Steve Herschbach

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In Alaska I hunted taling piles. They are easier digging, but there is rarely a time when the ground is flat. Lots of side hilling, and so I favored "walking picks" with 36" handles. The tailings are full of trash, and so the digging is constant. That being the case the pick was always in my hand, and made a great aid in navigating steep hillsides. Now that I hunt deserts and such, I tend to have my pick on my belt way more than in my hands. Hours can go by between targets. So I now favor picks that can hang easily on a belt. 24" is not bad but tends to catch me on the leg sometimes so now 18" is doing the trick for me. If I was digging holes every ten minutes I would go back to the longer handles, but right now I more of less vote for the 18". But it really does just depend on what you are doing. Prospecting Pick Thread Here are some of my picks. Right now #3 is the favored one. #1 is an Alaska version that dug many holes.

Can you believe I still remember when we had a hand crank phone and a party line in our house? Geez, I am getting old!! I literally saw Anchorage grow from a true frontier town cut off from the world (I watched the first live television satellite broadcast in 1969 - the moon landing) to what is today just another American city with all the big box stores. Not that different than Reno really except for the weather. Communications kind of ruined everything. You can be out in the middle of nowhere and there is a satellite dish and internet connection these days. It was that being off grid, totally on your own thing that got lost in the process. Dear old Dad is going strong at 87, though maybe a little slower. Yes, he is an amazing man in many ways. He let me do things I would be too scared to let a child of my own do but which instilled in me a great sense of confidence and self-reliance. My father ended up being a partner in the surveying firm he hired on with, and later founded his own surveying company. He worked from one end of the state to the other and his name is on records all over the state. He was one heck of a bush pilot and flew supply plane on many of the jobs. My good fortune again as I got to see a lot more of Alaska than most people ever will. My goal is to add a "chapter" to the tale each morning covering the time from the 1970's until the present. Chisana was a big part of my prospecting life but I have never told the story in full until now. So check back daily for new entries.

This gold prospecting and metal detecting story takes us all the way back to the beginning - my beginning that is. I was fortunate enough to be born in the Territory of Alaska in 1957. Alaska was still very much on the frontier back in those days. My father was a farm boy from the midwest who headed for Alaska in the early 50's with not much more than an old pickup truck. He worked as a longshoreman offloading ships in Seward, Alaska for a time. He decided to get some education, and earned his way through college in Fairbanks, Alaska, by driving steampipe for the fleet of gold dredges that were still working there. He spent some time in Seldovia, Alaska, working the "slime line" in a fish cannery. He met my mom in Seldovia, the two got married, and finally settled in Anchorage, Alaska. I came along in 1957. My father had taken a job as a surveyor but money was tight in the early years. I was raised on wild game and garden grown vegetables, and as soon as I was old enough to handle it, I was walking a trapline every winter with my father. Dad was a hard worker, and Alaska was having one of its many booms at the time - the construction of the oil and gas fields in Lower Cook Inlet. This was the Swanson River oilfield, discovered the year I was born. The state was prospering, and my father along with it as a surveyor on the new Swanson Field. He got the bug for flying early on, and by the time I became a teenager he finally got his dream plane at the time - a Piper Super Cub, the classic Alaska Bush airplane. Super Cubs equipped with oversize "tundra tires" can land just about anywhere you can find about 300 - 400 feet of open ground. A great little airplane and the one I ended up flying to get my own pilot's license. Super Cub N1769P parked on knoll in Talkeetna Mountains, Alaska It was in this same timeframe that dad got me hooked on gold prospecting. In 1972 I saw an ad in a magazine "Find Lost Treasure" and had acquired my first metal detector, a White's Coinmaster 4. This must have got discussions going about gold, and my father did have some knowledge on the subject having worked around the gold mines in Fairbanks. He took me to a little creek south of Anchorage, Bertha Creek, and I found my very first flakes of gold! By the ripe old age of 14 gold fever was in the air, I had my first metal detector, and already wanted a gold dredge. My first dredge, a 3" Keene with no floatation, was on the way to me in 1973. Keep in mind that the price of gold had only recently been deregulated from the old fixed price of $35 per ounce. In 1972 it was around $60 per ounce, and in 1973 made it to just over $100 per ounce. The money was not my motivation at all. I already just loved finding gold, and the connection to the prospectors of old and the historical quest for gold were more compelling than any dream of striking it rich. I just wanted to find gold! My first metal detector and first gold dredge (my 3502 had the older aluminum header box & a power jet) A young man with a new detector, new gold dredge, gold fever, and a father willing to fly him anywhere in Alaska on adventure. How great is that? Now there was only one problem - where to go? There was no internet then, so it boiled down to libraries and research. In short order I discovered the United States Geological Survey (U.S.G.S.) bulletin series and the number one Alaska title of the series, Placer Deposits of Alaska, U.S.G.S. Bulletin 1374 by Edward H. Cobb. This one book and the references contained in it became my prospecting guide to Alaska. My desired target? Remote locations with large gold nuggets! I read the book and certain places just jumped out at me. One was the Iditarod area and places like Ganes Creek and Moore Creek - tales told elsewhere. This paragraph of page 114 caught my eye: "Placer mining in the Chisana district, first of creek gravels and later of bench and old channel deposits of Bonanza and Little Eldorado Creeks, has always been on a small scale with simple equipment. The remoteness of the area, shortages of water on some streams, and the small extent of the deposits all prevented the development of large operations. There has been little activity since World War II; the last reported mining was a two-man nonfloat operation in 1965." Wow, that alone sounds pretty good. Nothing really about the gold however. The secret to the Placer Deposits series is not so much the books themselves, though they are great for getting ideas, like I did. The key is to use the references listed and in this case the main one is The Chisana-White River District, Alaska, U.S.G.S. Bulletin 630 (1916) by Stephen Reid Capps. It turns out I had stumbled over the location of the last actual gold rush in Alaska in 1913. It was a small rush and did not last long, but it did mark the end of an era. The world was on the brink of war and the age of gold rushes was soon to be history. The history of the area is covered in the report starting on page 89. It is fascinating reading, but it was this note on page 105 that really sealed the deal: "The gold is bright, coarse, and smoothly worn. The largest nugget found has a value of over $130, and pieces weighing a quarter of an ounce or over make up about 5 per cent of the total gold recovered. The gold is said to assay $16.67 an ounce." Gold nuggets a quarter ounce or larger make up five percent of the gold? And that $130 nugget at $16.67 an ounce? Somewhere over seven ounces. That's all I needed to know. Very remote, worked by simple means, and large gold - I wanted to go to Chisana in general and Bonanza Creek in particular. Even the creek names scream gold - Bonanza Creek, Big Eldorado Creek, Little Eldorado Creek, Coarse Money Creek, and Gold Run. Now all we had to do was get there. But when I said remote, I meant remote. Chisana is practically in Canada 250 air miles from Anchorage. To be continued..... Chisana, Alaska location map

There is quite a bit of negativity about whether Minelab will support the Equinox directly with enough coils. It certainly does not help that things seem to take so long. A lot of that is “watched pot syndrome”. The Equinox has only been widely available for a couple months. The 6” coil is now available, and will be in large quantity in the next few weeks. Then we will see the large coil out before the end of the year. It’s not really taking forever - it just seems that way! The key is/was popularity, and I think we all know the story there now. I do not expect the flow of coils to stop, and by the end of next year I bet we are all pretty happy with what is available.

Beginner’s Guide To The Minelab GPX 5000

Welcome to metal detecting. Coin detecting is not jewelry detecting. Jewelry occurs over most of the discrimination scale and with ANY detector to dig jewelry you have to dig junk. For every gold item there is an aluminum item, lots of aluminum items, that read the same. This had nothing to do with the Equinox per se. it is just the nature of how various items read, and the trades we make in finding desirable targets. As long as you discriminate out anything you will possibly miss good items. Again, there are no target id numbers that are just good stuff or just bad stuff. The ranges overlap entirely. There is less junk on the high end, where many U.S. coins reside, but gold falls smack in the middle of where all the trash resides. Pretty much everything you need to know is on the thread below....

Welcome to the forum Justin! That's some great finds, looks like you have really been at it. The Equinox should be perfect for Anchorage coin detecting. Thanks for posting!

VDI numbers give you more nuance, but at the end of the day they can still be skewed by highly mineralized ground and depth. Small nuggets in iron mineralized ground can easily read as ferrous no matter the detector, and that applies to Equinox. It may prove that multifrequency is more reliable as regards discrimination but it is too early to tell yet if that is the case or not. No gold detecting tool is perfect and Equinox is just another tool.

Yup, just a way to tune the Carrott to ground that it would signal on otherwise. If you turn the pinpointer on in the air, and it then signals when put to bare dirt... that is a sign that you need to have the tip to the ground before you turn it on. This works for many pinpointer models.

The Gold Monster "Gold Chance Indicator" is really more of a "ferrous probability meter". The harder right it goes, the better the chance the target is non-ferrous (aluminum, lead, copper, gold, silver, etc.) and the farther left it goes, the more chance the target is ferrous. There is no relation to VDI numbers per se. A piece of lead could give a full right reading, a barely right reading, or if buried in highly mineralized ground, a left or ferrous reading. Same for a silver dime or a gold nugget. It is very easy for highly iron mineralized ground to "mask" non-ferrous targets such that the detector makes a wrong call. That is why lots of people recommend digging everything. However, if trash does not allow that, then all we can do is use tools like this meter to do the best we can. With the Gold Monster, anytime the meter kicks to the right, you really should dig the target. Even if it kicks left five times and right just once - dig it. The only ones I pass on (if I pass at all) are those that kick hard left over and over. When in doubt, dig it out!!

Part 5 - High Resolution Iron Discrimination and Setting Notch Discrimination Part 6 - Setting Discrimination for Iron Audio Use and Bottle Cap Demonstration with Iron Audio Feature Part 7 - Searching in Pro Mode on Trashy Sites

Part 1 - Powering On, Factory Reset, and Detection Modes Part 2 - Standard vs Pro Modes and Proportional Audio Part 3 - Target ID Information, Digital Target ID, and Tone ID Part 4 - Frequency Adjust and Ground Balance

"This is only the fifth fall in Arizona and the first one in the Valley," said Arizona State University professor Laurence Garvie, curator of the Center for Meteorite Studies. "He is asking anyone within two miles of Deer Valley Road and 75th Avenue in Glendale to look for black rocks in their yard that weren't there before." Full article here

A handy FAQ from the natural History Museum about meteorites, meteors and other small celestial bodies that Earth encounters in its travels around the Sun. http://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/meteorites-and-meteor-wrongs.html

I know some spots that are exactly like you are describing. California has some really hot serpentine areas. They are frustrating because they really do call for a PI type detector, but the trash levels mean most of the time is spent digging trash. Or I switch to a VLF, but now half the targets are out of reach. Ultimately it does seem to always boil down to just digging everything. The problem is a time issue. We usually don't have the time to dig everything, but get forced into it anyway. The good news is these are the types of locations where people will keep eking out a few nuggets for a long time. A nugget probably still remains until every metal target is gone.

I think about writing books all the time! It is one of the few bucket list items I have left so I really do need to get with the program. In the meantime the third rewrite of the Treasure Talk article just got submitted so that's a start In the meantime keep digging that gold Lunk - the Equinox will easily find gold other VLF detectors miss. Here is a little rock that signaled - took me some eyeballing to see it is a little flake embedded in cemented gravel..... not all hot rocks are hot rocks!

20 khz and 40 khz serve to tone the Equinox down for situations where Multi-IQ is too powerful. The single frequencies can not only tame some difficult EMI situations but can mellow the machine out when dealing with some bad ground or hot rocks. I find 20 khz in particular to be quite useful. These would be in areas with mineralization far more intense than what you encounter Simon. In your case Multi-IQ is probably all you will ever need. I have been very hesitant to say much about the Equinox as a nugget detector. Nugget hunters tend to get stuck in their ways and to favor what they are used to. Equinox requires out of box thinking and even with the addition of the 6" coil the coil selection is not optimal for nugget hunting. Long story short I figured if I did my typical get people all stirred up thing about Equinox as a nugget detector, then far too many people would get it thinking it is a magic wand. Some like to overdrive VLF detectors in bad ground and then post videos of how they suck. Look at the blowback the Gold Monster got and still gets from people that do not understand the intent of the detector and how to run it properly. It just seemed like something I would be best off laying low on and letting the machine reveal itself more slowly over time. So while I have extreme faith in what can be achieved with the Equinox when nugget detecting I am going to avoid the soapbox on the subject. There are too many people using the Equinox already anyway! Nugget detecting is easily the most technical aspect of metal detecting, with VLF nugget detecting in bad ground being a true challenge of any persons detecting knowledge. I am trying to write an article for Treasure Talk right now giving basic guidance on nugget detecting with the Equinox. It is frustrating and I am on my third rewrite. It is very hard in a short article to try and explain exactly how to arrive at the best settings while nugget detecting even with a simple detector. With the Equinox I currently have three distinct methods for nugget detecting, with nearly endless variations of the fine tuning for each method. I could write a book on the subject, and am trying to get it all into about 1500 words. It is easy to just provide settings for a certain situation. But every situation is different and requires the ability to listen to what the machine is telling you about the ground, and then being able to arrive at settings that best quiet the ground while giving up as little power as possible. A person has to know the controls, what they do, and how they interact. For me now it is all second nature. Yet when I try and put it into words it is like trying to describe to somebody who has never walked on two legs exactly how to do it. We all walk around without thinking about it, but it is an incredibly difficult thing we are doing. That is what VLF nugget detecting is like for me - very easy to do but very hard to describe in simple words.

Nice but small, and that's the point. I can easily hit bits of gold weighing under 1/10th grain (480 grains per ounce, so 1/4800th ounce) which puts the Equinox with 6" coil squarely in the league of the best VLF nugget detectors when it comes to tiny gold, and in mild ground you can get PI like depth on larger gold with the 11" coil. My GPZ is still my bread an butter gold detector, but my Gold Monster has not been used at all this year as I prefer the extra control and features offered on the Equinox. Most of all I like the fact that the Equinox is deceptively simple but as you learn more about it there always seems to be more to learn. The power is there in spades - it's just trying to control it in high mineral gold prospecting scenarios that is challenging. Especially with the 11" coil - the 6" coil is far easier to tame. The Equinox is still the best all around detector I have ever used, and it just keeps getting better the more I use it.

Great info Steve... thanks! There certainly are times a small coil works better than a large coil. Better see through in dense trash, and sharper hits on tiny targets. But I think we can sum up and say that on coin size targets in the open, the 11” coil gets a couple more inches depth than the 6” coil.

Ah, the classic dilemma! Ground really hot, so you need a PI. But lots of trash, so you need a VLF for discrimination. But the VLF gets no depth so you need the PI. But the PI gets the trash...... Steve's Law Of Target Depletion

Geiger counters are used to look for radioactive minerals, and more specifically for uranium prospecting. They have no real application outside of that. Any information about something like using a Geiger counter to look for silver would involve some rare situation where a radioactive mineral is being used as a tracer. Anyway, not much use for gold but possibly of use for platinum group metals which may be associated with uranium in some cases. https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/jres/64A/jresv64An1p107_A1b.pdf http://www.minsocam.org/ammin/AM38/AM38_463.pdf

Lots of people proofread it, including me. Hopefully Minelab will achieve the level of inhuman perfection people expect of them someday. God forbid there be an error in an appendix in a very detailed manual. The manuals come out as a pdf first and don’t get printed until later, just so errors like this can get fixed..... before sending off to the printer.

Welcome to the forum! Well, it is an entry level detector so I would not expect too much. In theory any detector can find gold nuggets, but the reality is you are competing with a lot of people swinging far more powerful detectors. The area you are in does not have a lot of large nugget gold, and so you would typically want something hotter on tiny objects than this 6.6 kHz machine is going to be. The good news is I just saw these at Costco myself so I know you got a smoking deal. What you have really got is a good general purpose coin and jewelry detector. It does have a manual ground balance option, which is kind of a marker for a unit that is a “step up” from a basic factory preset detector. Should be decent for typical park detecting or walking a beach. Bottom line is Bounty Hunter has some good value deals when the price is right. Bounty Hunter Discovery 3300 Owner's Manual Newer Thread On The Subject Here