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

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

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

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

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

Ganes Creek Nugget Results Weeks One & Two 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Old bucket line dredge on lower Ganes Creek property

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

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2011 Herschbach Enterprises

I took the first Minelab GPX 5000 in Alaska up to our new claim on Jack Wade Creek in the historic 40 Mile mining district and did a little detecting. I did not have much time on the trip but still managed to bang out 6 pennyweight (9.4 grams) of gold. The largest nugget is 3.17 pennyweight (4.9 grams).

The ground is not very hot on our claims, so I ran in Sharp timings with Gain at 10. The Minelab GPX 5000 had an absolutely rock solid threshold. A far cry from the Minelab "warble" on the SD units. There is not really a whole lot I can say about the unit except to mention the confidence it inspires knowing you have the most powerful nugget detector made in your hands. Once that coil goes over the ground I'm confident I have left nothing behind except the smallest of sub-grain pieces. Gold so small you really can't call them nuggets.

I say the ground is not that hot but VLF users would argue with that. It is far hotter than around Anchorage and many VLF units running in all metal constantly sound off on hot rocks here. But by Minelab PI standards it is a piece of cake so the 5000 was able to take in stride without any trouble. I only found one rock that gave a signal in Sharp.

If you are in Alaska and have a Minelab GPX 4500 then you are doing pretty good already. The 4500 added a couple timings that have proved very useful in Alaska that earlier models lacked. Sharp for low mineral ground and enhance for high mineral locations like Moore Creek. The 5000 improves the Enhance timing and adds several others. The Fine Gold setting is for getting those last bits out of high mineral locations, hitting small gold Enhance will miss, but it has less benefit in low mineral ground. Our mineralization is so mild south of Anchorage I am anxious to try the new Coin/Relic timings. That was intended for areas with extremely low mineralization and so the thought was it would be more applicable to coin and relic hunting. It is possible that it has applications in those rare low mineral gold nugget locations, but that remains to be seen.

First gold found in Alaska with Minelab GPX 5000

I am amazed at how far Minelab has come with PI nugget detecting technology. There is nothing about the GPX 5000 that I can hope will be improved except the discrimination of man-made ferrous junk. Everything else is about all I can expect or hope for knowing what I do of detector technology. Now perhaps Minelab will put some effort into lighter, more compact physical designs to complement the superb electronics at work in the GPX 5000.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2009 Herschbach Enterprises

I have not been down to Crow Creek Mine for a long time and was curious about what was going on down there. I mainly went to just look around but took my Fisher Gold Bug 2 along to give it a spin. I got a new one recently and wanted to break it in. Since I was chasing tiny gold I put the little 6” elliptical coil on for the trip.

The fall colors were out but it was a bit gray and rainy. My first surprise on getting to Girdwood was to find that Crow Creek Road is now paved to where the state maintenance ends, getting rid of a lot of what used to be a section loaded with potholes. Second surprise is that just before getting to Crow Creek there is a huge new parking wayside for the trailhead that goes down to Glacier Creek and the tram that crosses over to the Alyeska side of the valley.

Third surprise was that Kate and Nate have really spruced the place up. The old camp at Crow Creek looks better than ever with more relics on display and everything looking much tidier. I visited with Nate for quite some time catching up on news. Then I headed up the creek to find a patch of dirt to work with the Gold Bug 2. By the way, metal detecting at Crow Creek is $20.00 per day, keep all the gold you find - if any!

I chose a spot where the creek was undermining the bank and so it was on the steep side. What caught my eye was a layer of loose looking cobbles resting on a layer of finer grained material. I surmised the cobbly material was loose tailings and that the material underneath was virgin ground. At Crow Creek I’ve often found gold where the two meet. So I got in and knocked down a bunch of the cobbles to uncover the layer below. Easy enough to do as the whole bank wanted to come down, so the main challenge was not getting hit by cobbles or falling in the creek.

Crow Creek Mine at Girdwood, Alaska

The ground here is very low mineral and so the Gold Bug 2 can be cranked up to levels that would not work in many locations. Set for all metal audio boost on, low mineral mode, sensitivity to max, and ground balance about 6 for this spot. I then proceeded to use the coil with no scuff cover like a little rake, scraping down the slope to knock off no more than an inch of material at a time. In just a few minutes I got a sharp little “zip” and quickly used my plastic scoop to isolate a very small nugget weighing maybe a grain. Good deal, the spot has gold! So I continued to slowly and methodically scrape away at the bank, using my pick now and then to dislodge a rock. The rain may have helped as the material was pretty soft and easy to work with the coil alone. Usually I’d have to use the pick to scrape and then check with the detector.

About every five minutes I’d get a tiny signal and recover a small nugget. I also got about an equal number of rocks that gave signals but they were much easier to find and eliminate since they were much larger than the nuggets. Most detectors would not have sounded off on them but with the Gold Bug 2 running so hot any mineralization at all in the rocks will be detected. Since these were positive hot rocks they most likely had arsenopyrite in them, which is pretty common at Crow Creek. There was no trash at all in the material, just nuggets and hot rocks.

Close-up of gold bearing material and bottom of 6" Gold Bug 2 coil

Good use of a plastic scoop is critical as these tiny nuggets can be very hard to find. I use the "divide and conquer" method. Scoop up the material that has the nugget in it. Give the scoop a good shake to get the nugget into the bottom of the scoop. If you have a couple inches of dirt in the scoop and the nugget is on top, you may not be able to detect it when you run the scoop over the coil. I prefer to do this with the bottom of the coil turned upright (just like in the picture) so I can get the scoop right over that hot spot in the middle of the coil. If I confirm the nugget is in the scoop, I dump half in my hand and check again. If it is still in the scoop, I place the material in my hand on the ground where I can check it again later. If the scoop no longer beeps, the nugget is in my hand, in which case I discard the material in the scoop. I just split and check until I'm down to a bit of material, which in the case of these little mud covered nuggets sometimes is just a few little pieces of dirt which have to be check one at a time to find which one has gold in it. Once you get good at this it goes real fast, but care must be taken to not get a nugget in the scoop only to discard it. That is why you put all the dirt in a place where you can check it again when you are done. Sometimes you can get more than one nugget in the scoop at once. Another option is to simply put all targets in a pan and pan it all later. But since I'm following the gold I want to know just where each nugget came from so I prefer to locate them as I find them.

I had got a late start and did not want to get home too late so I called it quits after an hour and a half. Once I got back to town I found I had 16 nuggets, the largest being 5.4 grains and the three smallest so small they will not register on my digital powder scale that goes down to 1/10th grain. A total of 17.4 grains in 16 nuggets so this is some small stuff indeed. There are 480 grains in a Troy ounce of gold. Some might question why you would want to go after such small gold. Well, at over $1000.00 per ounce a one grain nugget is now worth over $2.00! So my rather leisurely effort netted me $35.00 worth of gold in a fairly short time. If you follow the little stuff long enough larger pieces do come along. If I’d put in some serious effort for an entire day I think I’d have done very well so I may have to go back soon and do just that.

Sixteen little gold nuggets 17.4 grains total

The trick is in having a place with mineralization low enough that you can crank up a VLF unit to the max. Higher frequency detectors will do best for the real tiny stuff. Manual ground balance is also preferred as automatic ground balance tends to tune out the tiniest pieces of gold. There really are only two detectors I think are up to this task. If you want the best, use either a 71 kHz Fisher Gold Bug 2 or 50 kHz White's GMT (or earlier 50 kHz Goldmasters) and outfit them with the 4" x 6" accessory coils. Other detectors will hit small gold but nothing as good as either of these detectors. It is also important to get that coil right down in the dirt. Normally I’d recommend a scuff cover for this type of stuff as you can actually wear through the bottom of an expensive coil doing this. But in this case I really wanted to go to the max and so was not even willing to give up the tiny bit of depth lost by using a scuff cover. Which is going too far really as if done properly depth is not really an issue using this method. The idea is to slowly work your way closer and closer to gold that is out of reach until it can be detected. Since the small stuff can only be detected at an inch or less, you have to take the ground off an inch or less at a time, or you’ll scrape gold away.

Crow Creek has been detected to death. But there is plenty of gold left to be found only inches down out of reach of detectors. Yeah, it is small stuff, but there is a lot of them and I like finding every one. They do add up, and best of all they keep you interested in what you are doing until a larger nugget comes along.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2009 Herschbach Enterprises

I've been metal detecting in Hawaii several times over the years, and have used several makes and models there. They include the White's Surf PI, Minelab Excalibur, and Garrett Infinium. My wife and I have obviously taken a liking to the south shore of Kauai, as we keep going back there. It is like a second home to us, and certainly a nice place to be when it is the middle of winter in Alaska. See the links here and here for stories about previous visits. I have more details in those previous stories that I am not going to repeat here so you'll want to check them out if you have not seen them before.

This trip I decided I wanted to try out the White's Surf PI Pro, the latest version of the White's Surf PI that I used previously in Hawaii. The PI Pro has improved sensitivity to small gold items and a redesigned, more reliable control box design. The Surf PI Pro has only two controls and so is very easy to operate, and better yet it is a real bargain for an underwater detector with a list price of only $699.95. Many diving detectors run well over $1000.00.

This is the beach fronting the resort area where we stay on Kauai. I've done very well here before and every time I leave I'm sure there is plenty left to be found. The sands runs out onto a coral bottom, and right about where the waves are breaking there is about a foot of sand on top of the coral. I find the rings in nooks and crannies in the coral basement and so I try to work in that zone where I feel the coral bottom is not too deep. I've detected out in the bare coral and find lots of coins but have had less luck with jewelry out beyond the surf. The results are similar up out of the water, with lots of coins but an even poorer chance of jewelry finds. The surf break has been the hot spot for me.

Poipu Beach, Kauai, Hawaii

Since it is mid-winter the surf is about all I can handle when it comes to staying in one place. I use a neoprene suit to keep from getting beat up if the waves toss me on the bottom. I have a 40 lb. weight belt that keeps me in place, and allows me to instantly duck to the bottom to retrieve the finds. Frankly, using too much weight is dangerous and should not be attempted by anyone not very comfortable in the water. I have numerous SCUBA certifications plus thousands of hours of hookah diving time so I'm more comfortable than most people in the water. I have an excellent US Divers snorkel that sheds most of the water taken in as waves pound over me. After awhile you develop a sixth-sense about when and when not to take a big breath of air!

Gear used for metal detecting in heavy surf

I've found a scoop to be just one more thing to be hanging on to, and since the rings are down in coral depressions a scoop would miss them most times any way. When I get a signal I duck down and with my left gloved hand I quickly fan away the sand. I usually blast it hard for the first breath hold dive, then come up for air, and go down a second time to retrieve the target. The glove protects my hand when I dig around as I sometimes scoop out a hole. I keep my right hand bare, as sometimes stuff gets into such little holes I can't get my gloved fingers on it. Everything goes in a little goodie bag I keep attached to the armrest of the detector.

Seven morning finds - aluminum trash, coins, lead weights, rings, and ferrous junk

I hit the beach at daybreak, because once the boogie boarders and novice surfers get going it is too dangerous to be ducking down and popping up. If I was to get hit in the head and knocked out I would immediately sink to the bottom from being over-weighted. Since this is pretty hardcore detecting 2-3 hours a day is just fine with me anyway. The picture above shows most of the finds except the oversized junk which I toss in the trash cans down near the beach. The Surf PI Pro did just fine. It falsed on basalt rocks buried in the sand and falsed when picked up off the bottom but I generally had no problems discerning good target signals. Overall the machine was quieter than the Garrett Infinium I'd used previously at this location. I've decided that this is because the two-tone signal used by the Infinium inherently generates more noise when the machine is falsing than a single tone unit like the Surf PI Pro. It is not so much that the Garrett falses any more than other units but that it makes more noise when it does.

Steve's gold and platinum ring finds with White's Surf PI Pro

I got four platinum and three gold rings. One of the gold rings is white gold so it looks like only two gold. All fairly plain men's bands reflecting the rough surf area I was hunting. Once again that big diamond ring eluded me, but the number of platinum rings really pleased me. I guess I'll just have to keep going back and trying until I find that big diamond!

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2004 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

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

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

Coin detecting with the Garrett Infinium

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steve Herschbach

Garrett Infinium Pulse Induction metal detector

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2004 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Honda 3-wheeler stuffed in back of Cessna 206

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

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

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

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

Tom with Moore Creek gold specimen excavated from tailing pile

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newly assembled 6" suction dredge ready to go to work

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

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

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

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

Suction dredge sampling tailing pile at Moore Creek

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

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

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

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

Bob Herschbach and his 5.13 ounce specimen

Close up of 5.13 ounce gold specimen seen on edge

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

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

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

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

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

4 ounces gold specimens found by Steve at Moore Creek

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

Gold found while suction dredge sampling the tailing piles

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

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2004 Herschbach Enterprises

I walked a little ahead of my detecting buddy Jeff as we searched along the bulldozer trail for gold nuggets. The bulldozer had pushed little berms of material along each side of the trail as it made its way through the old tailing piles. I swung off the trail to one side where the tailing pile sloped down into the brush. Sweeping my White's MXT over a moss covered cobble pile resulted in a loud beep. I peeled the moss and cobbles back with my pick and looked down at the largest gold nugget I have ever found!

This story actually starts in 1972. That is when I purchased my first metal detector, a White's Coinmaster 4. I put in lots of hours with that detector, finding thousands of coins in Anchorage, Alaska, in the days before metal detectors became more common.

I was already doing a little gold prospecting and so I just had to try my new detector out for finding gold nuggets. I purchased a little 4 inch coil touted by White's as being the hot ticket for finding gold. They actually called it the "Gold Probe". However, after a couple outings I discovered that the detectors of the day were just not up to the task. The inability of the early units to compensate for ground mineralization made it impossible to find all but the largest nuggets. I am sorry to say that these large nuggets were very uncommon in my area, and so the chances of my finding gold with the early model detectors were slim to none.

Steve in 1973 on very first nugget hunt - Moore Creek, Alaska & White's Coinmaster 4

This early experience caused me to overlook metal detectors as a practical mining tool for many years. In fact, when my partner Dudley Benesch and I got into business in 1976 we sold metal detectors from the start but strongly downplayed their usefulness for prospecting. My standard line was "you can probably find more gold with a $5.00 gold pan than a $500.00 metal detector".

During the 1980's, I was heavily involved in gold dredging, so much so that I did if full-time for a couple of years. The amount of gold I thought I might find with a metal detector seemed trivial compared what I was producing with my suction dredges. I continued coin detecting from time to time but did not spend as much time at it as I had previously. It was at this time that stories of fabulous gold finds in Australia started to appear. My attention returned to using metal detectors to find gold nuggets, and I finally found my first nuggets with a Compass Gold Scanner Pro in 1989.

I was still selling metal detectors as a dealer and it was about 1990 that White's introduced its breakthrough Goldmaster II. At an operating frequency of 50 kHz, it was by far the most sensitive detector available for smaller gold nuggets. The Anchorage area has lots of gold but it is mostly in match head size and smaller nuggets. Nuggets weighing up to one-quarter ounce are very rare and nuggets weighing an ounce or more are almost unheard of. The Goldmaster II opened up the local area to nugget detecting with its small gold sensitivity and ease of operation. Put all this together with its bargain retail price of $499.95 and the Goldmaster II quickly became one of the fastest selling metal detectors ever. It is one of the only detectors I ever sold that quite literally could not be produced fast enough to meet demand.

I contributed to this electronic gold rush by taking my new Goldmaster II to local gold mining sites and finding thousands of gold nuggets with it. One popular site, Crow Creek Mine, had produced only small numbers of nuggets with other metal detectors. However, the Goldmaster II and its successor, the Goldmaster V/SAT, appeared be the perfect detectors for Crow Creek. The creek has only moderate mineralization and tremendous amounts of the smaller gold the White's units could find so easily. All of a sudden it seemed like gold was pouring out of the mine, all due to the introduction of the Goldmaster models.

Steve with White's Goldmaster II in 1992

Jeff was managing our Mining Department at that time, and if anything, he was even hotter than I with the Goldmaster. We were both having a great time finding gold and posting photos of our finds at the store. The Goldmaster models got so popular at Crow Creek that problems started occurring with so many people running the same frequency unit in the same area. Detectors running at the same frequency interfere with each other electronically, and it got to where people would have to take turns running the detectors at some of the more popular locations at Crow Creek. This problem was finally solved with the introduction of the Goldmaster 3 and its frequency shift control.

Despite these successes, gold dredging still occupied the majority of my free time in the 1990's. I was using a 6-inch dredge as my production unit, and the consistency with which I produced gold with it could not be matched by the more sporadic success one has with a metal detector. That, and the finds at Crow Creek and other local sites were depleting and so more and more time and effort was required to be successful detecting gold in these areas.

A couple things about my dredging bothered me however. One was that I was finding good quantities of gold but I was finding very few large nuggets. It was not until 1998 that I finally found a 1 ounce gold nugget while gold dredging. My use of larger dredging equipment was tying me down to local areas where large nuggets are very rare. I really wanted to be able to find a monster nugget like I would read about other people finding. Second, I was spending all my time going to the same nearby areas, over and over again. Days, if not weeks, were spent working in the same stretch of creek. I wanted to get out and spend more time exploring remote areas of Alaska. I became convinced that if I wanted to get serious about gold and prospecting I needed to get away from the local area.

Therefore, I made a conscious decision in 2000 to focus on metal detecting as a prospecting method instead of suction dredging. I sold my mining claims near Anchorage and my 6 inch gold dredge and invested the money in new metal detectors. I have used all the various brands over the years and found each one has strengths and weaknesses. In my opinion one key to successful nugget detecting is to have a variety of machines with differing capabilities. I invested in several makes and models of metal detectors that I use depending on particular nugget detecting tasks.

I was amazed with the results of my new strategy. Not only did I see no real decline in the amount of gold I was finding each year, but my nugget finds blew away decades of dredging results. I was finding more gold nuggets weighing over an ounce than I had thought possible. My previous record of a 1 ounce gold nugget from Crow Creek Mine was totally eclipsed by 4.95-ounce nugget from Ganes Creek in 2001. Finding that nugget was one of the biggest thrills of my life!

The real secret proved to be the freedom afforded by my metal detectors. With only a few pounds of gear to pack, it became far easier to go to remote Alaskan sites where large gold nuggets are found. It helped tremendously that I have developed many contacts with miners in my years of business and as a member of the Alaska Miners Association. These contacts are helpful when it comes to getting access to nugget producing mining claims. The fact is that most of the good locations for nugget detecting Alaska are on mining claims and so getting permission from the claim owners is critical.

Ganes Creek is in west central Alaska near the town of McGrath. Ganes Creek has produced some of the largest gold nuggets ever found in Alaska, including a 122 oz monster. The creek has a long mining history and so has many miles of tailing piles from old bucket line dredge operations, and from more recent heavy equipment operations. It was at Ganes Creek that I found my 4.95-ounce nugget and numerous other gold nuggets in the 1 to 2 ounce range in 2001.

Fall colors and old tailing piles at Ganes Creek, Alaska

With some prodding on my part the owners of Ganes Creek decided to give a "pay to detect" operation a try. Opportunities to metal detect at places like Ganes Creek are rare, especially for people from outside Alaska. As part of the effort to get the word out about the operation, I received permission to bring a couple "key players" in the detecting industry up to Ganes Creek for a short visit. The idea was that once they saw the potential firsthand they would no doubt spread the word to others.

In the spring of 2002 I decided to organize a Gold Show at Crow Creek Mine near Anchorage. We had never done this type of show in Alaska before and I thought it would be fun for all involved. Little did I know the work that goes into making a show like this come together. It proved to be a massive undertaking, but a rewarding one.

One key to a successful gold show is to try to convince manufacturer representatives into making the expensive trip to Alaska. We received a lot of support from various suppliers but that shown by White's Electronics and its Alaskan distributor Renton Coin Shop was truly exceptional. Many accessory items and gold coins were donated as prizes to be given out for various activities of the gold show. Most impressive was the latest version of the White's Goldmaster, the new GMT, which was donated as grand prize in the detector hunt held during the show. This was very fitting, as there have probably been more Goldmasters at Crow Creek over the years than any other single model of metal detector. The generous donations were greatly appreciated by everyone attending the show. I would like to offer particular thanks to Mary Gladding of Renton Coin Shop for her enthusiastic support.

Steve Houston of White's Electronics had come up for the gold show, and so I took the opportunity to arrange a trip up to Ganes Creek. Steve is an avid nugget hunter and so he jumped at the opportunity. I arranged for a visit immediately after the Gold Show ended.

Steve had never been in a small airplane before, and so the bush plane flight into Ganes Creek from McGrath was an adventure in itself for him! Having flown in small planes my whole life, I underestimate the effect swooping low over the terrain and landing on small runways has on the inexperienced flyer.

After we arrived at Ganes Creek, we did a bit of metal detecting in the immediate camp area, as quite a few gold nuggets had previously been found right around the cabins. The whole camp is built on old tailing piles that have been flattened out. After a little time spent with no results, we decided to head upstream.

The first group of 10 visitors was already at the mine, and two nuggets weighing over 5 ounces each had been found the day before. The nuggets were found just upstream of a large drainage ditch that had drawn my attention the last time I had visited the mine. The ditch is piled high on both sides with excavated material. I reasoned that the piles might contain some nuggets, since the material from the bottom of the ditch was from deep below the surface.

We started detecting the area, and in an amazingly short time, I heard Steve yell that he had found one. Sure enough, scanning the sides of one of the piles with his GMT produced a chunky 3.2 oz gold nugget! Well, that was so easy we figured there must be a bunch of nuggets along the ditch. However, as much as I tried I could not find a nugget myself, and Steve's initial find remained his only find. As if he really cared! I finally wandered away and found a small gold nugget on a large tailing pile nearby but that was it for the day.

Steve Houston with 3.2 ounce gold nugget found at Ganes Creek with White's GMT

This was a very short trip and so we only had the following day to try and find more gold. I found a few more small nuggets and Steve found none. Searching tailing piles for gold nuggets is literally like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Entire days go by with no finds, but when gold is found it tends to be worth the wait. I was grateful Steve Houston found a nugget as large as he had in our limited amount of time. It was the largest nugget he had ever found, and better yet, larger than anything his regular hunting buddies had found.

More than 30 people visited Ganes Creek in the summer of 2002. Over 10 pounds of gold was found, with many nuggets weighing over an ounce and several in the 5-ounce range. The success rate was amazing; with a large majority of the visitors able to say they found the largest gold nugget of their lives at Ganes Creek.

Still, people started to wonder if the creek was "worked out" and that all the nuggets had been found. I scoffed at this idea, as I have seen even small parks produce old coins missed by decades of diligent metal detecting. The idea that a few dozen people could find all the nuggets to be found in many square miles of tailing piles is not something experienced detectorists would worry about. To prove the point, I put the word out that I would make a visit to Ganes Creek after all the visitors had been there that summer and go find some gold.

OK, I have to admit there was a certain amount of bravado in this. The fact is that detecting tailing piles is very much a hit and miss proposition. In general, sheer hours of diligence will pay off, providing the nuggets are there to be found at all. However, there also is a bit of luck involved, and sometimes even the most dedicated person will get skunked. If it was easy we would all be out swinging a detector looking for gold nuggets for a living, but that is not the case. So, although I was talking big I certainly had my doubts about how much gold I would find.

It was late in the season when Jeff, Brian, and I made that final 2002 visit to Ganes Creek. Brian is an avid gold dredger and so his focus for the trip was to do some exploratory gold dredging. Jeff and I were both hot to go detecting for gold, however. As I noted before, Jeff is a very accomplished detectorist, and we usually have a cheerful competition going while nugget detecting.

We brought along several different detectors to try. I had my GMT but also White's new MXT model. I was intrigued with this machine that combined the basic Goldmaster circuitry with the features normally found on high-end coin detectors. I figured its exceptional target ID features might prove useful in the trashy tailing piles, and especially around the camp area. Jeff and I traded machines back-and-forth to get a feel for how the different detectors worked at Ganes Creek. Jeff in particular was in the market for new unit, and so was most interested in trying them out comparatively.

Jeff with White's MXT at Ganes Creek, Alaska

We first headed back up to that ditch area where many of the large nuggets were found, including Steve Houston's. The area had been hammered hard all summer, but we figured there might be some gold left to be found. I located a 13.8 dwt (dwt = pennyweight) nugget, and then a 3.8 dwt nugget (20 pennyweight per ounce) the first day. Jeff, although he tried in earnest, came up with no nuggets. We also tried some old tailings upstream farther, but found no more gold that day.

The second day dawned under rainy skies. We decided to stay near camp, and see if there were more nuggets waiting to be found around the cabins. I grabbed the new White's MXT, while Jeff used the GMT. The rain poured, but we stuck with it. Lots of bullets and shell casings were dug, which I consider a good sign. You cannot get all the nuggets and leave bullets in the ground. However, by the end of the day we had no nuggets. We headed up to the bench deposits above camp and found some small nuggets, just so we could say we did not get skunked. Jeff found a nice little pennyweight nugget, and I got a few smaller bits. Nothing to brag about, but at least we could say we found gold.

I have to note that I was very impressed with the MXT around camp. I used the 6" elliptical coil, and ran the unit in the relic mode. This mode, when set up a certain way, gives a high tone on non-ferrous targets, and low tone on iron targets. It was easy and efficient around camp, and all the targets I dug were non-ferrous items. It has very good trash separation with the small coil, and easy target ID with the dual tone system. The machine was great for places where trash is literally inches apart.

The weather cleared the third day. Jeff again ran the White's GMT, and I the MXT with the small coil. We started in camp, and I found a small nugget just behind the cabins. We then tried some of the dragline piles above camp near where I found my 4.95-ounce nugget in 2001. I switched the MXT to the 950 9.5" coil. Both Jeff and I found nuggets weighing several pennyweights each.

So far we were not exactly knocking down the nuggets. Frankly, we were both a bit puzzled, as our constant digging of bullets indicated nuggets were still to be found. If an area were thoroughly detected we would be digging nothing at all. Nevertheless, our nugget results were lean, and so our enthusiasm was flagging.

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

The more I used the MXT the more I liked it. On the cobble piles I ran in prospect mode, with full gain, minimum V/SAT setting, and in automatic ground balance. The 14.7 kHz frequency ran smoother on the mixed rocks of the cobble piles than the higher frequency GMT. High frequency detectors tend to get weak signals from mineralized rocks because of their extreme sensitivity. The MXT seems well suited for searching areas of mixed mineralization due to its lower frequency and fast automatic ground balance.

We followed an old bulldozer trail back towards the area I had spotted in the aerial photos. I concentrated on the edges of the main trail near to and in the brush. My goal was to cover obscure areas others may have missed. I finally got a good clean signal and gave a couple digs with my pick. The moss and rocks flipped back, and there lay a large gold nugget.

I did not get as excited over this one as with my 4.95 ounce nugget of the previous year, as I was not sure exactly how much the nugget weighed. Jeff, however, knew immediately it was something to jump up and down over. And he was right, as upon weighing it came in at 6.85 ounces! My largest nugget ever, and the largest found at Ganes Creek that summer. I also had the satisfaction of proving that finds always remain for those willing to look.

This particular nugget is strange, with very dark, lustrous quartz encasing a solid gold core. The quartz is almost like agate. Fingers of dendritic (leaf) gold reach up from the gold core into the quartz shell. It is a unique nugget, unlike any I have seen before. And at 6.85 ounces it gives me entry into a very exclusive club. Few people can say they have found a gold nugget weighing over one-half Troy pound without heavy machinery.

Steve with 6.85 ounce gold specimen from Ganes Creek found with White's MXT

My White's MXT had paid for itself rather spectacularly. It is hard not to like a detector that finds a big gold nugget. However, while it bench tests well on small gold, frankly it does not hold a candle to the White's GMT when it comes to very small gold under actual field conditions. If small gold is your bread and butter, the GMT is still the way to go. Not only do higher frequency detectors have an innate edge on tiny gold nuggets, but also the manual ground balance on the GMT offers better control for small gold. The MXT must be auto ground balanced, then "locked". The GB point is then fixed, but it cannot be manually adjusted from there. The GMT has both automatic and manual ground balance.

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

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

This article may seem like a White's ad, as I have purposely made the brand a centerpiece of the story. The fact is that I have owned and used all the major brands of detectors and continue to do so. I think all the major manufacturers make good units; Nevertheless, White's will always hold a special place in my heart as being the first brand I ever owned. It was that White's Coinmaster 4 that got me started metal detecting all those years ago. To come full circle 30 years later and find the largest nugget of my life (so far) with a White's detector is particularly fitting.

You may contact me online at the DetectorProspector Forum if you have questions regarding this article.

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

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

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

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

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

"Downtown" Chicken, Alaska

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over 4 ounces of chunky Fortymile gold found with metal detectors

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

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

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2003 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

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

Toyota 4Runner towing new Bombardier Traxter ATV

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

Black bear watching, and Fortymile River crossing

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

Steve hunts with Minelab GP Extreme

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

2.32 ounces of Fortymile gold!

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright 2003 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

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

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

Area #1 at Crow Creek Mine, early spring

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

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

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

Steve's White's GMT, converted to chestmount

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

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

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

Close up of White's GMT converted to chest mount

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

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

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

Steve's first gold found with White's GMT

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

Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2002 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben detecting hillside below old mine

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

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

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

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

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

Steve's gold ore samples from trip

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

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

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2001 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dredge On Tire Floatation!

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

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

Traxter Overlooking Valley

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

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

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

Old Pipe System     and      Loader Fed Triple Box

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

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

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2001 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

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

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

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

View up Crow Creek from Area #1

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

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

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

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

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

Layers of material at Crow Creek Mine, Alaska

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

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

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

Map of Area #1 at Crow Creek Mine, Alaska

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Removing overburden to get to gold bearing layer

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

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

Close up of clay "blue layer" exposed underwater

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

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

Chunky gold from pay layer

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

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

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2001 Herschbach Enterprises

Winter is slow in coming this year. November has arrived, and temperatures are still relatively mild. I have decided to take advantage of the good weather and make one last dredging trip to Crow Creek Mine. Crow Creek is close to town, and when the weather makes a change it is easy to pull out. It is an ideal spot for a mining trip late in the year.

The old location I was dredging in the canyon a couple years ago was taken over by friend Andy. He worked the creek up until he reached a narrow spot choked with boulders. He also worked above this area, but a stretch about 100 feet long remained that had not been dredged yet. I decided to take up where he had left off and see how I could do.

My little 4" was easy to pack into the location and setup, so I was working away the first day. I started seeing some good gold, and was happy I had returned to this spot. The gold here is gold that was lost by the old mining operations, and is distributed rather evenly in the top few feet of material. It makes for easy dredging, and I used mask and snorkel rather than my hookah gear to mine the gold.

The second day was the best. I got in a long days dredging, and took out most of the width of the creek. Everything was going great, and I was constantly seeing gold as I removed the gravel. When it was time to cleanup at the end of the day, I was happy to see over an ounce of nice gold for my efforts. It's days like this that make dredging great!

It snowed that night, and temperatures plummeted. It seemed winter had finally arrived. Ice was forming on the creek as I dredged, but still it was not too cold to mine. I dredged up the gut of the creek, but I was not seeing as much gold as the day before. My cleanup revealed that I had only found about a 1/4 ounce of gold for the day.

Steve's 4" subsurface dredge & some gold recovered

I looked at the weather, and decided that if I left the dredge and returned the next weekend that I might be frozen out. I decided it would be easier to just go ahead and hang it up for the season, so I packed the dredge out and headed for town. A successful last trip for the end of my mining season.

What does a person think about while they are dredging for gold? Good question. Obviously, you think a lot about what you are doing, and where the gold is going in the creek. But sometimes the mind wanders, and strange things can cross a dredger's mind while they are working. While working this deposit I imagined a little fantasy about what it might be like to be a gold nugget buried in the creek for centuries, and to finally be uncovered by a miner. What follows is a little news release I imagined while dredging. I posted it to some mining forums, and it got quite a response. I'm reposting it here for the record.

Nugget Rescue A Success!

(AP Wire 11/5/00)

Girdwood, Alaska - Rescue crews braved frigid winter conditions early this morning in an attempt to rescue numerous gold nuggets buried under tons of gravel and rock. A crowd gathered under gray skies to witness the heroic effort. The scene was one of tense waiting, interspersed with periods of high emotion.

Finally… success! A cheer went up as first one, and then many more gold nuggets saw the light of day. Rescue crews worked slowly with special equipment brought in to deal with the unique situation.

"These little nuggets have been buried here for countless years," said Rescue Coordinator Steve Herschbach. "The material has hardened a great deal, and there are many large boulders to deal with. We considered the use of explosives, but decided the nuggets might suffer unduly from its use. We chose to use suction dredges to protect the gold nuggets from possible harm."

One nugget positively glowed with happiness upon his liberation from the dark depths. "You can't imagine what it was like" he said. "The floods were the worst. I used to be quite a bright, crystalline nugget. But once the boulders got though stomping the living daylights out of me… well, look at me now. They say it builds character, though."

Not every rescue attempt had a happy ending, however. Mr. Herschbach described one of the failures. "I saw a beautiful nugget perched on the edge of a crevice under a large rock. It was all I could do to hold on in the current as I reached for her with my rescue tweezers. The current must have reflected off my hand, because she slipped away just as I reached for her. Try as I might, the rock proved impossible to move. Her pitiful wail as she fell out of sight will haunt me forever."

In spite of tragic events such as this, the overall mood by the end of the day was one of jubilation. A crowd of gold nuggets lay gathered in the rescue pan, excitedly discussing their futures now that they are free. "I can't wait to see the sun," said one. "I hear it looks like a giant, glowing gold nugget!" There was the inevitable promise of a book or movie to come. Most heartwarming of all was the wish of one little gold nugget. "I just want to find my Mom," she said. "I hear that many people are looking for my Mother Lode. I hope someone finds her so I can tell her how much I've missed her."

AP Correspondent Les Silver

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4" subsurface gold dredge at Mills Creek

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

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

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

121 Gold Nuggets Found Metal Detecting

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

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

Bucket line dredge on Wade Creek, Alaska

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

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

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

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

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

Fall Colors in the Fortymile Area

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

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

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

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

Jeff on Bombardier Traxter XT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mining operation in progress

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

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

Steve with Minelab SD2200D and gold just found

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

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

Steve's Nuggets - Just over 1.5 Ounces

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

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

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

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

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

High Grade Mine, Hatcher Pass, Alaska

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

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

Steve with White's Surf PI detecting on Kauai

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

Mills Creek, Alaska

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

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

Steve detecting bedrock at Mills Creek

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

Twenty little nuggets found with Gold Bug 2

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

I'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

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

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

I headed out of town the morning of October 9th to meet Jeff Reed at Crow Creek Mine to do some dredging. Jeff had been working the creek hard while I was at Mills Creek, but was not having much luck. I convinced him that I knew a spot in the canyon that I was sure had some gold, so we determined to pack our 4" dredges in and give it a try.

I was just leaving the outskirts of Anchorage, when a large moose with a very nice set of antlers ambled across the highway. Ironically he was next to the local shooting range, which must have frustrated the hunters there to no end. I stopped and took my photo of him with my camera, and then headed for Crow Creek.

Those that have read my entries from the spring know that getting into the canyon area of Crow Creek is a bit of a chore. Jeff and I have both constructed very light weight subsurface 4" dredges for these kinds of areas. Our units have 4HP Honda pumps, and so are not only light but very fuel efficient. They are great little units if you want to spend your time mining instead of packing equipment.

Jeff crossing Crow Creek log bridge

Our friend Andy was working his dredge in the canyon just upstream of where we were headed, so we stopped to chat a while. He was doing quite well, with lots of gold showing in the box. It certainly made us anxious to get to work.

Andy in his Harvey's drysuit

The spot I had in mind was where my brother and I had worked many years before. We had spent several weeks with a 6" dredge working a long stretch of the creek, and had done quite well. I took Jeff down to just below where my brother and I had started dredging, figuring to get into the same paystreak.

I was so confident that the area would have gold most of the way across the creek that I let Jeff have the coveted inside corner. Gold tends to take the shortest route downstream, and so inside curves are usually very good places to dredge. I also wanted to give Jeff the best shot at the gold, since he had really put in some hours in the last couple of weeks, and was disappointed by the gold he had found so far (don't feel too sorry for Jeff folks... most people don't get what he does, but his expectations are all the higher for it).

Jeff working the corner

Jeff went to work on the corner. I set up on some bedrock on the far side and followed it into the creek. After working awhile and not seeing much gold, I moved into the center of the creek. Andy was causing the water to get a bit murky, so at this point I could not tell if I was into the gold or not, but I dredged away confident that I had to be into the pay.

Then came cleanup time. The best way to put it is to say that Jeff kicked my rear end. I only had a couple of pennyweight, while he had over an ounce. The gold was hanging on the corner much more than was the norm for the stretch of creek just upstream of us, where it tends to run clear across the creek. The gold is from reconcentrated tailings out of the old mining operations, and so is rather small, but our little subsurface boxes seemed to do quite well with it.

Steve's gold, and Jeff with his (no wonder he's smiling)!

We came back the next day, and I moved into the corner upstream of Jeff. Jeff did about as well as the previous day, while I got even less. Oh well, that's mining for you. The good news is that I have been doing this long enough that I am as happy seeing others find gold as finding it myself. Well, almost!

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 1999 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

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

Fall colors along Turnagain Arm

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

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

1/3 oz gold dredged Thursday

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

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

Packing up the campsite

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

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

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

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

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 1999 Herschbach Enterprises