oldmancoyote1

Folks here have referred to carrying guns for self defense. In Arizona it is forbidden to blame the "victim" for a crime. As strange as it may seem, claiming self defense is no longer an acceptable practice as it blames the "victim". You run considerable risk carrying a gun. I write from painful personal experience. I was assaulted in a parking lot. I fought back and hurt the guy. He lied to the police claiming I was a violent homeless man because I wear a beard and was wearing a ratty old coat. I was charged with felony assault. Since I could not claim self defense, I was compelle

I once transcribed the journal of a 21 year old farmer from Quincy MA who sailed from Boston in January 1849 for the gold mines of California. It's called James White's Journal. It's free on Apple iBooks and $2.99 on Kindle. It's the real deal. No romanticism. Just what it was like.

I still don't know what it is. I do understand why someone might think it is a meteorite. The convex side looks like it might have been partially melted by passing through the atmosphere at high speed, and the back side looks like it might have been slightly melted by hot turbulent gasses behind the meteorite. However it does not look like any of the common types of meteorites that I am aware of. I don't even recognize the orange material on the back side. Show it to a petrologist or a meteorite specialist at a university. They might have an idea.

His name is Ray Mills.

That's one weird rock. Where was it found? Both what region and describe the actual location.

No. We work in higher elevations of the Klamath Mountains

The stream valley we were looking at had produced considerable gold in the past but was heavily forested and the ground was covered with a thick layer of pine needles and forest duff. Mostly we were looking for traces of undiscovered Pocket Deposits near know pockets using metal detectors. Some times we detected cracks in the very little bedrock that was exposed. I have conclude the only way to successfully prospect that area is to do what the old timers did there: dig lots of trenches looking for fine gold and following the trace up hill. I'm too old for much of that.

We didn't take a detector. it was lectures with explanations of actual locations.

For several years now I have been dragging my buddy to new places that I thought would be good spots to detect. We both have darn little to show for all our effort. To make up for it, I got a well known nugget detectorist to take us into the field for some lessons. Here are three important take-aways from that trip: 1) High hills in old burn areas are great places to identify new nugget fields. 2) He showed us such an area where there were a great many very small-scale mining features that were invisible In Google Earth, yet the burn made them quite visible from a hilltop.

I strongly recommend members of this forum read pages 285 to 296 "Pocket Hunting for Residual Placers" in Ralph's book. Ralph has clearly defined a very promising target that I have not seen meaningfully described elsewhere.

Your pictures are mostly table top. Give us close ups. thanks

Gold is where you find it, ... but usually not where you look : ) You can't find gold without looking. Crush a sample and pan it.

If I had to guess, they ran water in through the small pipe and out the other and dumped sand in from the top. The turning brush agitated the slurry mixture allowing the gold to drop to the bottom. The larger pipe carried the spoil out. That's pretty rubegoldberg, but it's the only thing that occurs to me.

A guessing game? Gee. I didn't know that.

Looks like it was massive pyrite in a framework of quartz veinlets. It's possible the massive pyrite came first and the quartz framework was added as part of the process that oxidized the pyrite. It's definitely an unusual rock in my experience.