Reno Chris

I was actually asked that previously in this thread - this is my response from Oct. 2019 and really nothing has changed: There is no ebook version coming. I looked into it and for the reason that ebooks automatically resize the material no matter what device you are using, they work very poorly for books with loads of illustrations - like my book. I looked into it and it was nothing but roadblocks and reasons it would not work. Ebooks work great for novels and other books that are pretty much text only, but there are hundreds of illustrations in Fist Full of Gold. I remember looking into it and my book, including the illustrations, was longer than the maximum of what was allowed on the site I was looking at to convert the book to an ebook format - and this was a function of all the illustrations. I could delete all the illustrations, but it would be a grossly inferior version.

Well, this a very slow response but it is one. First, late in 2020, the book began to sell at a faster rate than it had since it was first published. So I did a quick update to include the GPZ 7000 and a few other housekeeping items and then went to have it re-printed in late August (at the last print the 5000 was the flagship Minelab). To my disappointment, I found the printer was greatly delayed in reprinting because of Covid 19, now taking 3 months to print as opposed to one month in the past. Because of the delay, my distributor ran out, Amazon ran out and I ran out too. Most dealers had none in stock either. In late November the new print run was finally completed and the books delivered to my distributor in southern California. Amazon and my distributor now have plenty of the newly printed copies and it is in stock with them. However, I am myself still fully out of stock of the book. Because of Covid, I am delaying making the 1000 mile round trip to pick up copies from my distributor. Probably that will happen in March. I reprinted 3,000 copies in the fall and am now needing to print another 5,000 to keep up with demand. Its going to print now, and I wont have time to include the 6000 in the new edition, who knows when the information on this detector will come out. It will be a couple months in the field being used before we really have good reliable comment on it anyway. Likely the next print after this one will include the 6000. Second, printing for Australia has become difficult. I used to print here and ship books over to Australia, but the shipping of small lots of heavy items (like my book) has become crazy expensive. The last shipment I made was actually at a loss. 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. 2020 was a poor prospecting season between the virus and the fires. I am hoping for a much better 2021. The last day of the season was the best one (picture included). I am hoping my luck continues over. Chris

Hard to say, but I have seen all sorts of old trash dumped in old placer pits and other diggings. Old cars, washing machines, you name it. It might be related to something someone was thinking of doing for mining, but it also might just be old trash dumped at a placer pit.

I am sorry to hear this. A photo from better days, roughly a decade ago. This is how I will remember him. Chris

If the rock is rich enough, it can be well worth processing.

Its an old Bico-Braun. Its been long since they made this model but they still make ones like it.

So I'm stuck at home and decided that I wanted to crush some rock that I had. It was just a hair over a pound of rock, but these were all pieces that were found with a detector. None had nice gold showing, most had no gold showing but were quartz, from a district known for producing high grade, and made my GM1000 sing. None were good candidates for specimens, none really made the detector scream, so I thought these were good bits of rock for crushing. One piece was from California, the rest were from a little obscure gold district in Nevada that produced very little but what they did produce was pretty high grade. I've attached a photo of the rock before crushing. I was really surprised by the outcome. I got over 15 grams, nearly half an ounce - 0.49 ounces. I wish I had a 100 pounds of this rock - the grade comes out at about 1,000 ounces per ton. No surprise that the button is a little light in color, Nevada gold is often on the electrum side of things. I did a video on the whole process of going from raw rock to a finished dore button.

Yes, but he cant say anything........

Ummm, take a closer look at the book. There is a bibliography in the current edition, its on pages 357 and 358. As far as the index, a decent one would probably take a good 10 pages, and there is no room without significantly expanding the length of the book. Given the extra cost of such an expansion, probably not. The table of contents is quite detailed.

Well, I am here once in a while. There is no ebook version coming. I looked into it and for the reason that ebooks automatically resize the material no matter what device you are using, they work very poorly for books with loads of illustrations - like my book. I looked into it and it was nothing but roadblocks and reasons it would not work. Its possible that a next edition may be coming out in late 2020 or early 2021. So do you want to wait a year plus? Due to my YouTube videos, the book is selling fast and I will likely be reprinting in 12 to 18 months. It won't be a major change, I will add a section on the GPZ 7000. The 5000 was the flagship detector at the last printing.

There will be a nice obituary article in the ICMJ this month for Jim. He wrote many articles for us.

I got the word that Jim Straight has passed away in recent days. I last saw and spoke with Jim a bit over a year ago. He spent several hours on both Saturday and Sunday in the ICMJ booth with me at the Pomona GPAA show. He was a good man and wrote many articles for the ICMJ. It is sad to see him go. Jim was a great pioneer in the world of metal detecting for gold. He was on site for a great many famous old gold finds with metal detectors. Yet ye was very tight lipped about those locations. A lot of great secrets passed with him. It was always great to chat with him as we traveled a lot of similar paths - we both graduated from the Mackay School of mines, but about 30 years apart. We both spent a lot of time prospecting around Randsberg, CA and the northern Nevada placers of Pershing and Humboldt counties. I will miss our talks, as will so many other prospectors.

Nice gold!

The gold bearing greenstone belts of Sudan and NE Africa which launched the African detector boom roughly a decade ago are also found in southern Saudi Arabia. Same geology, same detector results.

Its hard enough to tell minerals just from photos, but when the pics are blurry, that's even harder. Just a raw guess is that its galena, a common mineral that is the most important ore of lead. Any chance of a better picture?

Both results are so low that unless you are talking about a mountain of millions of tons of ore to be worked at a rate of thousands of tons per day, this rock is waste. Most ore tests will have some level of minor variances in the results due to just what Clay Diggings observed - an errant tiny gold particle makes it into one sample and the other has no such tiny particle in it. If you are thinking to work this rock as an individual, both tests confirmed it is waste.

I'm not sure "alloy" is the right set up for mineral analysis - alloy will only say the metals in the specimen. It won't tell you the other elements in the mineral. So, at least you can say its a copper mineral with a fair amount of silver in it. Its not metallic silver or metallic copper. Probably Cuprite or Chalcocite. The copper mineral Covellite almost always shows a blue metallic sheen which I cant see on this specimen.

Sometimes cuprite can appear very dark gray, almost black. Its real hard to do mineral ID by a simple photo - even a good clear one. Cuprite will make your detector sound off at a good distance. Cuprite is a copper mineral that conducts electricity like a metal. Its often a very dark red but can range to a dark gray almost silver color.

Boy, ain't that the truth!

And likely the same here too. However the problem is that the company decided to save money by going directly from Air VTEM survey to drilling. The normal procedure is to do a ground survey to accurately locate the targets before drilling. An air survey is inherently less accurate at target placement than a ground survey. We know this from normal nugget detecting. The farther you are from a nugget target, the broader the signal is and more difficult to pinpoint accurately. They assumed that the target was so big that exact accuracy would not be an issue. Well, they cut corners and it burned them. Intending to drill 3 holes, they drilled one and ran out of money. They could not drill at the exact point they wanted to , and the inaccuracy of the VTEM location plus not being exactly where they wanted to be and not wanting to wait for better weather resulted in a very expensive dry hole. Perhaps they will be able to raise more money and do more drilling. We shall see. Because of the very positive VTEM survey results, I still think I could interest other parties if this company decides to turn it back to us.

In our area the spots that responded to the survey were under a layer of older unconsolidated gravel about 70M deep. If they'd have cropped out they would have been mined decades ago. The one bit that did crop out a few miles away was mined in the 1960s. So we had no idea where any actual VMS bodies were, but there are areas of alteration indicating systems are nearby (such as shown in one of the photos posted with the original post). The survey picked up some VMS large bodies - one is estimated at 900M long, by 400M wide and 300M on the dip. A couple others were around half that size. A presentation from the company that did the survey can be seen at: http://www.nevadasunrise.ca/projects/coronado-vms-project/ They started a drilling program intending 3 holes, and after one hole ran out of money. Sadly, they could not get to the spot they intended to drill from because of mud and snow, so they drilled at a spot farther out and went down 375 meters and hit nothing, missing the target completely. Nothing they hit in drilling would explain the EM anomaly found in the survey. http://www.nevadasunrise.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Nevada-Sunrise-Completes-First-Hole-at-Coronado-VMS-Pr.pdf The next steps are up to the company.

What did you do? The helicopter survey that was done on our claims cost upwards of $100,000 US dollars. Did you do a ground based survey?

You know it!!!

Unfortunately the heart stuff happened earlier in the year before I got out to prospect in Pumas County. Just to clarify, my heart problem is a non-standard one. Its not really related to weight, smoking or being out of shape - like most heart problems are. What I have is something you could get if you were an Olympic level athlete. What happened was another spot on my heart started telling the heart to beat - in addition to the normal one that tells the heart to beat. The two beat indicators sort of fought against each other sometimes. Initially, I never even knew I had it - it was discovered at a normal check up. I went to a cardiologist and he was not too worried about it, my blood oxygen levels were normal and I wasn't out of breath or anything like that. But he warned me that if the two beat indicators got into a full fight mode I could end up with a super fast beat and that would be more of a problem. Well, about six months later I was doing minor stuff in the backyard with my wife, and I suddenly went into this super fast heart beat mode. My heart was beating at 180 beats per minute (around 70 is normal). It would not go back to normal, so the ambulance was called. It did go back to normal after about 20 minutes, but they still took me to the hospital for a few days. I am now on a prescription and it seems to keep things normal and I have had no more tachycardia events. The Cardiologist has OK'ed me to prospect and hike and do any other normal outdoor activities.

The search was for VMS conductors but the little box you can see below the helicopter about half way between the coil and the 'copter is a magnetics measuring device. VMS conductors have both a conductive and magnetic signature, and the use of both is how they discriminate between a lot of other things that might show up. Nevada has a lot of aquifers in the ground where the water is a little salty. This means the aquifer will show up as conductive. But the salt water has no magnetic signature. VMS conductors have both. So functionally using both allows the explorer to discriminate between things that are valuable (like VMS ore bodies) and things that are not valuable (like salty water or bodies of iron ore that are magnetic but not conductive).