast understatement. The trip had only just begun. The best part of all was that my expectations for the trip were very low. I had been hoping that a month of camping and detecting would get me a couple ounces of gold. That would be more than enough to cover my expenses and make a few bucks. Yet here I was on the sixth day of my trip, and I had already exceeded that amount. This was just great on several different levels, not least in pretty much taking every bit of pressure off going forward.

Here is that specimen from a more detailed account of the find I told previously at Fisher F75 Strikes Gold in Alaska!

2.37 Ounce Gold Specimen Found With Fisher F75 Metal Detector on Jack Wade Creek, Alaska

I had to take a break and go show Chris and Bernie my good fortune. Then I switched back to the GPX 5000 and got with digging everything, including all those bits of rusted cans. Funny how a nice chunk of gold changes your perspective. That, and seeing what somebody else had left behind as trash.

I finished out the day finding three more nuggets, a 2.5 gram "cornflake" nugget, a 3.4 gram piece and and fat round 6.1 gram marble. First week, 2-3/4 ounce of gold, This was shaping up to be a really great adventure! To be continued......

Steve's Gold From Jack Wade Creek, First Week 2013

This adventure continues as a thread on the DetectorProspector forum with many more photos and details. View it all here.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2014 Herschbach Enterprises

Edit: I chronicled this trip to Alaska first, and then told the story of my earlier 2013 Alaska Trip after the fact. I did well enough in 2013 I did not want to tip anyone off to what I was up to until I had a chance to return in 2014. Therefore this story got told first, as if the other had not happened. And then the years story was told at the link above.

My history with the Fortymile Mining District of Alaska began in the 1970's and has continued off and on ever since. Last summer I spent considerable time in the area and have decided to return again this summer.

Here is the basic plan. I leave Monday to drive from Reno to Alaska. I am stopping a day to visit family in Olympia then will continue to Anchorage, where I will pick up my brother Tom who is flying up from the Lower 48. Then we will backtrack to Chicken, Alaska and pitch a tent site at the Buzby's Chicken Gold Camp http://www.chickengold.co

Last year I mostly camped around but did spend a period of time at the Buzby's operation. When I was out and about I had to activate my satellite phone to stay in touch because there is no cell phone service in the Chicken area. The nearest cell phone access is a couple hours back along the road at Tok. There is WiFi access at several locations in Chicken however, one of them being at Chicken Gold Camp. The WiFi access is included in the price of staying there. I am getting a dry camp site for $14 a day (6 days get seventh day free) but it saves me $300 activating my satellite phone, and WiFi allows me to keep on the forum and stay in better touch with my wife than the sat phone. Bottom line not activating the sat phone ends up paying for nearly a month of staying at Chicken Gold Camp. Right now I am booked from June 15 until July 20 but may extend.

Since I will have pretty much daily Internet access for the entire trip I am inviting you along via this thread to see how we are doing plus to perhaps answer questions for anyone planning to visit Alaska. The Internet access in Chicken is not the greatest even at its best, as the satellite dishes point straight at the horizon just trying to get a signal. That being the case plus I will be busy I will not be posting on other forums for the duration. If you know anyone who might be interested in following this point them this way. I will report in at least a couple times a week and probably more often as time allows or something interesting happens.

My brother and I will be commuting to various locations from our base camp in Chicken, with a lot of attention paid to Jack Wade Creek about 20 minutes drive up the road. I have access to mining claims on this and other creeks in the area, but we will also spend considerable time on the public access area on the lower 2.5 miles of Jack Wade Creek. Visit this link for more information. This area is open to non-motorized mining and we will of course be metal detecting.

Main building at Chicken Creek Gold Camp

I have detected on Jack Wade a lot, and I can tell you it is an exercise in hard work and patience. It is all tailing piles full of nails and bullets. The nuggets are very few and far between, with even a single nugget in a day a good days work. However, the nuggets are solid and can be large so can add up if you put in a lot of time. Or not as luck does have a bit to do with it. You could easily spend a week detecting Wade Creek and find nothing. So do not be surprised when I make lots of reports indicating nothing found on a given day. We fully expect that to be the case but hope we hope a month of detecting here and at other locations will pay off.

I plan on relying mostly on my GPX 5000 but will also be using a Gold Bug Pro for trashy locations or for when I am tired from running the big gun and want to take it easy. I usually run my 18" mono coil on the GPX unless in steep terrain or brushy locations and dig everything. And that means a lot of digging! The Gold Bug Pro eliminates digging a lot of trash and is easy to handle in thick brush. My brother will mostly use my old GP 3000 he bought from me years ago. I am also bringing along the Garrett ATX kind of for backup and also to experiment around with. It also will be easier to use in brushy locations than the GPX. Finally, I hope to possibly have a new Minelab SDC 2300 get shipped to me somewhere along the way to use on some bedrock locations I know of that have been pretty well pounded to death.

Chris Ralph will be arriving in Fairbanks on July 8th so I will drive in and pick him up. He will be staying with Tom and I until I return him to Fairbanks on July 21.

High on the list is to visit with Dick Hammond (chickenminer) and other friends in the area.

The road to Alaska is just another highway these days, with the only real issue being the lack of gas in northern Canada in the middle of the night. The pumps there still do not take credit cards so when the gas station closes you are stuck there until it opens in the morning. Do not try to get gas at Dot Lake at 2AM! I will drive to Olympia to spend a night and day with my mom (12 hours) then on to Dawson Creek/Fort St. John (16 hours), then to Whitehorse (15 hours), and then to Anchorage (12 hours). Four days driving, about $500 in gas for my Toyota 4-Runner. Pick up Tom and some supplies and then back to Chicken (about 8 hours).

Anyway, you are all invited along at least via the internet to share in the adventure. You have any questions about Alaska in the process then fire away. The full adventure continues here.