GotAU?

Ron, this looks like a very good idea, thanks for sharing it. Curious- how well is the mono working out for you in streams, particularly in black sand deposits?

That’s Reese @Goldseeker5000, far right front row! 😆

Just found this browsing for mining history, it’s about the history of gold mining in Montana: https://www.blm.gov/sites/blm.gov/files/docs/2021-07/THE ROAD TO GARNET'S GOLD (002).pdf

Ordered the 10 x 5 to try out in our tiny gold goldfields, will post results when I get it as well. The video by Au Downunder made the 14x9 look and sound good as well, looking forward to hearing about your results with it Simon.

Maybe not far from the lode when it was originally deposited as a placer and locked into the ancient streambed deposits, but with successive faulting, uplifting, glaciers and erosion events, all that may be left is a short section of that ancient streambed perched high up in a bench or in a layer on the mountain side and it’s dropping crumbs for Jason to find in the hillsides and valleys below.

You’re also proving my point to my wife that bringing my detector on our hikes might be worth it! 😁

Cool find, nice indicators for stream deposits too- water tumbled fossilized bone embedded in sandstone, and nearby you found a cool little placer deposit. Very nice discovery!

Nice find! Is the bone in limestone or volcanic ash? Can’t tell from photo. My wife and I also love to go exploring and rockhounding too, and it usually takes us to places that geologically speaking, aren’t known for gold but I still try swinging while there. We could never live somewhere else for the open spaces we have in the western states!

Thanks for posting that Mike, great references Chris put up there.

It’s all relative, we’re 3 hours from good areas in the desert. Curious - Have you been out to the Steens Mtn area? I was trying to find some prospects there (for quartz crystals) but had to leave as we were chased out by lightning and heavy rains. Heard anything about mineral collecting that way?

Ah, then you have some great rivers and mountains nearby!

If you live in a Northern climate near mountains and streams, Reese’s book “The Nugget Shooter’s Field Guide” would be a good one to accompany Chris Ralph’s “ Fists Full of Gold”.

Those quartz pieces have some nice discoloration from mineralization, especially where the gold specks are. They are not like the pure white bull quartz I’ve seen in some areas around the prospects and shafts I’ve visited.

Wow! Haven’t seen that one in your posts Gerry! I’ve been another one of those quartz chasers too, but it’ was confounding at first at one area that historically had free milling gold I occasionally go to has a lot of very white bull quartz outcrops and pieces of it strewn all over the surface. But then by looking closer at the old diggings there, I realized that the miners concentrated on a narrow band of ore with mineralized quartz, along with other material, deposited between the bull quartz dikes and surrounding rock, so I’ve been concentrating in those areas on the hillsides where quartz dikes and smaller veins are and detecting on them directly as well as doing some scrape and detecting of the soil downslope of each of them.

This may help showing the process of hillside weathering from one of my Geomorphology texts- if one is trying to get down to bedrock, the shallowest soil deposits will be upslope from the foot of the hill.

Gerry’s right, and once you verify the detector sensitivity, try the “scratch and detect” method he mentions, its also described being used on a slope from this article by Steve H:

Yes, its user defined the way the main program works (if its MatLab), you will need both the program and the user files to do something like what is shown.

Looks promising- definitely check the top of the ridge above that quartz- its on the hillside for a reason….

Jim Straight still had you beat: …but that coil should do well with what you have attached to the other end! Good hunting!

“Go slow, coil to the ground, and have an ear for whispers”, and variations of it, are some of the most important answers to many of my questions; they are the same recommendations I’ve been given by several successful detectorists.

Their list is terrible- it doesn’t even mention one of my favorite and well known Garrett dealers who is a contributor here as well and also provides personal training for his Garrett customers…

MatLab is a base program and language for instrumentation, data input and analysis - can be configured any way one wants with both control and analysis functions, and a customizable user interface. Whites may have used it for their hardware testing… if it is Matlab, one would need both the MatLab program and the Whites configuration files for it to run that way.

🤔 How come nobody mentioned Jeff Williams? Yeah, a bit 🤪 , but he does explain geology very well.

Matlab? Curious- how do you want to use it for prospecting?

For US? I think it’s 15%