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

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

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

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

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

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

Main building at Chicken Creek Gold Camp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The beach at Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

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

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

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

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

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

Junk items recovered while detecting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tone - VDI - Items 

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

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

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

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

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2006 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

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

Toyota 4Runner towing new Bombardier Traxter ATV

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

Black bear watching, and Fortymile River crossing

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

Steve hunts with Minelab GP Extreme

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

2.32 ounces of Fortymile gold!

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright 2003 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

Moore Creek gold specimens found by Steve Herschbach

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

Moore Creek gold specimens treated with acid to remove quartz

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2009 Herschbach Enterprises

This outing was part of my testing of the Minelab Gold Monster 1000, a new high frequency (45 kHz) VLF detector for gold nugget detecting. The Gold Monster 1000 was designed for use in Africa and other third world countries and therefore has some unique design features. The key design goal is ease of operation, and the control set is kept minimal, with everything possible done automatically. The GM1000 is the first nugget detector I have ever used that even has an automatic sensitivity tracking function. All this adds up to the Gold Monster 1000 being an extremely easy detector for beginners to learn. Yet the latest twist of high gain, high frequency circuitry means the Minelab Gold Monster 1000 has enough power to satisfy long-time detectorists like myself.

Frankly, when I first saw the Gold Monster 1000 I thought it was an odd looking thing. The lack of normal threshold based operation in particular takes some getting used to for somebody who has an ear trained to listening to a threshold. The GM1000 is silent search, which is definitely disconcerting at first. However, the boosted audio and very good external speaker quickly won me over. The Gold Monster 1000 bangs out so loud on even the tiniest gold that this a machine you can use without headphones unless there is a lot of background noise.

The near automatic operation makes the machine great for quick grab and go detecting. Between the automatic ground tracking and automatic sensitivity I found I could get the GM1000 to handle almost anything I threw at it, including some wet alkali ground that would quickly shut down most detectors of this type. I found I liked covering ground more quickly with the Gold Monster than would normally be the case with manual tune detectors. It is a terrific detector for quick and dirty scout work.

Minelab Gold Monster 1000 on red Nevada soil dusted with salt particles - hot alkali ground!

The problem with a silent search machine while in manual ground balance mode is that without a threshold you can end up leaving some performance on the table. If a setting of eight generates a little ground feedback, and you decide to go with 7 to make the machine completely silent, there is nothing wrong with that per se. However, if the ground changes and gets milder you may have the ability to run at a higher level of sensitivity, and without a change in the audio to alert you to a change in the ground, you will just leave the setting where it is.

In my case if a setting of 7 is completely silent, I will bump to a setting of 8, and this almost always gives me that little ground feedback I want. If 7 is too noisy, I will drop to a setting of 6 and this will probably do the trick for me. The range between each setting seems about perfect for a person to settle on a range of three settings, too little, too much, and just right. For my areas 6 - 7 - 8 are the magic numbers. For worse ground the range may shift lower, to 5 - 6 - 7.

Nugget embedded in lump of dirt excavated from ground while using Minelab Gold Monster 1000

Try and picture this. At sensitivity 7 I am just scanning along, coil lightly on the ground, with soft ground feedback, waiting for that hard little signal that even the tiniest target will generate. Then all the sudden the machine goes dead quiet. I have entered less mineralized ground. One thumb tap to sensitivity 8, and I get my "false threshold" back.

Or, at a setting of 7 the machine gets noisier. Maybe a little alkali patch or more mineralized ground. A quick tap down to 6 reduces the feedback to my desired minimal level. What I am doing is letting the ground tracking do its job, and then just bumping the sensitivity up or down a notch to ride the ragged edge of best performance for the ground.

Quick guide to Minelab Gold Monster 1000 functions / controls

I for all intents and purposes always use the all metal deep seeking mode, and use the iron discrimination meter to decide whether the target is worth digging or not. The disc mode gives up significant depth, and items can be missed entirely whereas the all metal mode will always give a signal if at all possible. Personally I would only use the disc mode to shut down very troublesome hot rocks or for areas where the trash is so dense that analyzing each target would be too inefficient.

I much prefer the 10" coil over the 5" coil for doing anything but chasing the tiniest bits. The 10" elliptical coil really will hit gold nearly as tiny as can be had with the 5" coil, but with double the ground coverage and much better depth on larger nuggets. To sum up, I will normally always run the Minelab Gold Monster 1000 in all metal mode, let the ground tracking handle the ground, and bump the sensitivity up or down within whatever three number range seems to work best in any given area. For me and northern Nevada 6 -7 - 8 does the trick very well. I have an article that explains the settings in much more detail here.

Eleven gold nuggets found by Steve with GM1000 - 14.9 grains total, largest 4.4 grains, smallest at bottom 0.6 grain and 0.3 grain

I found it deceptively easy to find some sub-grain bits of gold (480 grains per Troy ounce) in areas I have previously hunted. I went from skeptical about this funny looking little detector to being quite pleased with it, and currently it is one of my favorite detectors. A warning however. The Minelab Gold Monster 1000 handles ground as well as a hot VLF can, but it is in no way a substitute for a pulse induction detector in the worst ground and hot rocks. Anyone expecting that of an inexpensive little VLF is expecting too much.

To sum up, I am having a terrific time with the GM1000 and am glad I got involved in the project. Thanks Minelab!

This article started as a post on the DetectorProsepctor Forum. More information might be found there in follow up posts.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2017 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

Summer passes too quickly in Alaska. August has the last hot days of the year, but the weather usually turns rainy. By September snow will start to appear on the mountain tops, and by the end of October snow arrives at sea level. I am trying to plan my fall operations, but the weather is always a question. I am afraid that the rains and high water of September will turn to snow and cold weather quickly this year, leaving only a short dredging season.

The current plan is to work at Mills Creek first, and then possibly at Crow Creek later, depending on weather and gold. My mining buddy Jeff Reed decided to move his 4" subsurface dredge up to Mills Creek and start working. He had marked out a stretch of creek that had very productive sniping (extracting gold with simple hand tools) last year and wanted to hit some of those same areas with a dredge. The gorge I had marked out for myself upstream of Jeff's ground was still full of whitewater, and it made me rethink my position. Here Jeff was starting mining, and I was still waiting for the water to go down. I decided to look for an area further upstream that would be more suitable for dredging at higher water levels, as I want to do some dredging before it gets cold this year. I can then go after the gorge when the weather gets cold and the water level drops.

Jeff's 4" Subsurface Dredge at Mills Creek

The pictures above show Jeff's dredge. It is based on a new 4" subsurface sluice box by Keene Engineering, bolted between a small set of marlex floats. A 4HP Honda pump provides plenty of power for the dredge and air compressor. The entire unit, with 15' of suction hose and suction nozzle weighs just under 100 lbs. These units are nice for remote sites, as they weigh less and use less fuel than the equivalent surface dredge. The trade-off is some loss of fine or flaky gold, but I have found it to be an acceptable trade for the areas I work.

I hiked up the canyon to where the valley starts to open up, and located a very nice stretch of creek on a wide, sweeping bend below a waterfall. I had found gold in this location last year, so made the decision to move my markers up to this site. It is far enough upstream that I will have to abandon my normal campsite (pictured at the top of the page) and move upstream. The area is set in a beautiful alpine meadow, so I do not mind making this move, although the road up to this area will require some clearing. It is amazing how fast alders grow in Alaska's long daylight hours.

Views from camp down to creek and looking up valley

I will be camping on a hill overlooking my future dredge site, so it will be a short walk down to the worksite each day. I plan to set my dredge up in the lower portion of the on the inside curve (the upper left hand corner of the picture on the left). I'll proceed up the creek, generally hugging the inside of the curve. Bedrock is quite shallow, with no more than 1-2 feet of material in much of this area.

Satisfied with my new plan, I headed down to see how Jeff was doing. He had about 3 pennyweight (20 pennyweight per troy ounce) of nice gold as I came by, and had the rest of the evening and the next day left to dredge. I had to work the next day, however, so headed on back to Anchorage. When Jeff came back to work the following day, he had 2-1/4 ounces of very nice gold gold to show off, with quite a few nuggets weighing over a pennyweight each. His dredge had worked well and he got into a small, but hot stretch of crevices in the bedrock. His showing of gold certainly has me anxious to move my dredge up to Mills Creek the next weekend!

Jeff with weekend's gold

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 1999 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steve Houston with 3.25 ounce gold nugget

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

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

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

John Pulling with 2.21 ounce gold nugget

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright 2002 Herschbach Enterprises

Fireweed bloom in the fall on the year, and Alaskan lore says that when the fireweed cease to bloom, winter will be close at hand. So it is that when I look at the hills blazing with fireweed in the sun, I cannot help but think of the winter soon to come. Hopefully, before the ice freezes thick on these mountain streams, a few more ounces of gold will see the light of day.

I spent Friday evening loading up my 5" subsurface dredge. Since I have retired my 6" dredge, this will be my workhorse in the future. I am very pleased with the unit, which is incredibly more portable and uses half the fuel of my old dredge. I was thinking of bringing my 4" subsurface to Mills, but decided the small extra weight was worth the extra capacity to move gravel. This is the same unit I used at Mills Creek last summer, but with marlex floatation instead of the inflatable pontoons. I decided I liked the durability of the marlex over the compactness of the pontoons.

I took all of Saturday to clear a trail to my worksite and set my dredge up. I prepared to go over some ground below a bedrock outcropping where I had found gold last year. It is a good thing we have long daylight hours in the summer, as I worked until 9PM to get everything ready for Sunday.

Sunday I put in a long day of dredging. I worked from 10AM until 9PM and got roughly 10 hours of dredging in. The dredge worked well, and I did find gold, but had to work for it. The gold was evenly dispersed over a wide area in bedrock crevices. There was little gold in the overlying material, and so the day was spent splitting crevices open to reveal the gold inside. Unfortunately, this is time-consuming work, and I ended up with 1/2 ounce of gold for the day; about 1 pennyweight per hour. Not exactly getting rich quick, but not bad for a new area. One nugget was just over 1 pennyweight. The subsurface box did well on the rather substantial amount of finer gold that was recovered from the crevices.

Steve's 5" Subsurface Dredge at Mills Creek

I had taken Monday off from work, so put in about 5 hours more dredging, with similar results of about 1 pennyweight per hour. This gave me another 1/4 ounce of gold, or 3/4 oz for the weekend. The gold is a little smaller than that from downstream, but I hope that is just because of all the bedrock splitting. I hope to get into some coarser gold in the deeper, faster water areas. The area was pleasant to work, however, with shallow bedrock and relatively slow water, so it was a real pleasure compared to most of my dredging at colder times of the year.

Jeff was working downstream but I did not see him at all over the weekend. I was just too tired each night to make the trip downstream to visit. By the time I put my dredge up and pulled up camp, he had already left for home. When I got back to work Tuesday, He revealed that he had found just over an ounce of gold, and that the hot streak had played out, so he had moved upstream a little.

Steve's gold from Sunday and Monday

Now that I have my dredge on-site, and have a basic campsite set, I will be able to concentrate more on mining in the coming weeks. I have hopes of reasonable gold in this stretch of creek, with plenty of material that is workable even at higher water levels. Jeff and I both plan to take off significant amounts of time in September to mine at Mills Creek. Hopefully the weather cooperates by not getting too rainy.

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 1999 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

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

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

Minelab Gold Monster 1000 out in northern Nevada

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

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

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

Minelab GPZ 7000 outfitted with new GPZ 19" search coil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2017 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

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

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

Moore Creek claim marker

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

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

Testing the bench deposits with a highbanker

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

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

Steve with Garrett Infinium at Moore Creek

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

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

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

5.37 ounce gold specimens found at Moore Creek with Garrett Infinium

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

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

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

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2003 Herschbach Enterprises

I am a big fan of the Fisher F75 from a different perspective than most. I am a prospector and have done very well finding gold nuggets with the F75. The very powerful all metal mode combined with the simultaneous on screen target id numbers have allowed me to quickly and efficiently hunt trashy tailing piles in search of large gold nuggets. The light weight and superb balance make the F75 a pleasure to use for long hours in rough terrain. It also was my detector of choice for my one and only trip to the UK that I have done so far, and it served me well there.

I spent a month in 2013 metal detecting on Jack Wade Creek near Chicken, Alaska. I kept my great results there quiet pending a return trip there in 2014. That trip has now been made but that is another story already told in detail on my forum at Steve's 2014 Alaska Gold Adventure. Now I can finally reveal the details of the 2013 expedition.

As I explained in the previous entry Making Lemonade Out of Lemons I had decided to take four metal detectors to Alaska with me, with the Minelab GPX 5000 as my main unit, supplemented by the Fisher Gold Bug 2 for tiny stuff and Gold Bug Pro for trashy areas. As I also explain there, the Fisher F75 was redundant, but in the end I could not bear to leave it behind.

I started out early one morning with my big gun pulse induction metal detector, but got onto a tailing pile that had ferrous trash scattered down one side, and I was just not in the mood for it that morning. I went back to my truck and got out my trusty F75. I run the F75 in all metal because it has instant target response; there are no worries about recovery times in all metal. The coil picks up every variation not only in targets but in the ground allowing me to monitor what is going on at all times. Knowing what the ground is doing is important in keeping the ground balance properly adjusted for maximum results.

The key thing I like about the F75 in all metal however is that the meter always runs in discrimination mode and places a nice, large target number on screen while in all metal. The audio alerts me to a potential target, which I then analyze more carefully while watching the target numbers. All metal goes deeper than discrimination modes, so no on screen number means a very deep target beyond discrimination range. This alone makes running in all metal desired when prospecting because running in discrimination mode would miss all those extra deep signals.

Steve's Fisher F75 metal detector

In all metal I dig them until a target number shows up. Deep targets or small targets in mineralized ground will often read ferrous, so I watch the numbers and if they even once jump to non-ferrous, I dig. Only targets that give a 100% strong ferrous reading over multiple sweeps can be safely passed. Though I will throw in my caveat that no discrimination system is 100% accurate and there is always a risk of passing a good target. When in doubt, dig it out!

I do often employ pulse induction detectors and do very often just dig everything. I advocate that when time and conditions allow. The reality is this is not always practical for many reasons. Maybe it is just limited time and overwhelming amounts of junk. Better to increase the odds by using discrimination than bogging down digging 100 nails in a small area. In my case it often boils down to fatigue or flat out not being in the mood to dig junk.

So it was on this particular morning, and therefore my F75 came out and I got to work sorting through the trash working my way up the side of the tailing pile. I crested the top and got a strong reading and looked down. There was a shallow dig hole with leaves in it, obviously from some hunter there in prior years. I figured the guy had recovered a trash item and kicked it back in the hole so I cussed him quietly under my breath. I hate it when people do that

Then the target numbers caught my eye. They were all over the place. A crumpled piece of flat steel might give numbers like that though. Still, I was curious and figured I would retrieve the trash this person left in the field. I gave the old dig hole a big scoop, and out pops a big gold nugget!!

I seem to have a talent for finding ugly gold nuggets, and this one was perhaps the ugliest I have ever found. It looked more like a rock burnt in a fire than a gold nugget when I dug it up, though the glint of gold is unmistakable. This gold however was very pale and in fact later analysis revealed it to be roughly half gold and half silver and other metals.

2.37 ounce gold specimen from Jack Wade Creek, Alaska found by Steve with Fisher F75

Top and bottom views of the Jack Wade specimen

It is a little known fact that gold alloys tend to have very poor conductivity ratings. Gold is very conductive, and silver is a superb conductor. You would think adding silver to gold would improve the conductivity, but in fact just the opposite happens, and the conductivity lowers dramatically. Gold/silver alloys are closer to lead in conductivity than that of the pure component metals, explaining why bullets read identically to most gold nuggets. This nugget has a very pale gold, much paler than most gold on Wade Creek. I found another pale gold nugget like it later and was told locally that it is suspected that the source of this gold is somewhere up Gilliland Creek, an upper tributary of Jack Wade Creek.

I did later sell the specimen, and the buyer performed an X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) assay of the specimen revealing that it is 53% gold and 44% silver, a little iron, and a smattering of platinum group metals. The platinum group metals are extremely interesting, as it would indicate the possibility that the gold is related to an ultramafic bedrock source? Some of the rock enclosed in the specimen is decidedly darker than normal, another clue that the source might be unusual. Technically something with this much silver in it would be called electrum rather than gold. Electrum is a high silver content gold alloy.

X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) Assay of 2.37 oz "Ugly Nugget"

This ugly nugget is a detectorists worst nightmare, because the 50-50 alloy mix and the rock content give it a much lower conductivity reading than would be the norm. I surmise what happened is this earlier operator got a poor signal and gave a quick scoop to get the coil closer to the target. The signal did not improve, as would be expected with most gold nuggets, so the operator decided it was trash and moved on. The rest of the hill being covered with junk no doubt contributed to this decision.

It was my insistence on investigating everything except 100% ferrous readings that made the difference. The readings on this target were not solid as one would expect from a pretty strong signal but all over the place. Most people would say that indicates a trash target but I have seen many gold nuggets do the same thing in mineralized ground. The result is I dug a shallow 2.37 ounce gold nugget that somebody else walked away from. Sadly for them one more scoop would have revealed the nugget for what it was. Hopefully this is a reminder to the reader that far too often detectorists look for excuses not to dig. How many good finds get left behind because we do not want to take that extra minute or two to dig a target?

This nugget is far from a premium find, but I have already sold it for over twice the cost of a new Fisher F75. That detector was a real money maker for me as that was far from the only gold I ever found with it. Good thing I decided not to leave home without it!

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2014 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

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

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

Fortymile River near mouth of Napoleon Creek

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

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

Commercial gold mining on Chicken Creek, Alaska

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2001 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2013 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rings Steve found on this trip with the Garrett ATX

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

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2015 Herschbach Enterprises

A very interesting weekend, and not altogether unanticipated. The weather this spring has been unusually cool, and very late snows have left large quantities of snow at lower elevations. What I feared might happen was that the weather would turn warmer, and all that snow would melt quickly. Well, the weather has turned sunny, with temperatures in the 60's. This is nice, as the snow is going away, but it has brought my dredging operation to a sudden halt.

I headed down into the canyon at Crow Creek Mine, and looking down at the waters below, I knew I had problems ahead. The water had come up to over twice the volume of the previous week, and the clarity of the water had decreased considerably. I proceeded down the creek, and saw my dredge sitting in fast water, and with a decided tilt to one side.

High water, and sinking dredge!

I normally do not worry about rising water all that much. I often leave my dredge floating and tied off in the creek. I did make a mistake the last weekend, however, and I can attribute it to wishful thinking that the water would stay low for awhile longer yet.

I usually tie my dredge off in the pool I have created by working the dredge, which keeps it out of extreme currents if the water does come up. You can see in the photos above that although the water above and below the dredge is boiling, it is relatively calm around the dredge. I then tie the dredge off to a couple of points upstream, and allow the dredge to float up with the rising water.

The mistake I made was to leave my hose coiled in the bottom of the dredge hole. In normal situations this is okay, but not a good idea if the water is possibly going to rise. I usually worry that the currents from rising water may sweep the hose downstream, thereby pulling the dredge to one side and possibly causing a problem. When I anticipate that this may be a problem, I usually tie the nozzle high above the creek along a rope. When the water is evacuated from the hose, it also floats and acts as another anchor line.

I left the hose in the dredge hole, but what happened was something I had never foreseen. When the water came up, the front of the hole gave way. Rocks and gravel poured into the hole and buried the suction hose. The dredge was then anchored to the bottom of the creek! The water continued to rise, and the front end of the dredge was pulled below the surface of the water.

Several things saved my dredge from sinking. First, I plug all the drain holes in the top of the floats. Each of the four marlex float modules supporting the dredge has an open hole in the top. These holes keep the floats from expanding and contracting due to temperature and altitude variations. They also act as drains for water that may enter the floats, though this is most often through the holes themselves. I use boat style drain plugs, the type with a little brass flip on top, to plug the holes. This helps keep water out. The floatation modules on this dredge are more than ample, so even if a module fills with water, the dredge will still float, but if two fill, the unit will most likely sink.

I also run my anchor lines high, and the right hand photo shows that the leading anchor line runs steeply upward, helping to exert extra upward pull on the front of the dredge. This helps in situations such as these.

Finally, I got lucky. If the water had come up higher, it simply would have submerged the dredge to the point where it would have sunk. The float plugs are good, but not perfectly watertight, and so the unit will sink eventually.

I surveyed the situation, and decided that I was done for this spring. If the water was this high at 8AM, then it would just get worse as the day warmed. I could continue dredging, but the visibility was declining rapidly, and the current would be much harder to deal with. The diversion dam I had built the weekend before was totally submerged. Since I am doing this for fun, and since the gold will be there in the fall, I pulled the dredge out of the creek. I'll pack it out in the next couple of weeks, when the snow melts a little more.

5.81 ounces of gold from Crow Creek

And so, an abrupt halt to the spring dredging at Crow Creek. The final take for the seven days spent (five days dredging) was 5.8 ounces. This works out to 1.16 oz. per dredging day and 0.83 oz. per day for the trip as a whole. The 25% I pay to Crow Creek Mine comes to 1.45 oz., so I will be left with 4.35 oz. for my efforts. This equates to 0.87 oz. per dredging day and 0.62 oz. per day for the trip as a whole. Not a bonanza, but not bad considering that I did not get in full days in several cases.

The gold breaks down into 10% larger than 1/8 inch, with the largest nugget weighing 27.2 grains (1.13 dwt.). The less than 1/8" (8 mesh) but larger than 1/14" (14 mesh) size is typically used for gold nugget jewelry and equaled 33% of the gold. The gold less than 1/14" (14 mesh) is generally too small for jewelry use and can be considered fine gold from a resale point of view. This equaled 57% of the gold, or more than half the total weight.

So what does a flooded out gold dredger do? He goes metal detecting! Sunday morning I took my White's Goldmaster 3 to Crow Creek to look for nuggets for a few hours. The snow is still covering most areas, but cut banks are exposed and so providing a few detecting opportunities. Most of these areas have been scanned on the surface before, but I was not in the mood for serious digging, so I set about scanning the surface for missed nuggets.

I was not having much luck, so crossed over the creek to try some exposed banks I saw. This bank has old tailings perched over the gold poor "blue layer" of material. This is a thick layer of clay-rich material that overlays bedrock. It is relatively fine-grained and mixed with small rocks. It does contain gold, but usually only dust and fine particles. It is overlain in turn by a "brown layer" of streambed material that is a rich yellow-brown color, and mixed with larger round rocks. This is the layer that produces the larger nuggets. The old mining operations worked most of the brown layers and quit when they hit the blue layer. The top of the bluff in this photo is the top of the blue layer. Often gold can be found directly on top of the blue layer where it was left by the washing action of the old mining operations. I have found gold in the past on some of these exposed bluffs where the gold on top of the layer erodes out and slides down the face of the bluff.

Detector on steep bank & 1 grain nugget found with White's Goldmaster

Meanwhile, my friend Will Holden was upstream a short distance trying his new Minelab SD 2200D detector. This is a very powerful detector that lists for $3495, so you do not see very many of them. It excels at punching through very mineralized soil to find larger nuggets, but is not very hot on small nuggets. It would not have found the small nugget the Goldmaster located with no problem. Still, it's exceptional depth on large nuggets in mineralized ground makes it a machine I am thinking about purchasing.

Will started yelling and waving at me. I hurried up, and saw one of the happiest people on the planet at that moment. Will had turned on the detector and immediately found a piece of iron trash. The second target was quite strong, and turned out to be a nice two pennyweight nugget (1/10th ounce) found 50 feet from the trail in a heavily searched area. His feeling was other detectors would have found it, and that everyone had simply missed it. It is the largest nugget Will had ever found so far, and his hand literally shook from his excitement as I took the photo below.

Will's nugget, found with Minelab SD 2200D

I searched awhile longer and dug numerous fragments of shell casings and lead pieces from bullets fired into the hill in the past. Spring cleaning chores called me home early, but I will return next weekend for a more serious detecting expedition. So ends my weekend of mining, with one small nugget to show, worth about one cent. Such is the life of a gold miner!

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 1999 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

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

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

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

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

Camp at Mills Creek

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

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

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

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

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

Gold putting a smile on Darrell's face!

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 1999 Herschbach Enterprises

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 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 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

Well, back home safe and sound after a couple weeks in Hawaii with my wife. We visited the island of Kauai for the umpteenth time. We like the laid back vibe, made even more so by being familiar with everything. We do what we both like - she relaxes in the sun and I go metal detecting. And lots of walks and dinners together.

The back story is told at Steve's Mining Journal about prior trips made to the same location over the years. Hawaii has always been a pet project of mine as it is the most difficult environment I have even encountered for a metal detector. There is of course the salt water. There is also literally military grade electromagnetic interference (EMI) from military installations plus missile and satellite tracking stations. Finally, there is a mix of non-magnetic coral sands and volcanic basalt derived sands and cobbles. Throw in the heavy surf and out of control tourists on surf boards trying to kill you... things can get interesting!

If you stick to the tan to nearly white sands you can get decent performance from many detectors. But when the basalt gets involved is where things get fun. Most prospectors are familiar with basalt rocks and the challenge they present in gold prospecting. Well, just take the same hot rocks and douse them in really salty water and heavy duty EMI and you have Hawaii.

Multi frequency VLF detectors like the Fisher CZ or Minelab Excalibur do ok in in the stuff but lack any real punch. They do best in the whiter sands, but the basalt sands and cobbles really leave them feeling gutless. I went to PI detectors early on, and overall probably had my best results with the various White's Surf PI models. Again, however, they worked best in homogenous materials. Places where the white sands and basalt cobbles mixed gave the Surf PI fits as it hit on the basalt cobbles. In darker sand beaches it was near impossible to keep the machine steady over the bottom in the surf, leading to lots of false signaling.

I tried several Garrett Infinium detectors in Hawaii and got tantalizingly close to the detector I wanted. The Infinium as a ground balancing PI could tune out the black sands and hot rocks and eliminate many of the false signals. But it introduced just as many if not more by an inability to play well with salt water and EMI. The interference in particular made the Infinium almost unusable at times. I really wanted a stable Infinium, and confirmed this idea by using the White's TDI in Hawaii. It seemed to solve the issues I was having with the Infinium and so I waited for White's to make a waterproof TDI. And waited. And waited.

I waited so long that Garrett had time to take what they learned from the Infinium and another model, the Recon, and build a next generation PI, the Garrett ATX. I was cautiously hopeful that all the noise I had made over the years had been heard, but frankly, I was not getting my hopes up too much. On top of that, the good old days are gone. I used to spend a couple weeks in Hawaii years ago and never see anyone with a detector. This trip I saw people every day! Ok, often the same guy but also more different people detecting than probably all my previous trips combined. The competition has gotten fierce by comparison to the old days.

Hawaii treasure of another sort - beautiful beaches lit up at sunset!

The Garrett ATX is the best PI detector I have ever used for difficult water hunting. Hands down, no comparison. I have to qualify that by saying that what makes it shine is the severity of the conditions. A person buying it and using it on clean white sands in Florida would probably have a less enthusiastic reaction.

There is a lot of confusion regarding ground balancing PI (GBPI) detectors like the Garrett Infinium or White's TDI. They do not air test well against good VLF detectors and indeed do not really perform all that well against them in mild ground. People never really understand what detectors like these are all about until they get into difficult ground. The kind of ground where the best VLF detectors lose half their depth, the GBPI detector just keeps plugging along, and all the sudden now have a big depth advantage. Not because they go so deep to start with, just that VLF detector fare so poorly in really bad ground. GBPI detectors only really shine in the worst conditions.

Let that sink in because it is very important. Anyone reading this should not get the idea these detectors are the be all or end all for all circumstances. But when the going gets tough, when other detectors fall on their face, a GBPI detector like the Garrett ATX can be the answer.

Tuning a detector like the Garrett ATX can really bother some people. There is this resistance to doing anything that reduces the theoretical max depth of the detector. As soon as you start getting into reducing settings the feeling is that "well, yeah, but now it does not go as deep". The reality is that any machine that can be run maxed out in bad conditions has left some performance on the table. You may be able to max settings in benign ground, but you should have to back off of max settings in really bad conditions. That is why the controls exist - to compensate for bad conditions. The goal is to be set as high as possible while getting stable performance. The ATX is a powerful detector, and so it should be expected the machine has to be dialed back in severe conditions.

The ATX has three adjustments that affect the depth. The Gain control is the simplest. You decrease the sensitivity of the detector to help compensate for conditions that are introducing too much noise. Just like the Gain or Sensitivity control on a VLF detector. This control was lacking on the Infinium and is a major reason why the ATX is superior. There is the pulse delay, which Garrett labels as a discrimination control. It is, sort of. Without getting all technical on you it is also a sort of sensitivity control, in that increasing the delay or discrimination also eliminates signals from weak conductor targets like foil, hot rocks, or salt water. This is really the only control you have on the Infinium to deal with false signals and it serves a similar function on the ATX.

Finally, you have the ground balance. The ground balance is basically another type of discrimination circuit or filter. The signal produced by the ground is determined and then eliminated. However, this comes at a cost. Items that read the same as the ground signal are also eliminated, and items near to the ground signal will exhibit reduced signals.

The White's TDI makes it easy to demonstrate this. You can turn the ground balance completely off, and when you do so the machine air tests far better than it does when you turn the ground balance on. This is because of the subtractive nature of the ground balance circuit on the TDI. Also, because it has a manual ground balance, you can see the effect of tuning the ground balance control closer to and farther from a particular target response. Instead of tuning out the ground the control can be manipulated to tune out other items instead. It is just a basic discrimination circuit.

Different ground balance methods can affect items to greater and lesser degrees so the example shown by the TDI should not be taken as being the same with all detectors. But the effect is real and does exist to some degree on all ground balancing detectors, both VLF and PI.

So why use ground balance? That should be obvious - to tune out ground responses. If there is no detectable component in the ground you would be better off without the ground balance circuit. Such conditions rarely exist, but they do exist. Absolute pure white coral based sands are one of them. The ATX at its hottest will detect salt water however, and new to the ATX is the ability to ground balance out the salt signal instead of the ground signal, but you are trading some sensitivity for stability doing it.

Long round about way to explain that when the Garrett ATX is turned on with factory default settings the ground balance setting is at a minimum. The ATX should be tried first with the factory default setting and on many beaches you will not want to ground balance it. Just leave the discrimination (pulse delay) at zero, set the gain as high as possible while still allowing the machine to be stable, do a frequency scan, and go.

In Hawaii at my location however I could not do this. I could on clean sand but not in the cobbles I wanted to hunt. But first, a total surprise. My ATX was almost totally immune to the EMI that I had previously experienced on Kauai without even doing a frequency scan. The frequency scan was basically redundant. That one thing made the ATX a huge advantage for me before I did anything else. I would not have believed it had I not had a White's Surf PI along for backup and sure enough, when I fired it up, the EMI was there. It was discernible in the ATX non-motion mode but even then nothing to worry about. I. Do not know what Garrett did or if I have a magic ATX but this one thing alone really floored me. It absolutely eliminated my number one problem with the Infinium.

Basalt cobbles in sand on Kauai

A detector with all controls set to max is in theory getting the best depth. But if it is not stable you cannot work with it, so you have to adjust back to find the best balance. The ATX is a very powerful detector and so I found a combination of settings that worked for me to get quiet, stable performance. This is in no way being advertised as a setting to for you to use! It is what I did for this location and other locations will take different settings. In general, the more powerful all your settings can be the better while still being able to have a stable running detector. So the ATX with factory default (minimum) ground balance, zero discrimination (pulse delay), and max gain would be at its most powerful. The worse the conditions, the more you may need to dial the settings back.

The problem is with all the settings maxed out the ATX is very sensitive to small gold, but that also means it picks up salt water and hot rocks. I played with the gain control and the pulse delay (disc) control looking for a balance that left the detector running quiet. A discrimination setting of three and a gain of seven made the ATX submerged in salt water run like a VLF. I periodically reduced the disc setting or bumped the gain higher and noise was introduced, so settled on the 3 and 7 setting for my Kauai beach. Then I found a fat basalt rock buried in the sandy bottom and ground balanced over it, eliminating the signal. I would be the first to admit these settings were probably aggressive and of course costing me some depth in theory, but I got what I have always wanted in Hawaii. A PI detector running quiet as a VLF and by that I mean just purring along with a threshold sound, and when it made a noise, it was because I had a target under the coil.

Here is another way to look at it. A very hot detector will detect salt water. It will detect hot rocks. And it will detect things you want. EMI can also be an issue. The trick is to reduce the signals from the things you do not want to hear as much as possible while enhancing the good signals as much as possible. It may be letting unwanted signals through will also increase depth on desired targets a bit. It may also be true that too many signals from undesired targets will inhibit success. You have to decide for yourself where the balance lies. If maximum depth is the goal then digging more undesired targets may indeed pay off. In my case I had plenty of targets, so the goal was quiet, efficient operation.

I would not hunt clean white sand set like this. I would have the settings maxed out. I had a strategy in mind here, and my goal was to detect in the basalt cobbles. I was not tuning the machine for maximum performance in the easy stuff, but for maximum performance in the worst stuff. I wanted to detect the places where targets were more likely to have been missed by other detectors.

Finally, after one go with the stock coil, I switched to the 8" mono coil. A few reasons. First, it is easier to handle underwater and fits in depressions better. It can be pushed through sand ridges and is less likely to move on the shaft. And I could find items edge on with it easier than with the stock coil. By that I mean turn the coil on edge and drag it in the sand and it acts like a pinpointer on small surface targets. The edge of a mono coil is very sensitive. A smaller coil is easier to pinpoint with to start with anyway. And honestly, I used the 8" mono because I was worried about sand getting in the twist locks and giving me problems, possibly even seizing up the rod assembly. The 8" mono and shaft assembly was my sacrificial lamb. If it got totally screwed up my stock coil would still be fine.

Garrett ATX with 8" mono coil (goodie bag attached to arm strap, waterproof watch on handle)

I may as well relate now that I did have issues with sand in the twist locks but not as bad as anticipated. The lower two twist locks seemed just loose enough that at the end of every outing I just worked them back and forth and the rod in and out and they cleared. But the upper one gave me problems. It got sand inside that refused to come out, even after taking it off and working on it under running water for a half hour. For some reason that upper most twist lock was just a bit tighter to start with and the sand would not clear out. Yet it never quit 100%. I lost most of the ability to twist the lock but it still twisted just enough to hold the rod in place. I am asking Garrett for advice on where to drill a couple holes or maybe slots to see if we can get these things clearing sand a bit better. Overall I actually am ok with them but they need improvement. In other types of sand it could be a big problem. I am going to see if I can get my upper lock to loosen up similar to the lower two and will report back later.

The rod assembly got scored up quite a bit from being extended and collapsed with sand in the assembly. I will post photos later. Nothing that bothered me but some might hate seeing their expensive detector getting ground up like this.

I have to say at the end of the day the physical design and the rod assembly in the water were nothing short of brilliant. I have given the ATX low marks for prospecting as being a duck out of water. The waterproof design adds weight, complexity, and expense not required for most dry land prospectors. But in the water the ATX felt really, really good on my arm. It is slightly negative so will settle on bottom if released. But not much; it is essentially weightless on your arm underwater. The rod assembly was a dream. I was working in heavy surf with 40 lbs of lead weight on. I steadied myself many times by leaning on the ATX with absolutely no fear it would break, and the rod never slipped. I could get in the shallows on my knees and shorten the rod down as short as I liked. And just right, no fumbling for the right holes, just loosen a twist lock or two and put it right how I wanted it. Better yet, due to the three piece design, I could also extend the ATX to be longer than any detector I have used underwater. I was in 6 foot of water with just my snorkel in the air, and easily detecting around me. I do a lot of breath hold recovery in deeper water and the ATX was just so easy to adjust for whatever depth I was working at. So easy and so solid and tough that I 100% forgive any little work needed to sort out the twist lock situation. This is one really great handling detector underwater in rough surf conditions that would leave other detectors in serious danger of breaking.

The 8" mono was perfect for me. It stayed where I put it and I pushed it around a lot. I learned quickly if I wanted to adjust the coil position to be flatter all I had to do is turn the detector over and push down on the nose of the coil. Maybe not as easy as pushing down on the heel of a coil with a rod mounted in the center instead of the rear but no big deal, mainly because the coil stayed put. After two weeks of heavy use I never had to adjust the coil tension and it showed no signs of having any issue with all the sand it ran through. I had no scuff cover, and the coil shows no sign of cracking, just your normal scuffing from use. The epoxy appears much improved from the old Infinium days.

A weak point - that tiny spring loaded rod lock, the one you flip to disengage the rod and coil assembly. The tiny spring popped out on me once. I took it apart, made the spring end ninety degrees again, and it worked for most of trip, but slipped out again last day. Not a big deal but needs beefing up. Be sure when twisting the rod and cams while cleaning to not hold the detector body. You will be twisting against that little lever. Hold onto the rods themselves and twist the cams.

We need to find out what the part number is for the coil and headphones connector covers. Everyone should have a couple extra. Better yet, a couple spare caps like are fixed to the back of the ATX to cover the male headphone connection when not in use. One of these to put over the male coil attachment point inside the housing would be very helpful when rinsing and cleaning the ATX. Take the coil off, put the cap on, and now no worries while cleaning. I will find out the part numbers and pricing for those and get some and suggest ATX owners do also.

I saw no point on beach hunting with all the competition. One guy in particular walked the beach a couple times every day with a Surf PI. I saw a couple Surf PI detectors at work, a Minelab Excalibur, and a Tesoro Sand Shark or Piranha. They all walked the beach and only the Excalibur guy ventured into the trough when it was calmer once.

I spent all my time in the surf or deeper water with a weight belt and mask and snorkel. I recover targets by fanning or digging. And I went looking for mixed coral/basalt harder bottoms instead of deep sand. I played on the beach a bit and hit deeper sand underwater but basically all my finds came off of more solid bases.

I am not going to say the ATX was some kind of super depth monster. That would be misleading and really missing the entire point. I have no doubt it was getting as good as depth as could be wrung out of the conditions. I was easily getting nickels down to ten inches in the basalt, maybe a tad deeper but honestly it is hard to tell recovering targets underwater while holding my breath in the surf. The real thing I am trying to relay here is the ATX was rock solid, just like using a good VLF above water, but in the worst detecting conditions I have ever encountered. It allowed me to just get on with the business of detecting targets and recovering them. If I was lacking for targets maybe fighting for another inch would be the name of the game but I never ran out of targets.

Steve's Finds in Hawaii with Garrett ATX (Click on photo for larger version)

The rings just banged! Nickels hit hard. By virtue of the ground balance system large junk goes low tone and I ignored many low tone targets. That cost me some dimes, copper pennies, and quarters but that is ok. Nickels, zinc pennies, and rings go high tone. As do sinkers, bottle caps, hair pins, and aluminum. Still, being able to ignore low tone targets upped my odds some. Though I dug a lot of low tones also just to learn more and frankly, because I have a hard time passing targets. You just never know for sure until you dig them and I was there to dig targets. Still, this photo shows my target mix skewed to high tone targets. With the exception of a few large items discarded at the trash can this is every item I dug over the two week period and about 50 hours of detecting time in the water.

Another benefit with the ATX is the adjustable target volume and threshold, a real boon in an underwater detector. I had brought Gray Ghost Amphibian phones with me that started out loud enough but then got too quiet to hear, so I had to FedEx a set of Garrett phones in quick. I like the sound of the Ghosts better but not if I can't hear them. I surmise the sound chamber was filling with water and so will return them to get checked out. First time DetectorPro phones ever let me down. The Garrett phones have a lower tone but worked just fine. The volume and threshold control on the ATX makes them much nicer to use since they can be set comfortably for both above and below water use even though they have no volume control themselves. You can even set the volume on the fly easily while underwater. This is a very nice thing that most underwater detectors lack.

I have read a few posts by people very concerned about the placement of the headphone connector. Total non-issue for me. It is under my right elbow and was never a concern at any time.

Icing on the cake? The ATX retains all settings when turned off. Once I found my magic settings I was so happy with how the ATX was running I was afraid to change anything and did not have to. Just turn it off, turn it on, and ready to go. Everything is just the way you left it. This is very important with the ground balance setting. It is the one setting you have no idea where it is set. I wish and am suggesting that when the detector is manually ground balanced the LED indications reflect the entire range and show you where you end up at for future reference. Right now the LEDs simply follow to audio and reduce to nothing when the unit is ground balanced. But where am I and can I get back there? You have no idea and neither did I. All I knew was my ATX was running great and recovering targets at what I thought was good depth so I left it be.

I used rechargeables exclusively. I kept rough track of detecting time and charged up about every ten hours. Again, it was nice being able to pull batteries out, charge, reinstall, and when the detector was turned on again no tuning was required due to the retained settings. I carefully looked for water in the battery compartments each time but never saw a drop. I have total faith in the waterproof integrity of the ATX after what I put it through.

I just got back and blasted this report out but will probably edit it a bit to smooth it up over the next couple days. I will also post a more story like version with more details and photos on my journal in the next couple days. I am cleaning up a few of the rings. There is one very old class ring I thought was junk but is encased in sand and lime I am dissolving away and I have a couple silver rings to clean up. Once again the big diamond eluded me but no complaints here, it was my best haul ever for a beach hunting trip. In no small part due to the Garrett ATX but I will take some credit also for really hitting the water hard.

So here are the rings. The bottom line is I just had my most successful trip to Hawaii ever. I recovered over a couple dozen rings with the ATX and half of those were gold or platinum. Some silver rings, a nice 14K bracelet, and a pile of coins and the inevitable PI junk. This despite bad weather early on and all the extra detecting competition.

Eight Gold and Two Platinum Rings Found by Steve Herschbach with Garrett ATX in Hawaii

Another view later after the better silver rings were cleaned up, and that fabulous bracelet

Again though, do not take this as some kind of crazy ATX testimonial. Pay attention to my caveats. Beach hunters in clean white sand with tons of hair pins have less to be excited about here. But if you have black sand beaches or worse, the ATX is a machine to at least be aware of. I just can't help it though, I really like a detector that puts gold and platinum in my pocket!

Things I most wanted? An indication of what the ground balance setting is and an ATX version of the 14" Infinium mono coil. Thing I liked most? The way the ATX handled in the water and the way it adjusted up to handle the conditions. My last detecting nut cracked - thanks Garrett and especially Brent Weaver for obviously listening to my suggestions all these years!

I would like to learn more about this detector as there is much it is capable of. How exactly does it compare with factory default minimum ground balance mode versus PI detectors that have no ground balance at all? I tried the no-motion mode a bit but saw no real value for what I was doing - there has to be more to it that is of value in other situations. Most importantly, what combination of pulse delay, gain, and ground balance is optimum for various locations and targets? I found some that worked for me but I am not swearing they were the best settings possible. I admit to focusing more on detecting than fiddling and so it is hard to get me to stop and do comparative tests when detecting time is at a premium. I look forward to seeing what works for others and will add what I can as I learn more about the ATX myself.

This article was promoted from a thread on the DetectorProspector Forum and those interested in the article will find additional information in the posts on that thread. 

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2014 Herschbach Enterprises

Steve's Mining Journal Index

This outing started as an expedition to test a new detector by a company I was unfamiliar with - the Nokta brand based in Istanbul, Turkey, and the new Nokta FORS Gold. I wrote up a very detailed review but this article focuses on the gold found and so all the detector review details have been kept minimal. If you wish to read it, you can view the full report at Detailed Review Of The Nokta FORS Gold Nugget Detector. There is quite a bit of additional commentary in the follow up posts that might interest people.

Summing up from the report referenced above, the Nokta FORS Gold is one of the better VLF nugget detectors I have ever used, and even better it is a very capable detector for just about any type of detecting. It appears to just be a variation on another Nokta model, the FORS CoRe (Coin Relic) and shares nearly all the same features. The CoRe features slightly different discrimination options plus a dedicated beach mode, whereas the Gold focuses more on nugget detecting features, but from what I am seeing both detectors can do just about anything very well.

The FORS Gold default settings are almost perfect for somebody with little or no detecting experience. It boots up in Boost Mode, which is a two tone mode with ferrous items giving a low tone and non-ferrous a high tone. Simply turn the detector on, hold the ground balance button on the end of the handle down, bounce the coil up and down for a few seconds, and go nugget detecting! It really can be that easy with the FORS Gold.

The Nokta FORS Gold can be used for almost any type of detecting, but where it shines is in its main use for nugget detecting. I have to admit I have been pretty much a pulse induction sort of guy in recent years, but I have been reminded once again recently that very good nugget finds may very possibly be best looked for in the trashiest of locations. People using PI detectors tend to shy away from heavy trash, yet mining camps and work areas were often right in the middle of the best gold bearing ground. There still is a serious need for detectors with exceptional trash handling capability, and that means VLF detectors. Yet those detectors also need to be able to handle the worst mineralized ground and hot rocks, an area where VLF detectors are weak.

The FORS Gold has a relatively straight forward all metal mode, which they label as the General Mode. There are some features however not offered by most of the competition all at the same time in a single detector. First, while in all metal mode the visual discrimination feature is still engaged via the LCD display on the end of the handle. This offers the ability to identify items while still in the powerful all metal mode. Better yet, the FORS Gold also offers up an optional automatic ground tracking mode in addition to the manual ground balance. Some detectors offer one or the other of these features but very few offer both the ability to visually identify targets while in all metal mode plus both manual and automatic ground tracking.

Nokta FORS Gold in the field

The FORS Gold can be ground balanced by simply pushing the button on the handle and bouncing the coil. But you can also override the setting obtained by doing so with the plus and minus rocker switch. In other words, full manual ground balance. The third method, full automatic ground tracking, is engaged with a rocker switch on the front of the control box, and so can always be set as on or off before even turning the detector on.

I and many others tend to recommend always using manual ground balance. However, if possible I always prefer having automatic ground tracking as an option that can be enabled or disabled. You see, I want all options at my disposal, even those I may use but rarely. Just by chance, a very good reason came up while I was out nugget detecting with the FORS Gold.

I ran into an area with some really pesky hot rocks. There are several ways of dealing with this. In a pure manual mode machine you try and find a compromise ground balance setting and probably lower gain or sensitivity levels. Then you just try and discern sharper nugget sounds from softer hot rock sounds. Obviously, this can require some extra expertise and a trained ear. Severe hot rocks can be trying for the best of detectorists.

When hot rocks and ground conditions get severe, automatic ground tracking may help. In some cases, it can be almost magical. So it was with an area I ran into. In all metal General Mode the threshold was all over the place as I ran across lots of small hot rocks. I switched to automatic ground tracking, and they basically disappeared. The machine went from being a bucking bronco to a mild mannered pony with the push of a button. In theory ground tracking can track out faint signals, but this can be minimized with proper coil control. Wide continuous sweeps. It certainly is no worse than the nuggets that will get missed thinking they are hot rocks, and in my opinion in this type of scenario automatic ground tracking can be critical to continued operation in conditions that would cause most people to quit in frustration.

With the FORS Gold you can also go to the Boost Mode, where many hot rocks will just read low tone as ferrous items. Boost also offers an adjustable iron mask feature that can be increased until the offending hot rocks do not signal at all. As always, there are tradeoffs in the form of possible missed gold, but it is very important to always concentrate on getting the most found gold possible, even if that means compromises to some degree to get it to happen. Nobody gets all the gold, the idea is to maximize the amount of gold you do get to the greatest degree possible given whatever tools you have at your disposal.

The visual target id feature can even be employed to deal with certain high reading hot rocks that refuse to yield to other solutions. The rocks may cluster around a certain target number, which can then be ignored. Again, not perfect, but another possible option to be used if need be.

Well, come on Steve, what about some gold?! It is hard not to like a detector when I take it someplace with nasty hot rocks, and it handles them with relative ease. It gets even better when I put it into Boost Mode and wander into a trashy location getting lots of low tones, and then dig a few nuggets right in the midst of the trash. I went where I never would have went with my PI and the FORS Gold found gold when in all honesty I was expecting to write this report telling you about the bullets I found. It is not easy to go find gold, and so I was really just expecting to find bullets and shell fragments and I was keeping them to show you what the FORS Gold could do for this report. I was going to explain how bullets read like gold and there you go. Seriously folks, I really just got lucky but the FORS Gold gets the credit.

My first nugget found with the FORS Gold - and yes, those are rain drops on the rain cover!

After three nice nuggets I was as happy as I could be, when I get another signal and dig up what I thought was some crumpled up foil. Then I realized I was looking at gold, and an exceptional 2 gram nugget revealed itself to closer inspection. I did something I almost never do and wrapped it in tissue to protect it until I could get it home and properly clean it. The Nokta FORS Gold helped me find one of the most delicate gold specimens I have ever found. I ended up with 3.3 grams total and enough information to finally file this review.

2 grams fresh out of the ground


3.3 grams gold found with Nokta FORS Gold

I went into this basically just wanting to see if Nokta, as a relatively unknown player in the U.S. market, was a company that was not selling junk. I was pleasantly surprised to say the least, and found the Nokta FORS Gold to be a top-of-the-line VLF nugget detector that can go head to head with the best units made by long -time players in the industry. That being the case I recommend people keep an eye on this company  in the future because if what I am seeing is any indication, Nokta is a company that is going places. I am happy I had a chance to familiarize myself with the company and its products and thank Dilek and everyone else at Nokta for the opportunity. It's hard not to like a detector that puts such beautiful gold in my pocket!

Close up of 2 gram specimen found with FORS Gold

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2014 Herschbach Enterprises

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sheep Mountain, Alaska

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walker Fork Campground

Steve's Camp at Walker Fork Campground

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

Kurt Looking For Gold With White's MXT Pro

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

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

Working Bedrock With the Gold Bug 2

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

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

Bernie Pendergast and His Trusty Minelab GPX 5000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Steve Herschbach
Copyright © 2014 Herschbach Enterprises