jasong

Back home again, measured the shell and it's actually 2 1/4", looks like the same round and for a Sharp's still though, .44-90 so that's the one. This area was frequented by buffalo hunters and the time era makes sense. So I'm guessing that's probably what it was from as the era seems to fit in there somewhere. Land of Butch Cassidy, Buffalo Bill Cody and even some of the "Deadwood" names like Wild Bill Hickok made it out here too, all in that general time frame. Seems likely this was a stray round and not from a prospector now that it's been ID'ed though. Maybe just coincidence it was in a gold bearing area, as it seems like an unlikely round for a prospector to be carrying around for general use.

3rd'ing EMI. It's not a major problem, until it is. And then the detector simply won't work at all in some places, like totally useless mimicking a broken machine or coil. I'm not detecting anywhere close to power lines or civilization either myself. Also I've noticed in some wind storms (and in my part of the country it's always windy), the detector loses stability entirely too. Oddly, some days are ok though. I think it's atmospheric static, and the GPZ handles it ok while the 6000 just dies. I'd be using a mono instead, if I could. This 14" DD is too big to use in heavy, woody brush, which unfortunately is exactly what I'm spending my summer working. Thus: need a small DD. Separately, this 6000 is missing a ton of gold too as I'm regridding, even with this 11" mono. Like - Fine Gold/low gain in US mild soils level of missed nuggets.

Nice, hope there are some lunkers waiting for you in that unworked ground! Definitely earning them in there... They aren't letting you permit an excavator in there though? Looks like a prime candidate for a dig n' detect operation.

What made you start digging there out of curiosity? Is it basically a test pit down to bedrock, or were you finding nuggets up top? Good luck, hope you see some nice ones.

Thanks guys, that's the one! That gives me something to work with now for research. Looks like it was a Buffalo hunting round, or from that Era.

I'm not very knowledgeable with this relic stuff, but I found a gold site that I'm trying to research historical info on and coming up short. The only thing I've found that I might be able to get a date on is this rifle cartridge. Google looks to infer this company only existed until 1896? But I'm hoping for something more accurate. The bullet itself looks to have been slightly larger than 7/16" diameter but my calipers are packed up as I'm moving right now so can't get more accurate. Close to a 44 - 40 I guess, but longer shell. Hoping someone can narrow the years down for me a bit more or potentially this round's use? Would this be a calvary/government issued round? Or an old trapper's round? Buffalo hunting? Any kind of info is helpful to potentially give me a research lead.

I've been pretty lucky down here in so much as the USFS seems to pass off all the permitting stuff to the BLM and let them deal with it, and the BLM is pretty mining friendly here in WY since we are a mining state. But that's unfortunate Montana is having issues now, hopefully it doesn't start down here too. I just ran into a new one in AZ - the state mining inspector just sent me a letter along with 3 "violations" saying that I'm responsible, at my cost, for fencing off and/or reclamating all old workings (they date back to 1880's to 1970's) on one of my claims. They sent me a letter saying I had 60 days to the work or they would sue me. It sounded like some kind of legislation through rules rather than laws to me, so I talked to the AZ BLM legal department and told them about it and said if anything, it's the BLM's responsibility because they should have collected bonds from the prior operators, and thankfully they agreed with me and talked to the state mine inspector about it. I'm sure other claim holders in AZ are going to get similar letters and unlawful requests though because the woman writing the "violations" said she is just starting to issue them, so people be aware of that... They seem to think people who weren't even born when something happened now bear the personal responsibility for them. In this world I've learned a few things, and one is that some people will walk all over someone they think is weaker or won't fight back. So I've resolved to always fight back no matter the size of the bully, and never back down from an unlawful challenge or wrongdoing on general principal.

Appears to be half of a well oxidized nodule or concretion of some sort. Common nodule forming minerals can be iron pyrite, maybe manganese. Usually they start from a "seed" in the center, can be a grain of sand or a fossil. Iron pyrite is non (or very weakly) magnetic, despite containing iron. Many different metallic minerals can form nodules though. Here is a photo from Google I snagged showing similar radial growth common in nodules, which your sample also exhibits and makes it almost certainly terrestrial in origin. This one was cracked in half by the owner and thus not oxidized internally yet though:

Nice work and nice gold! Detecting the mountains is sure a different game than the deserts and prairies. That's some serious work you got going there clearing the land. Crazy year for bear attacks, we've had a couple down here too already but luckily I think the people all survived this year. I haven't seen any griz for a few years myself but I'm starting to see lone wolves more often now.

Did you buy it from someone living at a low altitude and take it up to a high altitude? Pretty sure those stock GPZ coils have a pressure relief valve on them, could be faulty or blocked? Or at least, I thought that's the purpose of that valve looking thing... Just wondering if someone siliconed it shut or something to put into the water.

Prescott, AZ or Grants Pass, OR are where I'd chose to move to and retire if I could. Flagstaff or Durango would be close 2nd places. Realistically though, I can't and never will be able to afford property anywhere I actually want to live in the US. The closest place with affordable real estate around gold now is probably Mexico, or somewhere else in Central/South America.

I don't see any obvious VG in there, what you are showing in these photos appears to mostly be iron oxides. The quickest way to find out if you have free gold in quartz is to buy a dolly pot and a gold pan. Or send a sample in for assay. You could have gold in there which you don't immediately see by eye.

Nice! I was wondering how the 6000 does on speci gold like that. Good to see it's hitting it relatively deep all things considered with the target type.

Don't confuse size sorting with density sorting though. For example: the larger rocks may go to the top of the pan, but the denser nuggets stay at the bottom. Unless you really shake the pan hard, and oscillate it up and down to bring the nuggets to the top. It requires both a high energy input plus a turbulent impulse to do such a thing. If the energy isn't both high plus chaotic, it's unlikely to overcome the natural tendency for gravity to sort things by density. But even if that succeeds to overcome gravity and bring nuggets to the top and then suddenly stop the agitation, if you leave that pan sitting in the open for a long time - geologically speaking like a million years - those nuggets will still end up sinking right back down to the bottom of the pan again because gravity never stops working and every tiny vibration will move the nugget slightly further down until it hits the bottom of the pan (bedrock) and stops. At least, assuming the wind doesn't blow all the lighter gravel off the top of the pan and expose the nuggets (soil deflation). That's why gravity and wind are the principal erosional forces that create nugget concentrations in dry, alluvial fans over time (ignoring for now the wash bottoms). They act upon the gravel daily. That isn't to say there aren't exceptions, especially in cases where landslides and floods have happened relatively recently geologically speaking and are still the dominant sorting factor involved. Rich Hill is one such place that seems to have both a massive landslide as well as potentially massive flooding. But even there, it's already clearly visible that bedrock concentration is starting to occur in some areas, and many of the surficial nugget patches appear to be the result of soil deflation. This is because over enough time, gravity and wind become the dominant erosional forces ahead of intermittent chaotic, rare events like landslides. The amount of density sorting by the gentler, but ever present erosional forces can be used to gauge the age of catastrophic events like landslides and floods, for this reason.

It's not a meteorite and there isn't any lettering on it. Where was it found? Did it come from British Columbia or California by chance? I'd guess a serpentine cobble based on nothing but a brief visual inspection of photos. The indentions are likely from differential surface erosion in a river, which means it had a bunch of softer inclusions in it, which serpentine often does. I very highly doubt it's jadeite unless by some rare instance it came from Myanmar or maybe Central America. It could be nephrite jade though (this is chemically and mineralogically different from jadeite, not the same thing), which is similar in many ways to serpentine. Black jade is just very, very dark green jade. So it will still show translucency of a dark green when shining a very powerful flashlight on an edge. Meaning - not perfectly opaque, but again very strong LED flashlight is needed. Black serpentine might or might not show translucency depending on it's composition, but it's going to scratch with the tip of a pocket knife whereas black nephrite won't scratch with a pocket knife. In general beyond that, identifying rocks that are highly river worn such as yours is not really something that can be done by photos. You need to do tests on your own. Hardness, density, opacity are what I'd start with.

The answer to most of your questions is "it depends where you are at" and there is no real exact way to answer them. Dependent on the amount of precipitation and severity of seasonal flooding, most nuggety gold is still found towards bedrock in these sorts of washes in US desert areas, or at least deep enough to be within the undisturbed hardpack that escapes churning during flooding. The finer gold can be commonly dispersed through the entire depth of the alluvium though. In some places you definitely can strip the first 75% or so of alluvium from a wash without too many nugget losses, but in other places you cannot. If you get out of the washes then things get more complex. Landslides can leave nuggets dispersed randomly. Eluvial processes can leave nuggets dispersed towards the surface of hillslopes, or towards the surfaces of flats due to soil deflation. This is a very common occurence on the benches/terraces of these washes in Arizona in some places. It's impossible to give a percentage of flour/nugget gold vs gold bearing cobbles. It's highly dependent on how the gold mineralized to begin with, the distance it traveled, the rock which makes up the gravel, the ore bearing rock and it's resistance to erosion, the topography, the amount of precipitation, and probably a lot of other factors. It changes place to place - some places have almost only just nuggety gold and some places have almost only flour gold. Some places specimen type (quartz bearing) gold is quite common, other places it doesn't exist at all. I've never personally detected a quartz cobble in a stream bed that had literally no visible gold, because the detection depth on such pieces is quite low and stream beds host detectable size gold usually deeper towards bedrock. I've found it very commonly in dry eluvial placers though where it's closer to surface, or eroding directly out of the vein itself. I have detected pieces of quartz in washes that had so little gold visible that I had to scrub it down with a toothbrush to see some small shiny bits. I've seen such pieces posted before by others who detected them, that were later crushed and shown to have quite a lot of gold inside.

I've always had better luck with NF coils myself. Maybe just luck of the draw though, hard to tell. All of my Coilteks failed fairly quick while I've owned 4x more NF's and only had one real failure. Yet I know people who have the opposite luck too... But I think I'll stick with what worked for me in the past and go for one of these NF's. Was going to wait until tests but definitely want a small coil now for EMI situations. So going to see who's getting them first here in the US today if I get time today. My ML coil wasn't overly knock sensitive and I tried to get it to false by moving the cord around, no luck. Slight knock sensitivity developed a few weeks after buying it, but never got worse. But yeah, I should probably go out somewhere test again, see if this coil can run stable anywhere now.

Haven't even used my stock DD yet, gonna toss it in the truck to keep around now though. So strange, nothing particularly different about this spot than any others I worked, but just couldn't get the 6000 stable enough to even use, even being very far from any obvious noise sources. I almost feel like it was the 6000 interfering with itself. Like, it was unstable just sitting, but seemed to get even more unstable when I'd swing it and it'd process ground and get even worse. I am definitely seeing the appeal of a smaller portable DD on this machine now.

In terms of specifically selling nuggets found detecting, it was possible for a while after the Great Recession. I lived full time in the field from 2010 to 2015 off nothing but gold finds, and I had lost pretty much all my money in the crash, lost my house, and had to cash out my 401k early to pay for hospital bills, so no padding to fall back on, but nothing left to lose either. Still had truck, RV, and detectors though, all which thankfully I had paid off before the crash. So, I definitely wasn't living in a tent, I had a pretty good degree of comfort all things considered, and I kept it up for quite a long time since most people I had met in the field prior to that had all quit by then due to bad luck or declining gold prices. I think the ability to make a real somewhat-comfortable living off just nugget detecting in the US ended in 2016 after gold declines and 1-2 years of GPZ flogging. I know people who still do it though - almost all with private land or heavy equipment, and they definitely aren't in tents. Back then my daily goal was always the same: 2 grams/day avg over the course of a month. It was enough to live off, but not make savings. Every detector I bought was bought with loans and paying it off with gold quickly was priority #1. These days, it's still possible, but the profit is in recognizing large scale trends that might be marketable to exploration companies, not finding individual nuggets.

Have there been any vids comparing the smaller coils directly to the stock 11" in terms of really bad EMI? Like same place and time, 2 side by side shots alternating audio of just the background EMI? I went to a new spot today and for the first time found the 6000 completely unusable due to EMI. I thought it was my coil, then the cable, then I factory reset...nothing helped. I wasn't interested in a smaller coil until today, now I think it's almost a necessity to have one as backup in the ATV if they make a significant reduction in noise, in case EMI renders an entire trip pointless like today. $150 blown gas, makes up the cost of a smaller coil quick.

Hopefully you post some tests Simon. None of these from either manufacturer have me excited enough to make a purchase, but if they are offering a good performance boost in tests then I'll probably try one out. I've bought 3 Coiltek coils in my life (all in 4500 days) and all 3 failed, another reason I'm not too excited, and on the sidelines for this one.

Great post and adventure, thanks for sharing. Also stoked to see there are some deep ones the 6000 is pulling up that the 7000 couldn't hear. Those gold pictures are great, is that done with a scanner?

I tried some similar doohicky about 20 years ago, can't remember what it was called. But it was totally useless in Colorado, way too many black sands, it stopped removing anything after like 5 minutes and packed off. Plus half of the black sands were non-magnetic anyways and still clogged the riffles. You should spend the $40 to get a good fire assay on your black sands though - especially the non magnetic cut. I practiced smelting last year - and a poor man's fire assay - on some of my decades old dredge cons and all of them seemed to be 1/2 oz/ton or greater. Some I sent in for professional assay ended up having good amounts of PGM's as well, and Rhodium was up as high as like $28k/oz last year.

I love my LeTrap. Lightweight, good retention, simple, ultra quick to clean up and reset, fits exactly in my 3" dredge box for dredge cleanups. It's close to the perfect sluice IMO. The only mod I do is add deep V-mat to the top so I can do a quick spec to see if fines are showing up or not right away.

I started holding all my gold at the end of this winter for the first time in over a decade instead of just selling it at the end of every season. I'm hoping it does something, but I can't help but feel that someone (read: most of the Western countries on the planet) are conspiring to keep gold down in a time of record global inflation to insure Russian gold doesn't also skyrocket and allow them to fund their war and thus neuter or cancel out all the sanctions the West has put on them. I'd love to be wrong though. It'll be interesting to see what prices do. If it gets up above $3000 and starts to reflect actual real world economics again, I'm going back prospecting full time again.