Steve Herschbach

Winter is slow in coming this year. November has arrived, and temperatures are still relatively mild. I have decided to take advantage of the good weather and make one last dredging trip to Crow Creek Mine. Crow Creek is close to town, and when the weather makes a change it is easy to pull out. It is an ideal spot for a mining trip late in the year. The old location I was dredging in the canyon a couple years ago was taken over by friend Andy. He worked the creek up until he reached a narrow spot choked with boulders. He also worked above this area, but a stretch about 100 feet long remained that had not been dredged yet. I decided to take up where he had left off and see how I could do. My little 4" was easy to pack into the location and setup, so I was working away the first day. I started seeing some good gold, and was happy I had returned to this spot. The gold here is gold that was lost by the old mining operations, and is distributed rather evenly in the top few feet of material. It makes for easy dredging, and I used mask and snorkel rather than my hookah gear to mine the gold. The second day was the best. I got in a long days dredging, and took out most of the width of the creek. Everything was going great, and I was constantly seeing gold as I removed the gravel. When it was time to cleanup at the end of the day, I was happy to see over an ounce of nice gold for my efforts. It's days like this that make dredging great! It snowed that night, and temperatures plummeted. It seemed winter had finally arrived. Ice was forming on the creek as I dredged, but still it was not too cold to mine. I dredged up the gut of the creek, but I was not seeing as much gold as the day before. My cleanup revealed that I had only found about a 1/4 ounce of gold for the day. Steve's 4" subsurface dredge & some gold recovered I looked at the weather, and decided that if I left the dredge and returned the next weekend that I might be frozen out. I decided it would be easier to just go ahead and hang it up for the season, so I packed the dredge out and headed for town. A successful last trip for the end of my mining season. What does a person think about while they are dredging for gold? Good question. Obviously, you think a lot about what you are doing, and where the gold is going in the creek. But sometimes the mind wanders, and strange things can cross a dredger's mind while they are working. While working this deposit I imagined a little fantasy about what it might be like to be a gold nugget buried in the creek for centuries, and to finally be uncovered by a miner. What follows is a little news release I imagined while dredging. I posted it to some mining forums, and it got quite a response. I'm reposting it here for the record. Nugget Rescue A Success! (AP Wire 11/5/00) Girdwood, Alaska - Rescue crews braved frigid winter conditions early this morning in an attempt to rescue numerous gold nuggets buried under tons of gravel and rock. A crowd gathered under gray skies to witness the heroic effort. The scene was one of tense waiting, interspersed with periods of high emotion. Finally… success! A cheer went up as first one, and then many more gold nuggets saw the light of day. Rescue crews worked slowly with special equipment brought in to deal with the unique situation. "These little nuggets have been buried here for countless years," said Rescue Coordinator Steve Herschbach. "The material has hardened a great deal, and there are many large boulders to deal with. We considered the use of explosives, but decided the nuggets might suffer unduly from its use. We chose to use suction dredges to protect the gold nuggets from possible harm." One nugget positively glowed with happiness upon his liberation from the dark depths. "You can't imagine what it was like" he said. "The floods were the worst. I used to be quite a bright, crystalline nugget. But once the boulders got though stomping the living daylights out of me… well, look at me now. They say it builds character, though." Not every rescue attempt had a happy ending, however. Mr. Herschbach described one of the failures. "I saw a beautiful nugget perched on the edge of a crevice under a large rock. It was all I could do to hold on in the current as I reached for her with my rescue tweezers. The current must have reflected off my hand, because she slipped away just as I reached for her. Try as I might, the rock proved impossible to move. Her pitiful wail as she fell out of sight will haunt me forever." In spite of tragic events such as this, the overall mood by the end of the day was one of jubilation. A crowd of gold nuggets lay gathered in the rescue pan, excitedly discussing their futures now that they are free. "I can't wait to see the sun," said one. "I hear it looks like a giant, glowing gold nugget!" There was the inevitable promise of a book or movie to come. Most heartwarming of all was the wish of one little gold nugget. "I just want to find my Mom," she said. "I hear that many people are looking for my Mother Lode. I hope someone finds her so I can tell her how much I've missed her." AP Correspondent Les Silver ~ Steve Herschbach Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

My dredging equipment has changed a lot over the last two years. I have been using a Keene 6" dredge with dual 5.5HP Honda pumps for many years. This was great while I concentrated on working a few choice locations, primarily Crow Creek Mine. A 6" dredge is great for production work, but it is too heavy for one guy to be packing around much. It usually took me 14 round trips to pack the entire dredge into any one location. The problem is that I have been spending years going to the same locations over and over. This is because I've been successful at finding gold at these locations, so why go elsewhere? Most of the vacation time I've been using each year has gone into working these same locations. But much as I hate to say it, I've been getting bored. I'm sure many people would like to have this particular kind of problem. I've been using 5" and 6" dredges for so long now that the fun and adventure has been fading. It has been turning into a job of sorts, in that I go and and do some heavy labor and get some gold. A certain number of hours dredging produces a certain amount of gold. The deposits I have been working are fairly predictable and I've found lots of nice medium-sized gold, with a few nice nuggets to spice things up. Unfortunately, this relatively predictable situation has taken a lot of the adventure out of of my mining trips. They are still fun, but just getting gold is not as exciting to me as it used to be. The day was when an ounce of gold in my pan at the end of the day was unimaginable to me. Now I look at it and just figure it was a decent days work. I've decided to switch directions in my mining efforts. The biggest change is to stop going to the same old places over and over. I've gotten in a rut, and need to break out of it. There are lots of new and exciting spots waiting for me all over Alaska, and I've realized I'm not getting any younger. It's time for me to start visiting new locations around the state. With that in mind, I need a new goal. Instead of quantity of gold, I'm going to focus on the quality of the gold. More to the point, the size of the gold. I like big nuggets, and I'm going to put more effort into finding them. The Kenai Peninsula areas I have concentrated on for the past 25 years are not the best areas for large nuggets in Alaska. It's time for me to go north. I'll be spending a lot more time metal detecting, and less time dredging. Steve's old 6" Keene gold dredge and 5" subsurface assembled from Keene parts This all means my old 6" was too big for my future plans. No more taking two weeks off just to go run the 6". So I sold it last year, and down-sized considerably to a 5" subsurface dredge. After using it a short while, I decided it was still to big for what I wanted. I need a dredge small and light enough to use for one or two day trips. I need to be able to pack it to a location, dredge for a day, and pack it out. The 5" was still a little on the large size, particularly in the amount of room it was taking up in my truck. So I sold the 5" and proceeded to build a 4" subsurface. The first version was built on a set of floats that proved to be a bit on the small side. The dredge worked well, but tended to nose-dive in fast current. Keene has also come out with a new 4" subsurface dredge tube with a redesigned riffle tray. I went ahead and rebuilt the dredge around the same marlex floats that Keene uses on their 2.5" dredge. The normal Keene frame is needlessly complicated for this application, some I made my own from simple aluminum stock. A primary design goal was that the frame, float, and recovery tube assembly had to fit in the back of my truck fully assembled. I wanted to get away from assembling and disassembling the dredge unless absolutely necessary. Steve's new 4" subsurface dredge under construction & in back of truck The new version looks great! Compact, lightweight, simple. The 4HP Honda provides plenty of power while being very fuel efficient. I can mount an air compressor if I need one, but for most of the shallow water dredging I do I can use a mask and snorkel, and forgo the extra hookah gear. Best of all, the unit slides into the back of my truck fully assembled. All I have to do is hook up the hoses. I think I've found my main unit for the next few years. A dredge that will be fun to use for short trips. My cousin Robert has recently moved to Anchorage, and my cousin Bob was in town visiting my father. We decided to get together for a trip to my claims on Mills Creek. Robert is new to mining, while Bob has been involved in numerous mining adventures in the past. I've been thinking of selling my share of the Mills Creeks claims, but wanted to try one spot out in particular to see how it paid. Jeff had sniped a nice pocket of nuggets on a corner of the creek on one of our past trips, and I've been curious if more gold was waiting to be found there. We also figured to metal detect for gold along the banks on bedrock exposures. We got my tent set up under a gloomy sky. Winter is on the way, and fresh snow is falling on the mountain tops. After settling in, I spent some time with Bob and Robert detecting for gold along the edges of Mills Creek where bedrock is exposed. We've detected lots of gold here before, but the location is getting picked over, so we had to work extra hard to find those nuggets. We shared my detector and started dropping nuggets in our vials. Once Bobby and Robert were under way metal detecting, I hauled my dredge down to the creek and got setup. The little 4" is so small compared to what I am used to that it seemed to be no effort at all to carry it around. I was setup in no time at all, and proceeded to work the bedrock area where Jeff had found his gold. 4" subsurface gold dredge at Mills Creek The bedrock was shallow, but I did not get into any major pockets of gold. There were flakes and a few nuggets scattered along the bedrock, but nothing to get excited about. By the end of the day, I had about a 1/4 ounce of gold to show. I had been hoping for something a little more dramatic, and so was a bit disappointed. The dredge was working great, however, and I was very pleased with it's performance. If I had found a great paystreak, I probably would have kept going, but the mediocre results made my mind up. I decided to sell my share of the claims and more on to greener pastures. I pulled my dredge out of the creek and packed it back to camp. I spent the rest of the weekend detecting with Bob and Robert. Bob seemed to be finding chunkier gold, but I was getting more nuggets. I finally ended up with 62 nuggets metal detecting, in addition to the gold I found dredging. Bob found 50 nuggets, while Robert only found seven. Since this was his first mining experience he was quite pleased, however. 121 Gold Nuggets Found Metal Detecting My nuggets are the ones in the bottom of the picture; Bob's are in the upper right hand corner. Robert found the seven to the left. A very successful weekend, with fun had by all. We tore down camp and stuffed everything possible into my truck and headed back to town. ~ Steve Herschbach Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

My new mining strategy is to concentrate on adventure and seeing new places, instead of just revisiting old locales to get more gold. This trip is the first test of this emphasis on chasing large gold in new locales. The first step is to research locations where large gold nuggets have been found in the past. This is fairly easy, and involves nothing more than reading lots of old mining reports. The best place to look for large gold nuggets is where they have been found in the past. The next step is getting access to those locations. It should come as no surprise that the kinds of locations that have produced many large gold nuggets in years past are most likely claimed by somebody. Rich mining ground is hard to come by, and the proven producers of yesteryear are obvious to anyone who wants to take the time to research them. Many of these areas are not only claimed, but have been for generations, with the claims passing from father to son. There are many second and even third generation mining operations in Alaska. In those cases where the claims have not stayed in a family's name, they have most likely been sold to someone else when the miner was ready to move on. Good ground is valuable, and a miner usually does not just walk away from it. He finds a buyer and sells it. The chances of finding good nugget locales in Alaska that are not claimed are slim. If they are not, it is most likely because the ground is now in a park, and therefore subject to restrictions on mining. Denali National Park has some good nugget creeks that are no longer claimed, but since they are in a National Park even metal detecting is restricted. Other creeks are now on Native lands, which are private property and require permission from the applicable Native corporation to visit. Bucket line dredge on Wade Creek, Alaska My mining buddy Jeff made the acquaintance of a miner in the Fortymile region of Alaska, and after a couple years of quietly asking had finally received permission for us to visit the claims. The Fortymile area is named after the main river in the area, the Fortymile River. The Fortymile district is really just the U.S. side of the famous Klondike goldfields of Canada. It is one of the earliest areas to see mining activity in Alaska, with gold rushes in the 1880's. Jeff and I also know several other miners in the area, and so we made plans to visit the area and see what we could find. Jeff drove his camper, while I followed pulling a trailer behind my truck. We brought along a new Bombardier Traxter XT ATV and a little dirt bike. We had no set plan as to where we were going, so we wanted to be prepared for any eventuality. Our first goal was a creek where a miner I knew was running a small bulldozer operation. If that did not work out, we had a couple alternative creeks lined up to visit. This was to be real exploring at it's best. It is about an eight hour drive from Anchorage to Chicken, Alaska. The drive was uneventful, if a little long. It was exciting to be seeing country I had not seen in many years. My business partner Dudley and I had mined in the Fortymile back in the 1970's, so I have been this way before. The roads have improved a lot since then, I can assure you. When we got to Chicken we stopped at the Chicken General Store and visited awhile. We got a few clues as to locations we might want to visit, and where to find the miners on a couple creeks. Chicken has a long mining history and is still being mined today. The major landmark in the area is a very large bucketline dredge still sitting where it stopped just a short way off the road as you leave Chicken. You can visit the dredge by stopping by the Chicken Gold Camp. We drove north up Jack Wade Creek and headed for our first destination. The creek we were heading for was on a small side road that wound down a narrow valley. Jeff and I had never been here before, and so were only vaguely aware of where we were heading. We pulled into one mining camp and talked a bit. The folks pointed us down the valley, and we continued on. We then came to a second mining camp, and stopped to visit. Fall Colors in the Fortymile Area We knew the miners by chance... it seems I've met most of the guys over the years at work or prospecting. We chatted a bit, and they told us that there was some pretty high water where we were headed. I was leery of making a high water crossing in my Chevy Blazer, as I had blown up the transmission last summer crossing Mills Creek in high water. The transmission is vented directly on top, and water going over the top can get in and cause damage. We decided to turn back and head for Jack Wade Creek. Jack Wade has a good mining history, and parallels the road for some distance. Some of the largest nuggets ever found in Alaska had been found here in the past. We did not know the miners on the creek, but had been told where to look for them. Night was starting to fall as we got back to Jack Wade, so we camped for the night. The next morning dawned clear and beautiful. The fall colors were showing, making for a spectacular sunrise. We drove up and down the creek looking for the miners. The camp we had been told to find them at was deserted, and so we decided to poke around the old bucketline dredge. We had been told it was ok to look for gold there, but I'm not sure if this is true. Still, we wanted to find something, and finally turned up a few smoothly rounded nuggets on bedrock above the creek. The location showed signs of being thoroughly mined, however, and did not hold out much hope of finding much gold. We stopped by the miners camp one last time, but they still were not there. The day was wearing on, an so we decided we had better head for one of our other alternative destinations. We had two creeks in mind, and both would require going overland for quite a few miles. We mulled it over for awhile, and decided to go on in and visit one of the creeks and see how it looked before the day wore completely out. Jeff put most of our gear on the Traxter, and I followed him in on my little dirt bike. Jeff on Bombardier Traxter XT The ride was easy for Jeff, but exciting for me. The little bike scooted along all right, but it was white knuckle riding to keep it on the ridges between the mud holes. I have not done much riding on motorcycles, and was kind of proud that I managed to not completely wipe out. We finally pulled into the mining camp that afternoon, and let the miners know we had arrived. They invited us to stay with them and put us up in their cabin. It seemed we had finally found somewhere to search for gold! There was some time left before the sun went down, so Jeff got out his Tesoro Lobo SuperTRAQ and I fired up my Minelab SD2200D. The ground in the Fortymile area is fairly mineralized, and low frequency machines with automatic ground balance perform more smoothly than high frequency detectors like the White's Goldmasters. There are lots of false signal on mineralized "hot rocks". The Minelab SD detectors excel under these kinds of conditions. There was some bedrock exposed along the valley wall just below the miner's cabin, so we started looking there. We started find a few nuggets almost immediately! The nuggets were thick and worn very smooth, as is much of the gold in the Fortymile area. The gold has rolled around in streams for eons, and has very little quartz left in it. The day was drawing to a close, however, so we called it a night. We were excited to see what the next day would bring. The next day dawned under clear fall skies. We offered to show the miner what we could do with our detectors by running them in his mining cut, and offered to give him any gold we found. We just wanted to be able to dig some nice nuggets, and realized this is how the miners make their living. It would also give us a chance to learn more about the mining operation and how the gold was deposited in the creek. This operation is using a bulldozer and a couple track hoes to strip the overburden to bedrock. The gold is concentrated entirely on the bedrock, with little in the overburden, so the overburden is stacked to one side. The bedrock is completely decomposed and much darker than the overlying material, so it is easy to tell where the gold begins. Several feet of the decomposed bedrock is scooped up and run through a recovery plant. Tailings are run into areas previously mined, and the stockpiled overburden is then pushed over areas once mining is complete. These kind of modern mining operations are more environmentally friendly, leaving gently rolling hills and ponds in their wake, but they are not very good for metal detector operators. Old mines where the workings were left open have much more potential for finding lost nuggets, but the newer mines cover up the holes as they go, so there is little chance of finding gold at many of the newer mining operations. But since we had permission to look in the current mining cuts, we were almost sure to find gold. And so we did, with nuggets turning up right and left as we detected the bottom and sides of the excavation. The miner watched with great interest, since any nuggets we found along the edges of the excavation indicated he might have to widen the hole to reach gold outside the current edges. The miner did have a Fisher Gold Bug that he personally uses for just that, and he has found it to be an important testing tool in his operations. Mining operation in progress We found a couple of ounces of gold, the largest being a 3/4 ounce piece I found that was shaped like one of those elongated fishing sinkers. It was great fun, but we had been hoping to find something larger. The miners have found quite a few nuggets weighing several ounces in the past, but the current cut was in what they called "smaller gold". Considering that all of the nuggets we found weighed several pennyweight each, I'd take that kind of small gold any day! Still, while this was great fun, we wanted to find some gold of our own. Jeff and I headed for some of the old high bench workings, and the miners told us we could keep any of the gold we found in the old mining areas. Benches are remnants of old stream locations now perched high and dry above the current creek level. Once the water was flowing over these locations, but as the stream erodes downward it eventually leaves portions of the old streambed deposits above the creek. Sometimes these deposits can be hundreds or even thousands of feet from the modern stream. Steve with Minelab SD2200D and gold just found We hit an old area far above the creek. I seemed to have the edge over Jeff, as my Minelab SD2200D was outfitted with the Coiltek 14" mono coil, whereas his Tesoro Lobo had the 11" DD coil. The extra coil size and the ability of the SD2200D to ignore mineralized ground seemed to give me that little bit of extra depth required to hit nuggets that the Tesoro was missing. In short order I found about an ounce of nice chunky nuggets. Jeff was only finding a couple of pieces. The area started to play out, so we headed down the creek to some other bench deposits. Jeff's fortunes improved, and he started finding more nuggets. One stretch of bare bedrock extended up steeply from the creek up the valley wall. Since this was nearly bare bedrock, we switched to smaller search coils. It was slim pickings, but we both found a few nuggets. Jeff was working at the top of the exposure right where it was going into the trees, when he yelled down at me. Steve's Nuggets - Just over 1.5 Ounces I walked up, and Jeff had a big grin on his face. The day was about over, but Jeff had found a nice 1/2 ounce nugget to make up for my finding the majority of the nuggets earlier. It turned out to be the largest "keeper" of the trip. We did a little more hunting, but finally turned in for the evening. We spent the night, then rose the next morning and headed back for town. Jeff ended up with over an ounce of gold, including that nice 1/2 ounce nugget. I had 1.5 ounces of chunky gold to take home, but my largest keeper weighed 3.5 pennyweight, so Jeff had me beat for big nugget bragging rights. The miners invited us back next summer, so we will have another chance to look for large gold nuggets here someday. For more information on the Fortymile Mining District, get Gold Placers of the Historical Fortymile River Region by Warren Yeend ~ Steve Herschbach Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

The owner of the High Grade lode mine in Hatcher Pass stopped by the store. He was interested in buying a metal detector to aid in hardrock prospecting. I’ve done a bit of this before, and realize how hard it can be for a beginner to get results. I offered to meet him at the mine last Sunday to demonstrate what I could do on his mine dump. If he liked what he saw, great. If not, he would save the price of a detector, and I would still get a fun trip out of town. I took my to the mine under gathering clouds. When chasing tiny gold enclosed in quartz a high frequency detector like the White's Goldmaster with a small coil is the way to go. The High Grade is up behind the Independence and Gold Cord mines at Hatcher Pass. The High Grade was named because it literally produced some very high-grade ore. The veins were narrow, however, and the mine only produced a limited amount of ore. The dump had so much iron trash in it that I found it easier to simply pick up quartz samples and wave them over the detector search coil. The ore in Hatcher Pass is relatively clean quartz with free gold. The gold does tend to associate with pyrite, so any quartz with reddish staining or obvious sulphides is worth extra attention. The pyrite here is non-conductive, and so will be ignored by the detector. Many very rich samples, such as those pictured, have little or no pyrite; so all quartz should be detected. I have seen gold in perfectly pure, white quartz in the area. In less than an hour I found eight pieces of quartz that gave obvious signals. Some had visible gold, while others were giving signals from gold totally enclosed within the quartz. Unfortunately, rain began to fall, and then it REALLY began to fall. I was not prepared for rain, but we had proven the point… the detector worked very well on the ore. I headed on home. I left the ore with the owner. BLM is putting the squeeze on him, so I figure he needs all the samples he can get. The ore pictured below is from the Fern Mine, also in Hatcher Pass. I obtained it from a geologist that worked the mine years ago. It is shot through with gold, and is a good example of what might be found by a lucky prospector in the Hatcher Pass area. It exhibits black streaking that is often associated with the better ore in the area. High Grade Mine, Hatcher Pass, Alaska An excellent source of additional information is Hatcher Pass Gold by Ron Wendt. Ron tells about all the mines in the area, and includes many maps and photos. The book is out of print but can be found used. ee also the USGS report for the area - Geology and Ore Deposits of the Willow Creek Mining District, Alaska (1954). Be aware that most of the hardrock mines in Hatcher Pass are patented properties. In other words, they are no longer just mining claims, but actually are private property. Few of the mines in the area are ''abandoned'' and permission should be sought from the mine owners to sample the mine dumps. Use extreme caution around the old mines, as many tunnels, shafts, and old structures present a hazard to the unwary. How was the gold deposited at Hatcher Pass? What follows is a simplified view of gold deposition. In reality is this is all theory, and entire books are devoted to the many theories of how gold deposits form. So what I am presenting below is a layman's view of a commonly accepted theory... not a "fact". Still, the theory works well enough to be used to predict where gold occurs. Gold most commonly occurs in quartz veins. The quartz and gold were deposited within crevices and fractures in rock far below the earth by circulating hot water. You will see the term "hydrothermal" a lot. hydro = water + thermal = hot. Most gold was formed by hydrothermal processes. Note that most quartz veins do not contain gold, so quartz alone means little. So we need two things... rock with crevices and fractures, and a source of hot, mineral laden water. The classic gold deposit is the hardrock mine area at Hatcher Pass north of Anchorage. A large mass of molten rock, in this case granite, rose towards the surface from far below. This kind of activity tends to result in a pattern of fractures or faults in the surrounding rock as this molten mass forces it's way upward. When this mass of molten rock cools, it shrinks, and more fractures form within this rock as it cools. What finally results is a "granitic intrusive", another term you will see often when reading about gold deposits. The hardrock deposits at Hatcher Pass are a were formed around a granitic intrusive. As the molten rock cools, water seeping down from the surface reaches the zone of newly introduced minerals and heat. Water that is extremely hot and under pressure can dissolve many minerals that we think of as insoluble, especially when some of the dissolved minerals cause the solution to become even more corrosive. The water, now mineral-laden and hot, rises back towards the surface. As it circulates through the crevices and faults in the rock it deposits many of these minerals. Much of the mineralization is simply because the solution is cooling, and so can no longer keep the minerals in solution. Often, in the case of rich mineral deposits, the solution comes into contact with another type of mineral that causes a chemical reaction. The classic mineral in this case is limestone. Many of these solutions are acidic, and when they come into contact with limestone, the acidity is neutralized, and the mineral drop out of solution. Many very rich mineral deposits have been found where limestone comes into contact with other rock types. Gold ore from Fern Mine, Hatcher Pass, Willow Creek Mining District, Alaska In the case of Hatcher Pass, the deposit follows the classic example. There was a rounded mass of granite far underground. Fractures formed in the top of the granite, and in the other rocks immediately above and around the granite. Hot water solutions deposited quartz and gold in these fractures. Ages of erosion exposed the top of the granite and the fractures to the surface. Erosion released the gold from the veins and deposited some of it in the streams and rivers in the valley. The rest remained in the hardrock veins, to later be discovered and mined. Very common in this scenario also, is the concept that the gold veins have a limited depth. The gold veins tend to occur just above and within the upper layer of the granitic mass. As erosion (or mining) extends downwards below a certain level, the gold deposits tend to thin out and disappear. A situation arises where areas that have extensive gold in the streams often have little in the rock (it all eroded out) and areas where the stream deposits are poor will often be associated with very rich hardrock mines (most of the gold is still in the rock). Again, a generality. Granitic intrusives are common along major fault lines. Maps can readily be had of faults and their related intrusives, and it is no surprise these tend to coincide with many of the major gold regions of the world. Volcanoes are another process where by molten rock rises to the surface, surrounding rocks are fractured, and circulating waters deposits minerals, including gold, in these fractures. The oldest hardrock mine in Alaska is the Apollo Mine on Shumagin Island in the Aleutians, near Sand Point. This and other gold deposits in the Aleutians and the Alaska Range are volcanic in origin. The Aleutians are a "volcanic chain", a long string of islands that are actually volcanoes. There are many other types of gold deposits, and many variations on these types. The best reference I have seen on the subject is "The Geochemistry of Gold and its Deposits" by R. W. Boyle, (1979) Geological Survey of Canada, Bulletin 280, 584 pages. ~ Steve Herschbach Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

One of my favorite places in Alaska is Bonanza Creek near Chisana in the Wrangell - St. Elias mountains. This location is accessible only by air and is about 250 air miles east of Anchorage. The elevation of around 5000 feet makes for a very short season. Snow persists into June and starts falling again in September. One reason I talked my father into visiting this site in the early 1970's was that it is very remote, and mining in the area concentrated on finding the richest deposits. Material that is very good by today's standards was left as too poor at the time. The gold was reported to be large, and it seemed reasonable that some good gold had been overlooked. I've known the claim owners for a long time, and have done very well metal detecting on this creek over the years. My original supposition was correct, and much rich ground remains. The ground is heavily mineralized, but even so I have done well with a variety of VLF detectors here, including the Compass Gold Scanner, Fisher Gold Bugs, White's Goldmasters, and Minelab XT17000, XT18000, and Goldstriker. My family and I have found thousands of nuggets here over the years. Old mine workings above Bonanza Creek I purchased a Minelab SD2200D specifically to try this locale again. The last trip to Bonanza Creek gave me the impression the area was getting hunted out, but I suspected more nuggets could be found with the SD. When I say hunted out, I mean of larger nuggets. The area is still full of smaller nuggets. But it was getting hard to find any nuggets over a pennyweight. The largest nugget I had found here so far weighed 6.8 dwt, found with my old Compass Gold Scanner. My sister actually beat me out, having found a 7 dwt nugget with the original Fisher Gold Bug model. The history of the area indicated larger nuggets could be found, but they have eluded us so far. As we went back over the years with more sensitive detectors, larger quantities of smaller nuggets were found, but the big nuggets were found early on. My father, Bud Herschbach, is an Alaskan Bush pilot, having flown here since the 1960's. He currently owns a Cessna 206, a very capable plane with a large load capacity, yet the ability to land on small unimproved runways. My father, Jeff Reed, and I departed Anchorage in fair weather and headed for Northway to meet the claim owner to get the keys to his cabin. After leaving Northway we made our way through the mountains to Chisana. The mountain strip we land on is something that would amaze most people. The approach is made flying up a small valley. A turn is made up a side creek and a landing is made uphill directly into the side of a mountain. It is something that must be done correctly the first time, as a missed approach means a nearly impossible climb out against the face of the mountain. The landing strip is just some bare dirt in the tundra, and very short at that. It is the kind of landing that has a person clutching their seat and hoping nothing goes wrong. As usual Dad aced the landing, however, and we parked the plane. We loaded our gear up and walked over the hill towards Little Eldorado Creek and camp. Upon arrival we found all in good order, although a bear had forced entry into one of the cabins. We straightened things up and settled in. Since we had hunted the area with detectors carefully over the years, Jeff and I wanted to try something new. The current owner has done well dredging the claims, and we figured we might do well to snipe the many exposed bedrock areas in the creeks with drysuits, masks, and snorkels. So our first morning Jeff and I suited up and headed down Bonanza Creek to snipe for gold. Jeff had a cold and was feeling a bit under the weather, but we had visions of underwater crevices full of large gold nuggets to push us on. My father took his Tesoro Lobo and headed out on his own to look for gold. Jeff sniping for gold in drysuit Well, Jeff and I ended up disappointed. We spent a long day poking and prodding into crevices with our hand tools. We found quite a bit of gold, but none of the rich pockets we were anticipating. The old timers, and more recent dredgers had done their jobs well, and shallow exposed bedrock areas did not give us as much gold as we had been hoping. I got kind of discouraged and started skipping along over areas. Jeff, for all that he was not feeling well, was more persistent, but no hot crevices were revealed. Jeff and I finally gave up and headed back to the cabins. Dad was waiting there for us, and we told him about our lack of results. We then asked how he had done, and he tells us he had ranged over quite a bit of ground, and had finally got a good signal with his detector. He then pulled out a very nice 3.1 pennyweight nugget laced with quartz to show us! Needless to say, Jeff and I were very excited about his find. It was the largest nugget my father had ever found, making it even better yet. We decided that the area he had found it in was well worth our attention (naturally!) and excitedly made plans for the next days nugget hunt. The weather was pretty poor the next morning, so we headed out under cloudy skies to search for gold. Jeff and I diligently searched bedrock along Bonanza Creek while Dad wandered on up ahead of us. There were lots of great looking bedrock exposures along the creek, but try as we might Jeff and I found little but nails. Jeff was using a Fisher Gold Bug 2 while I was using my new Minelab SD2200D. We finally caught up to my father in the area where he had found the nugget the day before. Bedrock was exposed in the middle of the floodplain along one stretch, and this is where the 3.1 dwt. nugget had been found. We started detecting in the area and finding some small nuggets. Finally I looked across the creek and saw some bedrock exposed along the bank. I decided to cross over and give it a try. I did a little scanning, and after a short while I got a strong signal. It sounded big enough to be a nail, so I had no big expectations. Imagine my surprise when an 8 pennyweight nugget popped out of the ground! It was the largest nugget I had ever found in this area, and I just stared at it a bit before I picked it up. There are few things in life as fun as finding a nice nugget with a metal detector, as far as I am concerned!! Steve points to where 8 dwt nugget was found with Minelab SD2200D Well, a lot of activity ensued along that bank, and a few more nuggets were found, but I had found the big one. We finally wandered back towards camp, and got caught got in a torrential downpour at the mouth of Little Eldorado Creek. We hid out under a rock ledge for awhile, and the rain let up. We then proceeded up to our old detecting grounds on some high bench deposits above Bonanza Creek. The old miners found that there was a lot of gold in old stream deposits well above the current stream level of Bonanza Creek. These type of gold deposits well above the current creek level are referred to as "bench deposits". They built a ditch and flume system several thousand feet long to bring water from the upper creek to deposits on the valley wall farther downstream. Lumber had to be made from trees miles away, then transported into this high mountain location and assembled into a water transportation system crossing valleys and cliffs. The remnants of this old water transport system are truly awe-inspiring, and are something I dwell upon every time I visit this locale. Once the water reached the high gold deposits, it was directed through large nozzles (giants) to wash the gravels into sluice boxes. Large areas of the hillside were stripped completely to bedrock, and much coarse gold was recovered. Today acres of bare bedrock exposed by these old mining operations exist well above the creek, and represent a perfect opportunity for the new age metal detector user. Gold was lost in these old washing operations. As material was washed with the nozzles down the hill to sluice box recovery systems, an occasional nugget would get stuck in a crevice in the bedrock. These nuggets were few and far between, and without the aid of modern electronic detectors it would have been very hard to find these few lost nuggets. The old miner would literally had to have split open and scraped out every crevice to find the lost gold. Metal detectors allow the modern day prospector to easily scan the old workings to find the scattered lost nuggets with ease. Jeff, my father, and I spread out and started looking for these lost nuggets. The main problem was that my family and I had already scanned the area and found the easy pickings in previous years. Still, with diligence one can always find more gold. My particular hope was that my new Minelab would find gold I had previously missed. Well, we didn't miss much! I found a few nice pieces in nooks and crannies, but nothing outrageous. Jeff was finding some smaller nuggets with his Fisher Gold Bug 2, but no larger nuggets. He was able to hit lots of smaller nuggets that my SD2200D missed, but my larger nuggets were more what he was looking for. We did locate an area literally in the ATV trail that was producing lots of little nuggets. So many, in fact, that my father and I decided to set up a sluice box and process the gravel rather than metal detect. Bud Herschbach shoveling gold bearing dirt along edge of trail The morning of the last day was nice and sunny. Dad and I went ahead and set up our sluicing operation. Jeff decided to keep metal detecting. We filled buckets with gravel and ran them through the sluice box. The material was incredibly rich, with more gold appearing in the sluice box after every bucket of material was run. We grew tired of shoveling, and decided to clean up the sluice. Processing less than a yard of gravel produced nearly two ounces of gold! It just goes to show how rich some of the material was that the old miners were after. There is still gold where we were digging. Someday we will have to go back and get some more. In summary, I was very happy with the Minelab SD2200D. It operated on this difficult ground very smoothly, ignoring the hot rocks and ground entirely. I ended up with some nice nuggets, including an 8 dwt piece. It's the largest one in the picture below. I only wish I had had more time, as we were cramming a lot of activity into three days. There is a lot of deeper ground here I need to search. The second largest nugget, weighing 3.5 dwt, was found by my father with his Tesoro Lobo SuperTRAQ. It is the quartzy piece in the picture. All the other 1/2 dwt to 1 dwt pieces were found with my SD. Jeff was using his Fisher Gold Bug 2. He found a lot of smaller nuggets, but was frustrated in not even finding a 1 dwt nugget. He is usually very hot with a detector, so I attribute this to simple bad luck more than anything. Steve with gold found running sluice box, and some detected nuggets (largest 8 dwt) My main feeling about the SD was not that it got overwhelmingly exceptional depth as compared to the VLF units, but that it was so much easier to operate in hot ground that more time could be spent simply covering ground. The VLF's require slow, careful work due to the background noise, which simply slows you down. Actually, I ended up impressed by what a good job we had done on previous trips with the VLF machines, as large swaths of ground that once produced many nuggets now seem completely cleaned out. All in all a very nice trip, with about three ounces of gold found. Hopefully we will return someday soon! ~ Steve Herschbach Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

The Gold Prospectors Association of America has a new set of mining claims on one of the best mining sites on the Kenai Peninsula south of Anchorage. The claims are only accessible to GPAA members, but access to this ground alone is well worth the cost of membership. The membership kits contain a guide to GPAA claims nationwide, a gold pan, panning video, snuffer bottle, and more. The membership also includes a one year subscription to the GPAA's excellent magazine. The claims are relatively new, and so I decided to drive down and check them out. IMPORTANT NOTE - THESE CLAIMS ARE NO LONGER AVAILABLE TO GPAA MEMBERS. I loaded up my nugget detector and headed out of town. The drive south is very scenic, and wildlife is usually seen along the way. One location just south of Anchorage, along Turnagain Arm, is a good spot to see Dall Sheep. The sheep come down in the spring and feed on the slopes just above the highway. They will often come down right beside the road, much to the delight of tourists and locals like myself. It was at this location that I took this picture of a Dall Sheep walking along the shoulder of the road. Mills Creek, Alaska The GPAA claims are on the same location as the old workings of the Polly Mining Company, one of the most productive old mines in the area. The creek has extensive deposits of gold along the banks above the creek, and most of the gold was mined by washing these bank deposits. There was a pretty good group of GPAA members and visitors there when I arrived, as a general outing and picnic had been planned for the weekend. After chatting awhile, I grabbed my detector and proceeded to explore the area. Most of the people were working the bedrock exposures along the right bank of Mills Creek above the point where it joins Canyon Creek. Many small gullies cut the bank, and old bench workings are evident in abundance. Some gold has been found with detectors on the bedrock, but most people are using highbankers and sluices at this location. Some dredging is also taking place along the creek, with decent results. Nuggets up to several pennyweight have been found in the area. The only problem is that getting to site requires crossing Canyon Creek. The road crosses the creek, but the water depth requires your vehicle to have good clearance. My Chevy S10 was fine, but you would not want to cross with a vehicle that has any lower clearance. Many people park and cross in waders. The stream flow is fairly slow at this point, so crossing in hip boots or chest waders presents no problem. Steve detecting bedrock at Mills Creek I worked one of the gullies for a while, removing rocks and brush to uncover bedrock, but only found one small nugget. I headed up the creek, checking the exposed bedrock with my detector, and found a couple more nuggets. I was not having much luck, but finally found a bedrock exposure on the trail, where people were literally walking over the gold. I worked at removing the rocks and small amount of overburden from the site, finding small nuggets periodically as I checked the bedrock with the detector. Twenty little nuggets found with Gold Bug 2 The day was wearing on, and I decided to head back to town. My vial ended up containing twenty small nuggets, weighing a total of just over a pennyweight (1/20th of an ounce). I highly recommend this area, particularly for those wishing to enjoy the camaraderie of the members of the GPAA. They are simply a terrific group of people, friendly, and always willing to share what they know about mining with new members. This is a great way for someone new to mining to learn what it is all about. ~ Steve Herschbach Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

I've wanted a Minelab SD2200D metal detector since last summer. I almost purchased one last year, but shied away at the last moment. The reason is that I have hard a hard time justifying the detector for the areas I normally hunt. The SD excels on larger gold, especially in highly mineralized ground. The areas I frequent have low mineralization and small gold, unfortunately, so I was not able to convince myself the SD would help me much under those conditions. I resolved this by promising myself I would get out of my rut, and make a concerted effort to get to more locations, particularly those that might offer a chance of finding a large nugget with a metal detector. My mining buddy Jeff Reed feels the same way... we both want to find some nuggets weighing over an ounce. We are trying to cram as many trips to remote sites as possible into the short Alaskan summer. The main investment is getting the time, and I want to have my bases covered detector-wise, so I have added an SD2200D to my detector cabinet. It will supplement, not replace, my Gold Bug 2. I also purchased a number of Coiltek accessory coils. When setup to test run in Anchorage, my new SD had a strongly wavering threshold. It did function, though, and I assumed this was normal, as all the new units we have in stock do the same. It was a kind of "warble". Then I got the unit home and gave it try in my front yard. It would barely work! I remembered a problem I had at my house with a couple years before with a Fisher Gold Bug. A guy a couple houses down has a serious ham radio setup. It killed the Gold Bug, and was having the same effect on the SD. The machine seemed to work, but would barely pick up it's own battery! I decided it must be the ham radio unit, and decided not to worry about it. It did start me wondering about the uneven threshold, however, and I was curious to see how it would do out of town. I decided to make a trip to Crow Creek Mine to play with the machine. I truly did not expect to find any gold with the SD2200D, however, as the creek has had thousands of detectors on it. It has been getting hard to find much gold by simply scanning the surface; you need to dig into the material to expose deeper gold. In the back of my mind I did hope it might find a larger, deeper nugget that had been missed, but realistically I figured to dig nails and bullets. When I go setup for small gold, I always find gold. When I go with large coils looking for large nuggets, I often get skunked. Still, I had seen my friend Will Holden find a nice nugget on his first outing with a Minelab SD2200D last spring at Crow Creek. Steve's new Minelab SD2200D When I arrived at Crow Creek I was pleasantly surprised. The threshold got much quieter and very smooth. The detection depth increased over my tests in town. It turns out that electrical interference in Anchorage is rather severe, and that the Minelab SD2200D units will only function well if removed from town. I suspect the radio installations at our Elmendorf AFB may be the source of the interference. So if you get a new SD, and it seems it has performance problems with the audio, be sure to consider that it may be radio interference in the area before you complain to your dealer. The photo above shows my standard outfit. My new SD2200D outfitted with a Coiltek 14" monoloop search coil, a set of Gray Ghost headphones, a Hodan pick, a cut-down garden hoe, a plastic scoop to recover targets, and a wide-mouth plastic vial for those nuggets. The battery for the SD2200D is carried in a little pack on your back, which has an extra pocket for a cold drink and mosquito repellent. I took the machine to the very head of the claims. This area is mostly virgin ground, and so has less trash. It has produced some coarser gold, but finds have been sparse. I decided to start at the top and patiently work my way downstream into areas with more gold, but more nails. The SD was smooth and quiet, but I hit only a couple of targets in several hours of careful scanning of cut banks. No trash, but no gold either. I finally approached the middle of the claims. Many of the larger nuggets found at Crow Creek have come from this area, but it is heavily infested with nails and other trash. I started hitting some nails and bullets. Many of the nails were at depths exceeding a foot, requiring that rather deep and time-consuming holes be excavated. I don't mind this much, it is just part of the game. The SD does have a type of discrimination, but I dug all targets to get used to the detector and what it could do. Typical trash targets found with SD2200D The monoloop coil was absolutely steady, and I did hit a couple of bullet fragments with it that would have weighed about a half pennyweight if they were nuggets. The main item of interest was a type of rock found at Crow Creek. The hard rock mines upstream have shed some chunks of ore that are found in the creek. It is a wild mix of arsenopyrite, pyrite, galena, chalcopyrite, sphalerite, and even a little free gold. The sulphide mix normally gives a VERY strong signal from a White's Goldmaster. They are a type of positive "hot rock", in other words they respond with a positive signal similar to metal. The SD ignored them entirely. The day wore on, and I still had found no gold. I decided it was time to find something to take home, so I got my Gold Bug 2 out of my truck and hit the hill. I had the 6" coil on it, and hit some holes where people had obviously been getting some gold. I managed to eke out 30 small nuggets that had been missed. They were all smaller than the Minelab could hit with the 14" coil, with a total weight of just over a pennyweight. The nice thing about going for the small stuff is that you rarely go home empty handed. Thirty little nuggets found with Gold Bug 2 The real tests are upcoming. The SD2200D will see my claims on Mills Creek this fall. I am working on a drive-in trip north to Petersville the weekend of the 4th of July. The area has extensive heavy equipment workings and hotter mineralization. I have never worked there, so it will be fun. I am also working on a fly-in trip to some old hunting areas in the Wrangell Mountains. I have pulled thousands of nuggets from the location, up to 1/3 oz in size, but the big one has eluded me. One to three ounce nuggets were common there in the old days, and some of the ground is very iron mineralized. I'm hoping the SD will find the big one I have missed. I also have hopes for other areas, but summers are so short here it is hard to pack it all in. I will be posting results of all these trips on this site as they occur, so stay tuned. ~ Steve Herschbach Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

Spring has sprung! I'm off to a slow start this season. Other commitments have kept me busy this spring, so I have not made my annual spring dredging trip this year. The short window of opportunity for low, clear water has already passed as water levels rise with the temperatures. It has been a rather cool spring in Southcentral Alaska, and as a result the snow is staying a little later than usual this year. My first trip to Crow Creek Mine just prior to the Memorial Day holiday revealed snow patches along the creek still. The mine is open for business, however, and many of the local miners were at the mine as I surveyed the area. I had left my little 4" subsurface dredge down in the canyon in the fall, hoping to use it early in the spring before the water came up. Since that time has passed, my first order of business was to get the dredge out of the canyon before the water gets any higher. I waited too long to haul out last spring, and the water rose to the point I could not ford the stream safely while carrying gear. I had to scale the canyon walls up a much less pleasant exit route, and did not want to repeat the experience this year. I've also taken a change of direction in my future mining plans. I've spent quite a few years mining the same locations, and want to start prospecting new areas. In particular, I want to spend more time metal detecting, looking for "the big one" so to speak. I've downsized my dredging equipment for now, having sold my 6" dredge last summer, and my 5" earlier this spring. I plan to upgrade my 4" subsurface with a better set of floats and a longer recovery box, and use it as my main unit for the time being. I won't be moving the volume, and so will take a hit in overall production. I'm hoping to stay more mobile and try and target a little larger gold than the quantities of smaller gold I have been getting. I guess I'm willing to trade quality for quantity for now. We'll see how this pays off. At the very least, I'll have new spots to write about for this Journal! Late Snow at Crow Creek I climbed on down to where I left my dredge last fall. I've learned from past experience that deep snow can really bury a dredge, so I try to leave them upright against a rock face or under a tree. This is not a problem now, since the snow is about gone. The dredge was fine, and the water conditions nice, so I decided to do a little dredging as I hauled the unit upstream. I set up where Darryl, Juli, and I had done a little sluicing last fall. The location was at the water's edge, and will be under two to three feet of fast moving water within a few weeks. It is the edge of a paystreak I had bypassed a few years ago, and from the sluicing we did last fall I figured I could pick up a little gold with no effort. Check my June 24th Journal entry from last summer if you are unfamiliar with subsurface dredges. The recovery system is underwater, which lowers the horsepower requirements, which in turn allows for smaller floats. My little 4" dredge only weighs about 90 pounds. I can pack it in two loads. Frames, floats, and sluice in one load, 4HP Honda and hoses in another load. Ideal for sites such as this. The downside is greater loss rates for fine and flaky gold, but they are not as bad as some people think. I have had so much interest in these units that I am writing a magazine article up on them at this time. Dredge stashed along bank and in water at work I worked behind a large rock along the edge of a gravel bar, or should I call it a rock bar? Not much gravel in this canyon! After an hour or a little more I cleaned up, and found I had just over 2 pennyweights of small gold, or just over a tenth of an ounce. At that rate, I could have easily got about a half ounce by the end of the day. The problem, again, was that the water was coming up as the sun rose in the sky, and I still needed to get the dredge out. I decided to bite the bullet and pack it out. Besides, I had brought my metal detector along, and wanted to do a little nugget detecting before the day was out. It only took about two hours to pack the dredge out, thanks to the lightweight design. It was a far cry from packing the old larger dredges out. Close up of tiny riffle tray, and gold recovered I still had some time left, so as planned I grabbed my metal detector and headed up the creek. I scouted around the exposed areas from the previous summer, but only found some surface trash. It is getting very difficult to find gold at Crow Creek by just swinging your detector. It has been hit hard by a lot of people with metal detectors. The best way to get any gold with a detector at this point is to move some dirt around. One nice thing about early spring is that you can see ground features that will be obscured by brush and leaves later in the season. I saw a little ridge back in the brush along a gully about 500 feet from the creek that looked interesting. The area had been stripped clean with hydraulic water cannons years before. Sometimes a lot of gold was left right on the surface, but now a thick layer of leaves covers the ground. The layer is thin on banks, and I like to scrape the thin covering off to get at the old wash layer below. The slope of the bank helps when pulling the leaves and surface material down the hill. I cleared the side of the gully a bit, and was immediately rewarded with a couple small signals from the Gold Bug 2. I was using the 6" accessory coil, which is very hot on small gold. The nuggets were small, only about a grain each, but it was gold! I continued to work the site, but the gold was small, and on the surface only. Leftovers from the old washing operations. I moved to another location farther up the hill where someone had dug under a tree. I got another signal in the back of the hole, and turned up another small nugget. One more scoop and the last guy would have got it. I cleaned up the hole and enlarged it a little, but only turned up a few more small nuggets. Small overgrown bank and small nuggets recovered from it The day was wearing out, and the sun going behind the hill. The mosquitoes started to get more active, and I had put in a long day, so I decided to head on home. I ended up with 15 little nuggets using the detector. They ranged from .5 grain to 1.5 grain and totaled a half pennyweight. Along with the dredge gold, I had 2.5 pennyweights for the day, and had my dredge out of the canyon. Not a bad start for the season, and all of summer is ahead! ~ Steve Herschbach Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

Winter in Alaska! What is an Alaskan gold miner to do? Go somewhere warm to look for gold, that's what!! My wife and I have been long overdue for a vacation together. We wanted to return to Kauai, Hawaii, as we had been there years ago and fell in love with the island. Kauai still retains much of the quiet, laid back style of Hawaii that has been lost in some of the more popular areas of the state. We chose to stay in the Poipu resort area, which is on the southern-most tip of the island. The area tends to have sunnier weather than other parts of the island. I have wanted to do some underwater metal detecting in Hawaii for many years. Friends have returned with some incredibly nice jewelry finds after vacations there, and I wanted to give the sunny beaches a try myself. I underwater detect in the Anchorage area quite a bit, but the cold water tends to mean that the quality of jewelry found is that lost by teens and young adults. The items lost in warmer waters tends to be from older, more affluent folks, and so the finds can be more exciting. I have never found any kind of serious diamond jewelry (except tiny little things) and hoped this trip would produce a gem or two. We stayed at the Kiahuna Plantation, the only beach-front condominiums on Kauai, directly adjacent to the Kauai Sheraton. One of the nicest beaches on the island fronts this location, and several other popular beaches are within walking distance. I figured this to be a hot location for metal detecting. I had purchased a new White's Surfmaster PI detector just for this trip. The PI is a pulse-induction unit that excels in saltwater/iron mineral conditions found in the marine environment. I usually employ VLF/TR (very low frequency/transmitter receiver) units, such as the Fisher Aquanaut, in the freshwater lakes around Anchorage. This is because the VLF/TR units have superior discrimination capabilities, since they are standard coin hunting type units packaged for underwater use. Some of the lakes have a lot of trash, especially nails and bottle caps, and the discrimination can help a lot. Steve with White's Surf PI detecting on Kauai The pulse units feature the ability to work in areas that will give VLF/TR detectors difficulties with false signaling, but for all practical purposes one digs all items with a pulse detector. Some, such as the Surfmaster, feature a type of discrimination circuit, but it is not very effective compared to that on the VLF/TR detectors, especially when looking for jewelry items. The best idea when gold nugget hunting is to dig everything, and this is a good idea when looking for jewelry also. Digging sandy areas is so easy that trash items are not as much an issue as in hard pack soils in parks or elsewhere. Just remember to take the trash to a garbage can. A little side note here: Test a new machine underwater before a big trip such as this. I have previously had a brand new detector leak like a sieve after bringing it on vacation with me. I never was able to get it to seal, and had to stay above water for that trip. Just because it is new does not mean it will work. My new unit spent a night weighted to the bottom of my full bathtub before coming along with me! I watched where people were playing a lot. There was the line of beach towels and chairs at the top of the beach where it leveled out. The hot spot in the water seemed to be the waist to shoulder deep area, where people would wait for waves to ride in. There was also the "wipeout" zone close to the beach where the rides ended, sometimes spectacularly. I also checked out the bottom with mask and snorkel. The condition of the bottom seemed ideal. Much of the area had less than a foot of sand on top of a hard coral base. I wanted to concentrate on this kind of spot, with a layer within range of the detector where items would come to a stop as they settled into the sand. The main problem was the waves. They were rather large, more than I could handle un-weighted. I was retrieving targets by holding my breath and ducking to the bottom, and needed to stay in place while I worked. I had considered SCUBA since I am a certified diver, but hauling the gear around is a pain, and I did not like the thought of being underwater for long stretches with lots of people around. It is too easy for them to lose track of where you are, and I could not very well "claim" the area as mine by putting out a dive flag. I solved my problem by going to a dive shop and renting a 40 pound weight belt. This helped me stay put while waves crashed into and over me, and allowed me to drop straight to the bottom to recover the finds. Steve's finds, including first gold ring from Hawaii! I put in quite a few hours of time in the water, plus hitting the beach itself. The Surfmaster worked very well; coins were easily detectable down to about a foot, and the machine was very stable. The smallest ring I found (pictured above) was nothing more than a silver wire. I found plenty of coins, a bunch of pull tabs, but only a few jewelry items. These included a fake-diamond encrusted broach, a silver hoop earring, a the very thin silver ring (with a black stone), a twisted silver ring, and the real find of the trip, a very large men's gold band. It was located in a trough on the bottom near the coral base layer. An interesting find was a dollar bill that I saw floating a couple feet underwater. All in all, not bad, but no large diamond ring. I certainly was making finds, and the pull tabs and coins indicate the area is not hunted out, but there was less jewelry then I expected. Oh well, I'll just have to keep returning here until I get it right! ~ Steve Herschbach Copyright © 2000 Herschbach Enterprises

It is winter in Alaska! Maybe not by the calendar, but certainly by the snow on the ground and the ice on the water. Jeff Reed and I decided to make one last mining trip for the season. Snow is falling at low elevations now, but only a few inches have accumulated on the ground. We decided to take a gamble and see if we could drive back into our claims at Mills Creek. There was a chance, however, that we would find too much snow on the road to get back in. The only way to know was to drive down and find out. We decided to take both our trucks, just in case one of us got stuck. We headed out early under cloudy skis. On the way through Portage we passed a cow moose and her calf breaking ice in a pond next to the highway. I met Jeff at the gravel pit next to the highway where our access road starts out. We decided to take it easy driving in. There was only two or three inches of snow on the road, but that can be enough to cause problems on steep hills. We did not think it wise to be too aggressive getting in, as we might not make it up a couple of the hills coming back out. The drive in, however, proved to be no problem. We arrived at my campsite on the claims just above tree line to find a winter wonderland. Our plan was to take advantage of the low water conditions to snipe for gold on shallow bedrock. Our claims have quite a bit of exposed bedrock, and relatively coarse gold. Sniping consists of the use of simple hand tools to recover pockets of gold, usually from bedrock cracks and crevices. This is more commonly done above water, but can also be done underwater with the aid of a wetsuit (down south) or drysuits in Alaska. A prospector outfitted with a suit, mask, and snorkel can examine bedrock underwater in search of concentrations of gold. The gold is then recovered using simple tools, such as small pry bars and suction guns. The best (perhaps only) book exclusively on the subject is Underwater Sniping for Gold by Sam Radding & Jim Garlock. Moose crossing pond, and Steve with Kirby Gearing up for underwater sniping in Alaska is kind of like preparing for battle. Jeff got into his AMDS drysuit while I donned my Harvey's drysuit. We have tried every kind of kneepad imaginable over the years, but never found anything that really stays put in fast water. I finally came up with my own solution years ago, which is to wear an oversized pair of work pants. I sew carpet to the knees with fishing line. The trick is to get a pair of pants with wide enough legs that you can easily slide them on over the drysuit. This may mean a rather large waist size, so I usually use a bungee cord for a belt. I have been using miners moss for the kneepads lately. It does not last quite as long as the regular sluice box carpeting I used to use, but is soft and cushy on my knees. This solution not only protects the knees of the suit, but the entire lower half of the suit. Jeff has adopted the idea, but is a bit more stylish in that he uses a weight belt for his pants! Next comes the hoods with under caps. A good neoprene drysuit hood, like that made by Harvey's, is all that is needed, but we both use Henderson Ice Caps also. The ice cap is a thin under (or over) neoprene hood used in addition to the regular hood that covers your face completely, except for the eyes and a small opening for the mouth. Once a mask, snorkel, and gloves are put on, the only part of your body touching the water is your lips. The gloves can be five-fingered for some people, but three-fingered mitts are warmer in extreme conditions. I coat the entire working area of my gloves with a thin coat of Aqua Seal brand sealant. A little of this stuff goes a long way. Too thick an application will result in a glove that is stiff and tiring to use. Jeff & Steve suit up Our sniping kits are similar. I use a cheap nylon rucksack to carry the gear. I have an 18" chisel-edged pry bar and a large screwdriver for prying crevices. I also have a small screwdriver, some very large crevice tweezers, a set of fine point tweezers, and a snuffer bottle. The main tool is a suction bulb. These are similar to the snuffer bottle idea, but with a squeeze bulb and a larger intake tube. I sometimes bring along a larger unit made out of a modified grease gun, but find the little bulb unit gets the most use. Finally, I include a 10" gold pan and a large plastic vial in my kit. The process of sniping is actually simple, and can be a lot of fun. You can recover quite a bit of gold by sniping in itself, but it serves an even more important role as a prospecting method to locate future dredging ground. In areas where dredging is prohibited, sniping may offer the only way to recover gold from some streams and rivers. The picture shows the area we were in. There is bedrock outcropping on both banks and in the creek. I usually leave everything in my rucksack on my back, except for the 18" pry bar. I jump in the water and thoroughly examine all the bedrock I can get at. If there is a bit of sand and gravel on the bedrock, it can be scraped aside and "fanned" away by waving a hand at it rapidly underwater. Any interesting crevices, no matter how small, should be investigated with the pry bar. Other tools can be pulled out as needed. When any gold is located, the snuffer bottle or suction bulb is used to recover it. I spent quite a bit of time in the area around the falls, finding a bit of gold here and there, but no major concentrations. Jeff wandered on down the creek, and I followed a little later. He had his head stuck in a pool behind a rock, and indicated he was finding some nice gold. I kept scouting around, finding an occasional flake, but a good crevice eluded me. It is possible to find single crevices that will produce a few pennyweights of gold, and sometimes a hot set of crevices can produce an ounce or more of gold. This area is at the upper reaches of the coarse gold deposits on Mills Creek, however, and the gold is a bit sparse. I looked up the creek, and Jeff still had his head in the same pool. I knew something was up... he would not stay put unless the gold was good. I came up, and with a big smile he dumped what he had so far in his pan. A few pennyweights of chunky gold looked back up at me from his pan, and I must admit I was a bit jealous. I had only little flakes to show in return. Jeff indicated the pocket was working out, though, and pretty soon he headed downstream. Mills Creek freezing up, and Jeff's gold We continued on, but neither of us got into any other hot pockets. Jeff saw a couple of spots he wants to come back and check next summer. My main goal is to put my dredge on the corner where Jeff located the best gold of the day. It is in the area I am actively working, just upstream of my last dredging location. There may be more gold under the deeper overburden, or it may simply be a single pocket of gold, now worked out. I'll have to wait for next summer to find out. So ends my gold mining for 1999. Overall, it was not one of my more productive summers for total gold found, but for fun it was tops, as I think my entries for the summer show. A determined dredger can work through the winter, but frankly I am not so gung-ho as to fight the cold for a few ounces of gold. Better to wait for summer to return again. Jeff ended up with about 1/4 ounce of nice nuggets for the day. I had a fairly pitiful showing of small flakes and a half pennyweight nugget. I would have liked to finish the year with a bit more of a bang, but so it goes. This is two trips in a row that Jeff has kicked my fanny in gold production, so I can't wait for next year and a chance to show him up in return. The gold will wait under snow and ice for us until then! Steve's Gold from Crow Creek & Mills Creek 1999 Largest Nugget 5.4 Pennyweight P.S. I get a lot of comments on the color of the gold in my photos. Please keep in mind these are digital photos, and have often been lightened (as in the photos above) or darkened. Most gold around Anchorage is about 85% pure, and had a nice yellow color, but is much paler than much of the California gold I have seen. Crow Creek Mine gold is of lower purity, usually 70-75%, and so has a lighter color than the Mills Creek gold on the right. I have some gold from Crow Creek that has enough silver in it to qualify as "white gold" or more properly, electrum. ~ Steve Herschbach Copyright © 1999 Herschbach Enterprises

I took Darrell to Mills Creek earlier in the year on his first mining trip. His girlfriend Juli has now arrived in Anchorage, and we decided it would be fun for the three of us to run down to Crow Creek to look for her first gold. Temperatures are reaching freezing at night in Alaska now, and the water levels are dropping. We decided to use a sluice box to dig at water line, hopefully exposing gold-bearing material that is normally underwater in the summer. Snow started to fall as we approached Crow Creek, and a light dusting covered the ground when we reached the mine. Luckily we were prepared for the cold and it just added to the fun. We carried the gear to the creek and looked for a likely location. We all grabbed gold pans, and I showed Darrell and Juli how to sample for gold. It always makes sense to do a little checking with gold pans before setting up a sluice box. We dug small holes behind larger rocks at the water's edge up and down the creek. For awhile it was just a flake or two per pan, but I finally got a decent showing against one bank. I set up the sluice while Darrell and Juli panned for gold. We were using Keene's A51 sluice, a very popular three foot model. The trick to setting up a sluice is to find some fast water. Most people set up a sluice with water running too slow. There seems to be a general fear of washing the gold away. I tend to set my sluice on the fast side. I may lose a few fines, but in areas where the gold has some size, it is more important to run a good volume of material. I try to set my sluice so that when a 14" pan of material with rocks less than 2" in size is dumped in everything just runs through. Like I said, I'm sure I lose some fines or flat flakes, but I feel I more than make up in volume with larger gold. If you have to toss every little pebble out by hand it slows you down too much. I always tell people to look at how a 2" dredge sluice runs... rocks 1.5" in diameter run through completely on their own. The A51 is about the same size as a 2" dredge sluice and should be run about the same way, unless you have nothing but fine gold. If that is the case, then the material should be screened and the sluice run slower to enhance fine gold recovery. I'm sure some would argue, but I simply find that if I shovel more yards through my box then the next guy, then I also usually get more gold. Darrell & Julie at first sluicing location & sluice set up Here is another way to look at it. Let's say we are looking at 4 yards of material that runs an incredible 1/2 ounce per yard. You are determined not to lose any gold, so you first screen the material to 1/2" minus, then run it carefully through your sluice. By the end of the day, you manage to process one yard, and get an impossible 100% of the gold. You end up with 1/2 ounce. I work the same time you do, but I dump directly to my box, discarding only rocks larger than 2" in diameter. I run my box faster and deeper to move these larger rocks through. As a result I lose 25% of the gold since a lot of it is fine and flaky. But my increased volume allows me to process two full yards of material. I end up with 3/4 ounce of gold to your 1/2 ounce. To add insult to injury, we return the next day. There is one yard of this incredibly rich material left. We both go after it; you manage to process another 1/3 yard while I move the remaining 2/3 yard. Your final weekend total is .83 ounce of gold, while my weekend of work nets me 1.25 ounce of gold. The bottom line - from any theoretical 100% recovery position, if you double your volume of material the recovery percentage would have to drop to 50% or less to end up with less gold. My observation is that most recreational miners are under-utilizing their equipment for fear of losing gold, or just plain not working hard enough. So my advice is "you want more gold, move more dirt"! The only time this is likely to be a losing proposition is if the gold is exceptionally fine and/or flaky. It is also for miners with limited time. If you have lots of time, and limited reserves of material, (or are commercial!) then increased attention to recovery rates makes more sense. Juli's nugget & Darrell at second sluicing location Before I get a firestorm of email about this (recovery rates are a type of religion with miners) let me just note that this is a suggestion based on what seems to work for me, nothing more. I'm the kind of guy who tosses the bit of fines left in my pan back, so it can grow! Besides, I made all the numbers up in my example. It just all depends on your situation, and if this got you to think about it, then I've achieved my goal. If you are happy with the gold you are getting, then by all means keep on at it. Back to the story... Darrell and I fed the sluice while Juli worked on her panning. We kept seeing smaller gold showing up in the sluice, but nothing too large. Then Juli came up with her first nugget. It was larger than anything we had found in the sluice so far, about the size of a watermelon seed. Not too bad for her first nugget! In fact, it turned out to be the largest nugget of the day. Cleanups from first & second locations The site we were at did not seem to be paying out all that well, just lots of fines, so we went back to prospecting with pans. I located a spot behind a large boulder about 100 feet downstream that produced a dozen pieces of gold in a pan, so we moved on down. The gold was in a layer just at waterline, and seemed fairly rich. Again, however, the gold was pretty small stuff, with no real nuggets. We worked another couple of hours, and then called it quits as our backs began to get stiff. It is much harder to run a small sluice than a 6" dredge in my opinion! We panned out the sluice and were rewarded with between two and three pennyweight of medium and fine sized gold. Juli thoroughly enjoyed her first gold mining trip, and fun was had by all. ~ Steve Herschbach Copyright © 1999 Herschbach Enterprises

I headed out of town the morning of October 9th to meet Jeff Reed at Crow Creek Mine to do some dredging. Jeff had been working the creek hard while I was at Mills Creek, but was not having much luck. I convinced him that I knew a spot in the canyon that I was sure had some gold, so we determined to pack our 4" dredges in and give it a try. I was just leaving the outskirts of Anchorage, when a large moose with a very nice set of antlers ambled across the highway. Ironically he was next to the local shooting range, which must have frustrated the hunters there to no end. I stopped and took my photo of him with my camera, and then headed for Crow Creek. Those that have read my entries from the spring know that getting into the canyon area of Crow Creek is a bit of a chore. Jeff and I have both constructed very light weight subsurface 4" dredges for these kinds of areas. Our units have 4HP Honda pumps, and so are not only light but very fuel efficient. They are great little units if you want to spend your time mining instead of packing equipment. Jeff crossing Crow Creek log bridge Our friend Andy was working his dredge in the canyon just upstream of where we were headed, so we stopped to chat a while. He was doing quite well, with lots of gold showing in the box. It certainly made us anxious to get to work. Andy in his Harvey's drysuit The spot I had in mind was where my brother and I had worked many years before. We had spent several weeks with a 6" dredge working a long stretch of the creek, and had done quite well. I took Jeff down to just below where my brother and I had started dredging, figuring to get into the same paystreak. I was so confident that the area would have gold most of the way across the creek that I let Jeff have the coveted inside corner. Gold tends to take the shortest route downstream, and so inside curves are usually very good places to dredge. I also wanted to give Jeff the best shot at the gold, since he had really put in some hours in the last couple of weeks, and was disappointed by the gold he had found so far (don't feel too sorry for Jeff folks... most people don't get what he does, but his expectations are all the higher for it). Jeff working the corner Jeff went to work on the corner. I set up on some bedrock on the far side and followed it into the creek. After working awhile and not seeing much gold, I moved into the center of the creek. Andy was causing the water to get a bit murky, so at this point I could not tell if I was into the gold or not, but I dredged away confident that I had to be into the pay. Then came cleanup time. The best way to put it is to say that Jeff kicked my rear end. I only had a couple of pennyweight, while he had over an ounce. The gold was hanging on the corner much more than was the norm for the stretch of creek just upstream of us, where it tends to run clear across the creek. The gold is from reconcentrated tailings out of the old mining operations, and so is rather small, but our little subsurface boxes seemed to do quite well with it. Steve's gold, and Jeff with his (no wonder he's smiling)! We came back the next day, and I moved into the corner upstream of Jeff. Jeff did about as well as the previous day, while I got even less. Oh well, that's mining for you. The good news is that I have been doing this long enough that I am as happy seeing others find gold as finding it myself. Well, almost! ~ Steve Herschbach Copyright © 1999 Herschbach Enterprises

I particularly enjoyed this little expedition. It is always nice to get out and spend time with my father, Bud Herschbach. He has taken a liking to Mills Creek and was anxious to return and look for more nuggets. This was also helpful since my truck was out of commission and he was able to give me a ride to the claims. He picked me up Tuesday morning and we headed for the claims. The drive down the Seward Highway was brightened by exceptional fall colors, with the leaves hanging on the trees a little longer than normal this year. A little note here on trucks and water. The shop informed me that my transmission was full of water and that the bearings were shot! I was not aware that transmissions were vented on top of the body of the unit. On many 4WD vehicles it is routed via a hose to a higher location in the body to prevent the entry of water. The Chevy S10 Blazer has no such extension on the vent, and so any water rising to the top of the transmission can enter and destroy the bearings. I have no doubt that when I stalled my truck out crossing Mills and had water flowing under the doors that it was also flowing into my transmission. An expensive lesson for me, and a warning to others who drive in deep water. Find out where the vents are on your transmission and differentials! If I had been aware of this problem and changed the transmission fluid immediately I could have prevented the damage. When we arrived at camp we moved our gear into the tent and then went down to the creek to metal detect for gold. The water had dropped some more, so bedrock exposures were easy to come by along the edges of the creek. We spent the remainder of the day removing loose rock and debris from the bedrock and carefully detecting the crevices. The work produced numerous small nuggets up until the light began to fail, and we headed back into camp. Fall colors along Turnagain Arm I decided to spend Wednesday dredging, as I needed to decide whether to try and continue at Mills or to pull out and head for Crow Creek. I worked the shallow bedrock area I had exposed earlier while my father continued to metal detect for nuggets. I attacked the material aggressively, determined to give it a good shot a producing. However, after uncovering a wide expanse of bedrock I found nothing more than the same scattering of gold trapped in small crevices. There were no large nuggets and not even any nice little pockets of gold to perk me up, just tedious crevice work for a bit of gold here and there. Finally, even that seemed to peter out, and towards the end of the day I was not finding much gold at all. I have no doubt the gold continues in this area but after pausing and considering the situation I decided to come back for the gold next season. I had about 7.5 dwt for the work so far that day, and could probably have ended up with about 1/2 oz for the day if I continued to dredge. BUT... my father had to return to town the next day, my truck was in the shop, and I was not sure when I would get it back, and serious snow could fall at any time. Everyone else had already pulled out of our claims for the season. I decided the amount of gold I was seeing was not worth pushing the season any further under the circumstances. 1/3 oz gold dredged Thursday We got up Thursday morning and proceeded to load up the dredge and tear down the camp. We spotted a good-sized black bear cavorting around at the very edge of the brushline up the mountain. It is the first bear I have actually seen at Mills Creek, and he had managed to evade the bear hunters that were in the area the last few weeks. I am often asked what I do about bears. It seems to be a serious concern for a lot of people. In general, I do nothing other than keep a very clean campsite. The statistics do not support everyone carrying weapons because of bears. More people are shot accidentally in the woods than are eaten by bears. It makes more sense to be afraid of people, and the bears know this. They will give you a wide berth if given the chance. That being said, I sometimes carry a 12 gauge pump shotgun. This is usually when I am alone in the woods, and it is basically a security blanket issue. Here I am over forty years old, but when I am alone in the middle of nowhere in the dark, and I start hearing funny noises in the woods, well, let's just say I rest easier having my shotgun nearby. But realistically, in this part of Alaska bears are not usually a real threat. There are other parts of the State where they are thick, and encounters can be a daily event, and it may warrant having a weapon in those areas. Packing up the campsite We finally got everything loaded up, and decided we had enough time to do a little more metal detecting. Dad had found a few more nuggets on Wednesday and we decided to try the last area he had been working in. We immediately began to get some nuggets. I tackled an area where the material was a little deeper and the bedrock dipped below the surface of the water. I started getting some nuggets, and so Dad started helping me work the hole. It kept filling with water, so we would scoop out the water with a pan, then detect a nugget or two before it filled with water again. After getting a very strong signal, we were both on our knees peering into the hole as I scooped water out. Suddenly, as the water washed back after a scoop, a large nugget appeared on the side of the hole! It looked like a monster, and I swore it was a 1/2 oz nugget at the time, solid and thick. It turned out later to be 5.4 dwt, just over 1/4 oz, and still a very nice nugget. I have to tell you, I sure get a thrill when a nugget like this shows up! It makes it even better that I shared finding it with my father. We ended up with about 1/2 oz of gold from that one small hole in bedrock in about an hour. The pocket worked out, however, and we had to leave, as I wanted to drop my dredge off at Crow Creek as we headed back towards town. We gathered up our tools, and did just that. There was no sign of Jeff at Crow Creek, so we dropped the dredge off in the upper area of the creek and headed for town. Bud Herschbach with his detected nuggets (including the big one!) Steve's detected nuggets, plus the 1/4 oz nugget All in all, a very nice trip. The weather was fine, it's always fun to get out with family, and we found some very nice gold. The plan now is to try my luck at Crow Creek, which is closer to home, and has less problem with being snowed out without warning. I'll hook up with Jeff Reed, and we'll finally get to do some dredging together. ~ Steve Herschbach Copyright © 1999 Herschbach Enterprises

The adventures continue! I left Anchorage rather late Saturday morning. I was happy to find that the creeks had dropped by over half compared to the previous week. I met Al and his partner Kenny at the claims, and found that they were pulling their equipment out in anticipation of the coming snows. After a short visit, I headed up to my camp. The weather was nicer than I expected. The forecast had called for rain, but it was only cloudy. Everything was looking good. I suited up and headed down to my dredge. Since the water was now down, it was an easy chore to move it across and down the creek. I fired up and ran a tank of gas, cleaning up the area I had worked by hand the previous trip. The light began to fail, so I cleaned up and found I had about 1/4 oz of gold. This encouraged me and I decided the site was worth more effort. I set my tent back up and moved in. The clouds cleared and the temperature was dropping as I turned in for the evening. The thermometer read 30 degrees when I got up, and heavy frost covered everything outside. The weather was clear but the clouds were moving in again, and the day soon warmed up into the 50's. I headed down to the dredge and got back to work. New dredge site at Mills Creek The bedrock is quite shallow at this site, less than two feet underwater and with only a foot of overburden. The overlying material has some gold, but not as much as I had hoped. Most of the gold is in the shale bedrock crevices, and is not readily visible until you split open the crevices. Unfortunately this slows things up a lot, as you don't know where the gold is, and so all crevices must be broken open. Some have gold and some don't. The bedrock is really rotten at this point, and so I basically just rip it all up, remove the larger pieces that will clog the hose, and then dredge up the rest. The value per yard is high, but the going is too slow to do really well. Running two more tanks of gas netted another 1/4 oz of gold. My father was still interested in coming up, so I had told him I would drive out Sunday night to give him an update. I quit before running my normal third tank of gas (each tank lasts about 2 1/2 hours) and buttoned up the camp. I headed out as dusk fell. My truck had made a funny noise on the way in, and now it was apparent that something was really wrong. My transmission grumbled and chirped on the way out, but the noise quit once I got on the highway and into high gear. When I got to Anchorage and had to go to lower gears, it REALLY made noise. I decided it had to go in the shop in the morning. I cleaned up the gold, and it weighed in at 9.8 pennyweight. Not bad for the equivalent of a days dredging, so I want to work the site some more. So far the gold is a little smaller than I would like to see. I ran my truck into the shop, and was told it would take a couple days. I called my father, and told him the creek looked good, so we decided to head up the morning of the 5th in his truck. We plan on metal detecting the bench deposits further for a couple of days. Then back to town, and hopefully my truck will be ready so I can get back up to do some more dredging before the snow hits. Gold for October 2nd & 3rd Since I had some time to kill, I drove down to Crow Creek to see how my friend Jeff Reed was doing. He started dredging Saturday in the upper creek, and I figured if he was finding lots of nuggety gold that I might be tempted to pull out of Mills and head his way. I met him coming up the creek. He reported that a couple days dredging upstream had produced very little gold. The area is spotty, so this was no surprise, but we had been hopeful of finding coarser nuggets in the upper creek. He had just spent the day sniping around for a new site, and had found about 1/2 oz of gold in bedrock crevices. The crevices were isolated spots, though, and he was still unsure as to where he would dredge next. In any case, since he was not getting rich quick, I felt better about continuing at Mills for the time being. We'll see how it goes. ~ Steve Herschbach Copyright © 1999 Herschbach Enterprises