Reno Chris

A lot of the Arizona prospectors and other western Prospectors will remember John "Goldmaster" Blennart, AKA "John B.".  He passed away last Monday the 11th. I lost another old prospecting friend about a week ago. Enjoy the time you have as none of us are here forever.

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So it’s likely very old geologically, right? An old, weathered river channel

Its an old channel and shoreline area that has weathered and much of the overlying gravel washed away.  The general area is where some of the old tertiary channels emptied out into the basin lakes of the central valley in CA.

It just depends on the location. There is very little exposed bedrock at this location and what bedrock there is consists of very well weathered rock. There is no hard,outcropping bedrock as with many streams. I have found gold in the old workings that they just missed as well as along the workings but just outside them and in some place where there are no workings within a couple hundred feet. They tested this are and planned where they would work by panning samples of gravel.

On 4/27/2022 at 2:19 PM, Chris Ben said:

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Did you dig only the targets on the right? Or some that flashed left and right on the Gold monster?

I dug both types. Targets that flash both ways are the detector telling you "I dont know" - so you must dig them as they are sometimes gold.

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What size are your tent poles?

They are 12 mm outside diameter, which seems to be an unusual size.

 

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were you on the California side or the Nevada side of the Cascades?

California side of the Sierra Nevada in the low foothills.

 

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find some gold and camping out was probably some good medicine for your mind and body. Good for you. Find some more.

The guy I went with has tent camped there at that same spot a number of times with no problem. However there were maybe 35 cows - not just one or two. Yes, getting out was good for mind and body, I have a feel for the area now and I'm looking to return and give it another go. This time I'll be putting up an impromptu tarp tent in the back of my pickup.

1 hour ago, Jim_Alaska said:

A cow attack! Not too bad though. If it were in Alaska, it would be bears and the tent in shreds.

I freely admit a bear attack would be far, far worse than a cow attack. I'll be out there again in the coming weeks. This time I'll be prepared for the attack cows. I'll also be trying some different things with my detectors to find gold. When I get the results, I'll post some photos here.

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Hope they didn't poop on your tent. 😵

They urinated on the tarp, but a plastic tarp is easily cleaned. They wrecked the tent while I was off detecting a few miles away. It was a great trip and I'll be back.

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this is a great time of year to be in Fairbanks.

It was warm and mostly pretty dry while we were there but it is changing fast now. The days are getting shorter, the weather getting cooler and wetter.

Iron is the 4th most common mineral in the earth's crust, with many rocks containing significant amounts of iron minerals. Both igneous ( includes both volcanic rocks and crystalline rocks like granite) as well as metamorphic rocks (rocks changed by heat and pressure) commonly have significant iron and it often crystalizes out into tiny dark colored specks that are heavier and more durable than other rock forming minerals like feldspar and mica. The iron rich mineral specs are what make up black sand. Rocks that dont have much iron - like limestone or dolomite - are only rarely hosts that give rise to placer gold.
So iron and iron rich minerals are super common, while gold is super rare (gold is one of the rarer elements in the earth's crust).
A lot of iron oxides in quartz veins are the remains of what was once iron pyrite, but the sulfur is gone and only iron oxides remain.
As far as rocks which show "gold" on the GM 1000, that merely means that there is something conductive there and it does not have the magnetic properties of iron minerals. It could be gold but it could be other things too. There are some conductive minerals - not many but a few.

Effectively the only case where the public can be excluded from access is cases of permitted mining operations where the public could be in danger and in those cases fencing and signage are both approved by the BLM and required under MSHA.

Agreed and some of those techniques work well or not so hot depending also on the size of the target. Edge on methods work well if the target is good sized, and can be almost required if the target is huge. They do not work well if the target is really small. Small targets may not sound off on edge until the are almost touching the edge of the coil. 
With a DD I typically step back and move forward rather than moving the coil backwards towards my feet but the net result is exactly the same.
Fast target pinpointing and recovery is more of an advanced technique and exact methods depend on size of the target, size of the coil, configuration of the coil and likely approximate depth to the target. But it is something well worth the effort.

Our eyes are easily fooled! That is why its hard to guess the weight of nuggets. As you say on the video, it is like foil - big in 2 dimensions, but thin in the third dimension. I have a piece of gold from Northern Nevada that is a flat folded piece like that, but mine is about 1/10th the size - a bit over 3 grams. Just like that one, you'd expect it to weigh more based on how it looks.
Even on pieces with good size in 3 dimensions, gold weight can be tough to guess. I have a spot in California which has produced a good number of 1/4 to 1/2 ounce nuggets in chunky pieces, but look like they should weigh about twice as much based on what you would guess by looking at them. On close inspection with magnification there are little bits of quartz and iron oxides shot throughout the piece, which is why they weigh less than you would expect - they are not truly solid gold, even though they look like it in your hand.

Oneguy - as far as saving time digging targets, one of the biggest problems is that many people simply do not make much effort to accurately pinpoint the target location. They swing over it a couple times to make sure there is a target in the ground and then immediately start digging. Then they chase the target all around trying to find it and it seems like its here and then it seems like its over there. The hole gets bigger and bigger, time drags on and the prospector gets frustrated. Taking an extra 30 seconds to pinpoint a target carefully can save 5 minutes or more of digging and chasing. Multiply 5 minutes per target (more or less) by 20 or more targets a day and it really adds up. Plus the less time you spend digging and chasing your targets, the more time you spend actually searching for gold. This means you will be able to detect and find more targets in a day resulting in more gold produced.

If it is sitting so that the sunlight touches it, its a sunbaker, whether you see it first or the detector sees it first. I've found underwater nuggets that were exposed to sunlight, and I'd also call them sunbakers, even though they were underwater.

Discrimination for pulse detectors is a last ditch type of thing and I would advise against it. On my first trip to Alaska I watched as several multi-ounce nuggets that had been found in the days I was there tested on a Minelab PI and discriminated as junk. Only very loud targets, that you have carefully pinpointed their location can be safely discriminated even with a VLF. You are right that serpentine is a very difficult bedrock to work with a VLF - dang near impossible. Serpentine can at times even be difficult with a pulse detector.
The frequency of a detector does change the sensitivity of a VLF detector to hot ground, but only a little. Turning down the gain helps too but only to a certain point. That is why on really difficult ground like serpentine bedrock, a pulse detector is best. One of the things about successful nugget detecting is that with only a few exceptions, you need to accept that you will dig a lot of trash.

Can you get the book printed in Australia?   You do have the best book out there hands down.
As per my comment from a couple hours ago just above your post:

I had a small run printed there but the cost of printing small runs and delivering it to JP makes the book almost as expensive there as it would be to ship my copies over there. I barely did better than to break even. I only am able to make a decent profit on the book here in the US by printing several thousand copies at a time. And before anyone suggests print on demand, no, it is not any cheaper, it is more expensive.

I was doing some work in really hard to dig ground and deep gold. I was using the GPZ to see the deep targets and even with the standard coil you need to dig a big hole with the 7000. So I just dug a little starter hole to mark the spot. No paint left behind, no marker chips or flagging. Just the start of a hole dug to mark the spot. Afterwards, I'd go mack with the SDC and and dig it out - and with the smaller mono coil of the SDC, a much smaller hole needed to be dug. And I got some nuggets way too deep to see with the SDC by itself. I hate digging those GPZ craters , especially on deep targets - but I do like the deep gold!
Its the lazy man's way  -