delnorter

Bunks picks below. I have the smaller Burrow pick and really like it. http://bunknteri.com/Pick.html Mike

Good info Steve. I too was a surveyor for many years. The old dip needles - aqua boxes... ok..? Then we got the Schonstedt. Great improvement. One of the best features was being able to null out metal fence lines. Good memories. Mike

‘That is one cool piece Peg. Mike

Merry Christmas Barry, Mike

Merry Christmas Clay and all my other Detector Prospector friends. My sons will be coming home for Christmas and all is well. Can’t ask for too much more. Except getting on the stream and a little gold in the pan.All the best to you,Mike

It’s wonderful for children to be outdoors enjoying the real world. Real good on you for providing the opportunity. All the best to you. Mike

Nice setup and location prunt. By the range of gold size you captured it appears you had the sluice set up pretty good. I generally keep the tail end of my sluice a little higher in the flow but understand your predicament. I think I’d remove the bar across the tail of the sluice. Perhaps devise a way you clamp the riffle bars down from the bottom of the sluice. Thanks for the interesting post, Mike

I just returned from a week of deer hunting in the Payette National Forest in the McCall Idaho area with my two sons. It was cold, the lowest of the week being 20’. We had both snow and clear weather. The deer hunting was very poor. The locals said this was the worst season for even seeing deer in a long time. They said recent past winter kill was the cause. My son Frank killed a nice mule deer buck, but David and I were skunked. We wished we’d bought elk tags as we came upon quite a few herds with nice bulls. It was a beautiful drive from the northwest corner of California. For those who have not seen much or any of the west, you should take a trip out here. Tremendous variety of lands with dense forests, open high deserts, lakes and the Pacific Ocean at the end. Mike

Nice nuggets. Dig that crevice!!

Walking back and retrieving my back pack with pan, 1/4” screen, pick and such, I decided to sample this cut bank. Filling a pan with screened material from this top grey layer and washing it out at the river turned up a nice flat flake and a few, smaller, pepper sized pieces of gold. Feeling pretty tired from hunting adventure, I screened out and panned two 5 gallon buckets filled only 1/2 full. Total of about 5 gallons of material. From this 5 gallons of the top grey layer I panned out .54 gram of gold. I didn’t get into the red sand or bottom original layers. Yet! I too am getting a little old for such hard hunting and prospecting oldmancoyote1, so I just relaxed the following day and returned home with the venison and a little gold the next day. I guess what I’m getting at is: gold in this Northern California area, with the tremendous amounts of rain we get, can be throughout a gravel bar or concentrated in these layers. In your smaller creek it may be more productive to concentrate on the edges of the stream where the layers are more evident and accessible. Obstructions to the flow of the creek such as outcrops, sharp bends, drop offs and the like should be checked out. I take off on another deer hunting trip with my sons in the mountains downstream of Happy Camp tomorrow. I’m sure I’ll have time for a little prospecting too. Good prospecting oldmancoyote1, Mike

😉 more later. Long days working with the storm that came through.

Great points and questions Harry. There is a tremendous amount of gold all along the Klamath River. Within these large and small gravel bars, both deep and shallow, are numerous flood layers along with the layers from the original dredging and hydraulic operations. With close observation and experience they become quite apparent and predictable. Each or all can be surfaces for migrating gold to come to rest. Sample, sample, sample. The year before last I met my sons over in Trinity County for some deer hunting. They hiked into the high country wilderness while I stayed in the lower elevations. One of them killed a nice buck and left for home the following day. As I had taken a week off from work, I stayed camping and hunting. Naturally the day after they left I killed a modest buck which required a difficult drag back to the closest road. This, with hanging it and skinning it that evening left this old guy pretty darn tired. With about 5 more days to my vacation I decided to drive to Happy Camp and hang the buck in the Kingfisher Markets cooler until I headed for home. Actually I had them cut, wrap and freeze the venison so I could stay longer. Any way, getting back on track, I set up camp in a local Forest Service campground, right along the Klamath River, not far from Happy Camp, for a little R & R. Next morning, with a cup of coffee in hand, I took a walk along the river. As I walked along a large gravel bar I noticed a cut bank about 3 feet high on the land side of the bar. Within this cut bank were 3 distinct layers of material deposited by past events. The bottom layer was ancient compacted stream bed cobble which I believe had never been worked. This layer is a rather pale yellowish, brown with black coated cobble. On top of this is a very distinct layer of coarse red sand which most likely was washed downstream from old timers dredging or hydrolic operations. The top layer was a grey mixed size cobble, from suitcase size rocks right on down to sand. I think this top layer was created by the 1964 flood. Truly a 100 year flood. Opps, time to go to work. About a 45 minute drive up the Smith River canyon here in Nortthern California.

Wow Phoenix, that looks great. Mike

Check this link out from Steve.

Cool looking place Sourdough. That looks like a redwood tree by the panning trough. Those are some impressive circular saw blades against the cabin wall. What a great time the kids are having. Mike