Condor

I went back out late yesterday to the super gully to give her a go with the drywasher. It is a couple hrs from home so I spent the night out there. I got there late and detected for about an hr before sunset. I found 1 small piece in the pile of one of my previous dig holes. This morning I decided to detect the whole works again with the Z maxed out settings with my high dollar earphones plugged in to boot. I found 10 pieces total. One 2 gram piece that I missed before and can only attribute to operator error on my previous outing. It should have been loud and clear without the maxed settings. The rest were all tiny pieces, so small that I detected them with the Z, but recovered them with the Gold Bug. Basically, if I got a repeatable warble in the Z threshold at maxed out settings, I dug until it was out of the ground then grabbed the Gold Bug Pro with the little 5" round coil to recover them. A good time saving measure if you're working a small area. Then I set up my puffer drywasher near the original dig holes. First thing I noticed was the dirt still had enough moisture that it clumped in the riffles. I ended up running it through 3 times from the tailings and wanted to abandon the effort. Nevertheless, I ran about 10 shovels full and decided to pan it out. Absolutely amazing, probably 20 colors with a couple tiny pickers in the pan. I punched 2 more sample holes in different areas just to check the results. Same thing, plenty of colors and a few tiny pickers. But, it seemed that the richest material was not at bedrock, maybe half way between or just above bedrock. I gave up the drywash effort because I know I'm losing gold in the damp soil and will opt for something new and more efficient in the future. Perhaps the Gold Cube set up to recycle water would do a much more efficient job. Photos to follow.

I have hesitated posting this recent prospecting adventure, but do so with the following caveat: "Prospecting in Mexico is probably illegal. Law enforcement is arbitrary at best and bent for personal gain at worst. The roads are narrow with no shoulder. The landscape is rugged and unforgiving, services distant and cell phones useless. It's not for the faint of heart, don't do it if you can." Nevertheless, I'm an adventurer. I'm retired, divorced and my kids are grown so no one is depending on me for support. I have the luxury of risk taking because I'm the only one at risk. So last month my new friend from the "Pay it Forward" story decided to share his vast knowledge of placer gold from down the Baja peninsula. The placer zone is a well known area smack dab in the middle of the peninsula between the Pacific and Sea of Cortez. It's been prospected by drywashers for at least 100 yrs if not more. Detectorists both Mexican and American have been detecting down there since the advent of metal detectors. So we organized a 10 day trip taking 2 trucks. My guide and his longtime prospecting partner in one, and me in the other. We crossed the border at Mexicali at sunup and had breakfast and topped off our tanks in San Felipe. We took the back way, bone jarring, rough graded dirt roads from Puertocitos eventually coming out on Baja 1 near the turnoff to Bajia de Los Angeles. We stopped early the first day and prospected a small placer near the highway. Friend John found 1 nugget maybe 2 grams, I got the skunk and some nasty cactus in the soles of my boot and ankle. The next day we arrived at the "zone". We split up near an old hardrock mine, I eventually found a couple of dink nuggets in run off flats below the hills. From down in the brush I could hear a truck approaching, not a good sign. The track we were on hadn't seen vehicle travel in months. I stayed out of sight and friend John met slightly irate workers from an exploration company who made it clear that we were trespassing on company leased land. Oh well, we'll just have to keep a lower profile. A brief description of the terrain is in order. This is the harshest desert you will ever see and that coming from an old Arizona desert rat like myself. The flora if you can call it that is thickest in the seldom run water courses, the natural concentrating areas for placer gold. Every tree, bush and cactus has thorns, stickers, hooks, sabers and spines that will rip, stab and puncture your skin, as well as poke through a rubber boot sole. You are well served to have a leatherman tool handy to quickly get them out of lower legs and boots. There is no water and the bees will invade your camp to scavenge precious drops of moisture from beer and soda cans. In January the daytime temps were pushing mid 80's. Every wash, gully and canyon has been drywashed leaving behind a 100 yrs of nails, wire and rusted cans. My kind of place, the tougher it is the better I like it. Shoe clerks and manicured businessmen need not apply. My guide has been detecting here for over 20 yrs and has GPS coordinates for dozens of placer patches. We have arrived at each new spot when we see an old Coors Light can stuck to an Ocotillo limb. He remembers nearly every substantial nugget taken from these various patches and we trundle through them all. To be continued: I'm off to follow Jason's advice and drywash the short rich gully from the other day.

Jason, I was thinking the same thing about drywashing. Probably go back out next week. Unfortunately it's going to stay pretty warm in sunny Yuma.

Photos

I did a solo overnighter outside of sunny Yuma. Temps were hitting high 80's. I started at sunup and did a 2 hr loop with no gold, a few trash targets. I was working my way down the flats of desert pavement back to my truck when I decided to drop down into a shallow gully. Immediately I got a good tone and dug a small half gram nugget. 10 ft further on another nice mellow tone. 12 inches down I pull out a nice 1 gram nugget and after I gather my digging tools I wave the coil over the hole. Another target in the hole and one in the pile. I pulled 4 nuggets out of that one hole. 10 more feet further on another nice tone and I dig 3 nuggets out of the same hole all down 12 to 15 inches. My narrow Hodan pick is great for extending hiking and exploration, but really sucks for digging deep holes. I went back to my truck and took out the big boy pick and continued my search. The productive part of this gully was maybe 50 yds long and I took out 17 nuggets in the space of 2 hrs. A lot of digging. As I explored around the margins I saw old and faint shallow dig holes and boot scrapes. Then I noticed several dozen more recent shallow dig holes that had each been covered and marked with small piles of pebbles. I ran the Z through this margin zone and pulled one deep 1.5 gram piece from amid the shallow dig holes. I ran through the whole mess again and got four crumbs bringing the total to 21 nuggets weighed in at 14 grams. I'm pretty sure this spot was discovered by someone swinging a VLF and they apparently did pretty well on the shallow stuff. The ones I found in the gully were all stretched along a slow curved inside bend in the deepest part of the wash. Too deep for the VLF I suspect. I poked around all day and part of the next for no joy. My first respectable patch and it ended too soon. I'll follow up with a photo from my phone, I'm still too dense to sync these things together.

I can say positively that I noticed a difference after the upgrade. My Detector was constantly drifting into a negative ground balance especially running in hot ground or a lot of hot rocks. The threshold kept banging every time I lifted the coil off the ground. I accidentally fat fingered the reset the other day and I had a hard time getting the ground balance to ignore the ferrite. I went through the new ground balace process 3 times before I got it close, but it never did ignore the Ferrite at high Sens settings. I dropped Sens down to 12 and let go at that.

I have seen places here in AZ where wet/dry cycles and freezing/thawing cycles push rocks to the surface and ultimately push fence posts right out of the ground. There are similar theories about our "desert pavement" which often overlays hundreds of feet of rocks and clay. I see dozer cuts through the desert pavement and there is no underlying stratification. Just random rocks and clay type soil.

In my inartful response I neglected the role of physics and gravity that guides my economic sense. It's well established that due to its specific gravity, gold, over time will continue to settle to its lowest point until something stops it. Desert washes run perhaps twice a year, and have catastrophic floods at best once or twice in our lifetime. When you see a 20 ft high cut bank with the strata of thousands of years of flowing and flooding you get the big picture. The occasional big flood may dislodge gold from its hiding place and throw it into the outwash gravels, but it's not a regular event and not worth spending a lot of time pursuing. The gold got laid down in those gravels thousands of years ago, a .22 cartridge casing or lump of aluminum foil got laid down in our lifetime and they lack the inherent density of gold to settle at those bottom levels. So, if you spend your time in outwash gravels you'll find the detritus of our recent human activity and not the dense gold that has perhaps settled beyond detection range. The fact that someone found a huge chunk of gold in dredge tailings doesn't change the role of gravity because in all likelihood that gold was resting at its lowest level until acted on and unfortunately discarded by the dredger. My tortured point is that especially in the desert southwest, I concentrate my efforts in areas that have not only produced gold, but contain settling bottom areas that are reachable with modern electronics. My own personal detecting guidelines, "deep outwash gravels, no bueno". I want to stick to those areas where I have the greatest opportunity to detect and recover gold in its lowest level hiding place. My apologies for belaboring the point.

Seriously Chris? The logic of hunting a tailings pile certainly differs from hunting desert gravel washes where this thread started. For me it's a matter of simple economics. I could spend my time in deep gravel washes and get plenty of targets and a very small minority of them will be gold. But, there is a cost. The cost is both opportunity lost and physical effort expended. Digging deep targets in desert gravel is no easy chore and a very time consuming one. A two foot deep hole might end up being 3 ft wide because the sides keep caving in. Then there is the economics of my physical effort. My 61 yr old frame only has precious few deep hole digging hrs available during a given day. If I use them up chasing deep trash then I am no longer available to dig better targets. Just yesterday I got a decent target in an obviously float gravel wash. I could see from the exposed bank that bedrock was probably about 2 ft down. So I dug straight down hoping to find a bottom layer of muck or clay that might hold a nugget. No luck without an ever expanding hole but fortunately the target came out after about 15 inches down. Of course it was junk, but I knew that going in and decided to chase it if I thought I could find a bottom. For me, it's the percentages that matter. There is simply no advantage for me to swing my coil over deep desert gravel washes because I will find targets and then what, dig them or walk away. Am I missing gold? Of course I am, but I choose to spend my time over targets that have a higher percentage of being recoverable gold at a lower cost of physical effort.

I'm sorry I missed answering part of your question. Yes, I want to keep my data from a previous trip because my ground in in Yuma by the Sea stays fairly equal. I don't think my ground "reactivity" changes that much in my local area, so I'm happy with keeping the previous data and settings, and letting the data build with whatever new location I'm in.

My impression from JP's previous comments on stored "Ground Balance" was, after 10 seconds you're clearing your stored data and starting a new string. That is not necessarily a bad thing as Nevada Chris pointed out. If you have changed locations and general ground conditions you may well benefit from clearing the stored data. I'm no authority here, I only know what's working for me in my little corner of the world.

I dropped a duece there a couple years ago and put that trash on top before I covered it up. Must have smelled like cheap red wine and bean dip. I've learned my lesson especially with the 7k, loose float gravel "no bueno", got to have a bottom within digging distance.

I've been running Steve' s insanely hot settings non-stop for the past month. I got my first ferrite very recently and have done daily start-up ground balancing, but keep it under the 10 second rule per JP. My perception is the detector takes a few hrs to settle in. At start-up in the morning she's pretty jittery but settles down after some run time. Today I got into a field of strewn volcanics and it was a mess. Those hot settings really light up the volcanics and my only solution was to remove self from affected area. I ran into a guy running a GPX 4800 and he had also surrendered to the overload from the same volcanics. Conversely, I covered some nearby shallow gullies and tiny nuggets were lit up like surface trash. I got 7 nuggets that totaled 2.8 grams and everyone of them sounded off like a booming piece of trash. The deepest target I dug was maybe 8 inches but sounded like bullet frag on the surface. Today I chased one seam of red clay for a good long while, but when I switched to "difficult" it disappeared while still running a Sensitivity of 20. Granted, I'm running some fairly quiet ground in SW AZ, so I have the advantage of letting the detector settle down before it drives me crazy with its antics. I also have the advantage of detecting 3 or 4 hrs a day for at least 5 days a week, so we are mutually getting used to each other. I don't think you can go out for a weekend in variable ground and expect these settings to work for you. Your hearing and sanity will give out long before the detector settles in and your brain settles in to the nuances of this kind of detecting. I was detecting with a fellow 7K user a couple weeks ago and he was running Sens 10 and still finding sub-gram nuggets and covering twice the ground. It's working for me so I'm sticking with it. As Nevada Chris says "your mileage may vary".

I loved those Keen boots, but 3 pairs delaminated. Keen was very good about replacing them on a 1 yr warranty, my last ones made it 13 months, too late to replace. Call customer service, email them a picture of the problem, and a new pair in the mail.

Oh no, Rob is coordinating the angle of the sun, the horizon and the background terrain to pinpoint the spot. Seriously though, the usual birdshot and some shallow iron trash. I dug one deep nail and one deep broken point off an old pick.

I'm not that media coordinated, I have to switch to my phone to post the photo.

Me a couple Yuma boys, decided to conduct a genuine prospecting trip today. I had researched an area and looked for it last year, but gave up after a long and arduous trip through the mountains, beat my poor old truck to death. So this year I shared this info with someone who knows his way around a computer and the mapping software. We got some decent coordinates and decided to give it a try. We left the freeway at sunup and it was 28 degrees. I towed a friend's side by side ATV, not wanting to beat my truck up again. Our map was perfect, though the desert had other ideas about road conditions. Washouts and river bottom silt dust were the norm. We managed, though I had already inhaled my fair share to dust just getting to the spot. We were shooting dark, expecting to see some drywash tailings as a starting point. No luck on the tailings, only hardrock mine workings. We branched out in all directions. 45 minutes into the hunt I get a good signal in a small bedrock gully. A baby nugget comes up and I'm thinking this is the ultimate spot, no dig holes and already found gold. I push on for nearly an hr before I get another nugget, then find 3 in about 15 minutes. I cannot let my friends down, so I hike across the flats back to our parking spot. I find both of them close by and convince them to move down to the spot where there seems to be gold. We again branch off and I find 2 more babies in the process. We had decided that based on the miles of bad road and our distance from home that 3pm would be the cutoff. As 3pm approaches I'm heading for the vehicles just pushing my coil along "desert pavement" with all kinds of broken quartz underfoot. I'm 50 ft from my ATV and I get the ultimate signal. Quite possibly the best I have received with the ZED. A low, broad tone, obviously deep, and in an area where there should be no deep trash. I start digging and the tone keeps getting better and better. I turn my Sensitivity down to 5 to try and narrow down my digging point. Ed Sr is within earshot and I tell him I'm digging a big nugget, so he brings a better digging tool. We dig awhile and expand the hole to try and pinpoint. Ed Sr goes back to the Jeep and gets a military style shovel to dig. By then Ed Jr arrives and pitches in to help dig the hole. As we open up the hole, the "sweet spot" of the signal seems to have moved. Never a good sign here in the desert. That usually means deep nail or wire that has corroded and giving a halo type signal. Nevertheless, we're in seemingly virgin ground, so I remain cautiously optimistic and dig on. I turn the detector Sensitivity down to 1 and its overloading in the hole, frustrating our efforts to pinpoint. Ed Jr is down on his knees pulling all the overburden out from the hole and he gasps, "oh my god". The nugget came right out with the last move to widen the hole. Spectacular, though covered in caliche. So, Ed Jr will have to post the photo of the hole and my smiling face with the nugget from his camera. I'll post the cleaned nugget photos in a second post from my stupid phone. The big one comes in at 10.8 grams. After Gerry's big find I almost feel unworthy, NOT! For those winter shut-ins, by noon we were at 65 degrees and I was sweating in a short sleeved t-shirt.

The beauty of this forum is we get valuable information without the ridiculous sniping so prevalent in the old days of other forums. I've been following the JP posts since the original Finders forum and cringed at the abuse he took from armchair prospectors with a Minelab Axe to grind. Again, Bravo Zulu to JP for sticking it out and Steve for zealously keeping the forum clean and relevant.

I inadvertently left my machine on after shutting down the audio then laid the machine on my tailgate. Ouch, that must have throughly f'd the ground balance. Maybe that's why it's running so smooth. I'd better start all over.

I followed up by reading the JP original post on the Australian forum. Under 10 seconds even over the Ferrite. Repeat if necessary, but don't dump the accumulated data by holding quick track too long. Makes sense that this accumulated ground balance data is stabilizing or perhaps immunizing the machine to some extent.

As I recall JP mentioned something about a quick ground balance that doesn't dump your stored ground balance data. I wonder if that's possible over the Ferrite and get the same benefit.

I know that before the update, my machine would drift to a negative ground balance and every time I raised the coil I was getting threshold over shoot. That's gone away, but I still get banged hard if I make a sudden movement either up or down.

The cumulative effect of the GPZ ground balance storage Observation: I ran Steve's Hot settings, HY, Normal, Sens 20, Threshold 35, Smoothing Low for several days in a row and the machine seems to be running as stable as before I switched to the hot settings. The desert southwest ground is fairly mild, especially where I've been working lately, but I know when I first started running these settings my machine was noisy, growling and squealing unless I slowed my sweep speed way down to a crawl. Now, the machine seems to have really settled down and I can increase my sweep speed without a bunch of extra noise. I did the Minelab update but I never had the ferrite to do that particular ground balance procedure. Question: Is the machine storing the ground balance information such that it now recognizes this ground and has made enough internal adjustment to account for a noticeably quieter machine, or is it just my own brain and hearing have made the adjustment and I have imagined the improvement? I just received a Minelab ferrite,( thanks to Rob @ NuggetHunting.com), but now I'm afraid to re-ground balance and F up a good thing by clearing that stored data. What's a guy to do in this situation? By the way, I got a deep, faint tone today and experimented with the settings some. The results are probably moot since the target was a piece of wire down about 14 inches, but I got as good a tone if not better on this target with the General, Normal, 20 sens setting. When I backed the Sens down to 15, neither HY nor General picked up the signal. Switching Smoothing off, I got an awful lot of chatter and the signal was very hard to hear through the chatter.

Opps photo misfired

I went back out to the spot my benefactor showed me the other day and gave it a go with the "bad boy" settings. Since I did the Minelab update my ZED has been considerably more stable. As you can see in the photo I found 3 micro nuggets that even combined won't register 1 grain on my scale. The round ones gave solid, unmistakable target tones. I dropped the first one back into the rubble pile and thought uh oh, that's going to be a problem. It never lost a solid tone and I got it in one go. The biggest nugget is 1.2 gram and was down over a ft. Once I got the hole going I had to back the sensitivity down to 5 to pinpoint, then I got the big shovel to finish out the digging. Steve's settings will work here because the ground is relatively mild. Still, I doubt I could do a whole day of that intensity. Sorry for all you cold weather shut ins, it's 65 and sunny here in Yuma by the Sea.