Condor

I think it's easy to forget that at the end of the day it's the journey that matters, not the size of your poke, the worth of your truck or your kid's prowess on the soccer field.  This forum is dedicated to the friendly exchange of ideas about our hobby/pastime.  Let's just remember that as we start a new year that the size of our poke is a personal achievement, but not at the expense of our humanity and good will to others.  

People might say, "Condor, have your lost your friggin mind and gone Buddhist, we're all about finding gold here".   That's true, but today's experience reinforces personal beliefs whose priority may have been temporarily misplaced. 

I've been helped my many people on this forum, Steve H, Rob A, Nevada Chris, to name a few.  There was never a toll for their friendship and assistance.  Let's just remember to pass it on to others. 

I found this on top of a desert pavement mesa, down about 8 inches.  A very low broad tone so I suspect there may be some more gold inside the rock.  The visible piece is less than a gram.  I detected the hell out of the whole area and not another target to be found.  Where is that darn patch I hear so much about?

My phone crapped out, I'm barely computer literate enough to get the photos out, but I managed.  I took a picture of the hole I dug, but the photo doesn't do justice to all the big rocks that I had dragged out behind me, but you get the idea.

Rob, yes I have been back to that area and a years ago I found one big 1/2 oz slug, but otherwise a few half grammers, all with the SDC last year.  This year nothing.  This nugget came from the road in from the canal near the power lines.  The so-called nugget patch that Bill told us about where the guy allegedly found 40oz looks like a moon crater now.  Everybody and his dog has drywashed that zone. 

Sorry I didn't get to the second day of my experience with the super hot settings.  I got busy helping an out of state hunter trying to fill a Desert Bighorn Sheep tag.  We filled, not a trophy but some hard hunting involved.

Nevertheless, here's the rest of the story.  On day 2, I was heading for an area I explored about 10 years ago with Rob Allison and Bill Southern.  The road was rough and rocky so I pulled up short and decided to explore some gullies nearer the road.  My main goal was just to keep trying out the settings and maybe get over some gold.  I prospected for nearly an hour and was getting pretty frustrated with kicking a lot of hot rocks.  The area was littered with volcanic rocks and the new settings were really lighting them up.  I turned to make a loop back to the truck and pushed up a steep gully.  I got a loud tone that really sounded like a nail, but since I was experimenting I thought I better dig the target.  A very shallow nugget less than .2 gram popped out.  I thought maybe this will work out after all.  I continued down the ridge to a small wash with a few drywash tailings.  I pushed up that a short distance and got a solid low tone.  Low tones out here are usually bullets, but again I dug it up.  6 inches down a really solid half gram nugget came up.  The shape, density and super hot settings made this small nugget sound off with a low tone.  I continued up the wash and 20 ft away I got an iffy signal.  I had already dug so many hot rocks that I was not much convinced but I started digging.  After pulling off about 6 inches of rocks and soil the tone cleared up but the hole was choked with interlocked rocks.  I kept thinking any one of those rocks was the culprit but kept digging.  I punched down between 15 and 18 inches to the clay layer checking every rock I pulled out.  The tone kept getting louder and louder in the hole.  Because I was so deep the hole was too narrow to try and pinpoint so I just kept expanding the hole.  At one point I was about to go back to my truck and get the big pick and shovel I had spent so much time on my hands and knees digging and prying rocks, but I kept going.  Now the signal was booming, so I turned the sensitivity all the way down to 1.   I'm thinking I must have missed a piece of trash in the sidewall, but kept digging.  One more big rock and the target was in the loose dirt in the hole.  I started scooping and waving over the coil and boom.  Out she came, 11 grams of golden beauty.  My biggest this year. 

Here's my take on Steve's Insanely Hot settings.  They're great if you are in a known gold producing zone and have the luxury of moving really slow.  They will drive you crazy with noise if you're in the gold prospecting mode and need to cover a lot of ground or if you're in very mineralized ground.  It takes a pretty good while to adjust your hearing to ignore noise that isn't a target tone.  The machine is going to meow and growl every time you raise or lower the coil as the ground balance and threshold try to catch up.  It seems to me that after about a half hour the machine smooths out a little or maybe its just my brain smoothing out.  The 7k is super sensitive to ferrous targets so you'll be chasing some very tiny pieces of old cans and the shavings off heavy equipment tracks and blades.  I'm to the point that if the target moves with a boot scrape I don't bother.  I may be leaving gold behind, but my knees and back don't appreciate the ups and downs to dig trash. 

I'll post the photos after my phone charges. 

Bravo Zulu to Steve's shared settings, they certainly have a place in the prospecting quiver. 

A smooth threshold with the 7k is more like a state of mind. It's a noisy machine and you develop a tolerance for the noise. The key is to fiddle with the threshold tone and find something less annoying. I opted for a more bass general tone that still leaves a noticeable rising pitch over a target. Don't forget to lower the signal limiter. You'll blow your ears out over the first big trash target. I adjusted to the JP threshold setting of 35. It still takes continuous use to adjust brain, hearing and coil control to get comfortable.

Here in sunny Yuma by the Sea I've been having reasonable success on sub gram nuggets running the 7k in HY Normal with sens at 16 with a nearly silent threshold. I don't have the same noise tolerance as Steve H. But, after seeing JP weigh in and Lunk reiterating comments on Steve's Insanely Hot settings I thought I'd better give er a go. I was feeling poorly so I decided to make it real easy on myself just to try the settings. I drove out 30 minutes from home to an old placer operation that has been absolutely hammered over the past 10 yrs. I picked out a dozer push and fiddled with the settings described by JP. 5 minutes into it I hit a sweet tone. About 6 inches down in hardened caliche out pops a half grammer. I tried to ignore all sharp surface targets since the 7k loves that steel shed from the dozer. Half hr another really soft smooth signal. Micro gram nugget. So ended day one of the test. 2 hrs 2 micro nuggets. It gets real good on day 2. Details to follow.

The Zed calls it sensitivity, I think default is 9.

Lucky,

Ya but, the other day I hit an area that had the gold bearing gravel overlaying a bed of red clay. That poor Zed was howling and growling so much I could scarcely get the coil down. Had to settle for General, Difficult and still suffered. The auto ground balance gave me a negative ground balance so that anytime I raised the coil it added to the unbearable noise. I gave up in short order and moved back to more forgiving terrain. It has its limitations, but I'm having a great time knocking down the dinks.

My smart phone having trouble loading the photo.

I know Lunk covered this last spring, but I want to reiterate. This morning I got the classic faint mew tone, repeatable in both directions. This is the kind of tone we live for, I knew it was gold because I was out of the trash zone and it was obviously not a surface target. I was running HY, Normal, smoothing off, gain 12. I decided to play with the settings a little. First I switched to HY, Difficult, same sensitivity. The target was barely audible and I doubt that if I was in regular prospecting mode it would have been sufficient to stop me. I already knew it was there, so I had too much advanced knowledge. Then I switched to General,Normal, same sensitivity. The target was still very clear. I toggled back and forth, clearly the Difficult setting faded the target. Low Smoothing had little effect, but I was in very quiet ground. My conclusion, at least for this quiet ground in Sunny Yuma, use Difficult as a last resort. The nugget was about 5 inches deep.

Oh yeah, the end of the nugget broke off, now I got 3 nuggets.

I got out early this morning in an area I found last year. I had high hopes that the 2300 had missed some deep gold. Very little trash last year, so I intended to dig everything. Unfortunately, the last rain storm really hit that area hard and stirred up a bunch of old can fragments. I concentrated on bedrock areas with a foot or less of overburden. I got a good signal and opened up a foot deep hole to bedrock. Interlocking rocks made it no easy chore. As I'm scooping out the loose rock this nugget is laying right in the bottom. Whew, I'm really pleased so I take a break in the shade. After I get all my gear ready to go again I sweep the dig hole, a booming signal comes through. Wow, this is gonna be awesome, not. It takes me another half hour to open up the hole to get more interlocked rocks out. I'm sweating buckets, but jazzed at the propect. I finally get the last rock out and start scooping out the gravel and this old tin can seam comes out. Total buzz kill. I pushed on for a 4 hr rountrip, nothing else but junk.

HY, Normal, Smoothing off. I think it's a brain/audio conditioning thing. The more I use it, the more the chattery background seems to fade. Mind you, I'm in some pretty mild ground, but when I hit more mineralized ground I have to slow way down.

We had a cold snap in sunny Yuma, 78 degrees at 0530. I went back out to the previously hammered gold drywash zone. I found the 2 bigger pieces 2ft apart on the shoulder of a worked out gulley. They were 8 to 10 inches deep under some drywash tailings, resting on a layer of hardpacked clay. I gridded the area with no more luck, although I had bootscrapped one spot a couple times. I decided to plug in my earphones and jack up the sensitivity to 16. I gave the area a good go no new targets, but I kept going back to the bootscrapped spot. With the threshold at 1 I was getting a faint stutter in one direction, but nothing on the backswing. I used my pick to pull down a couple inches of dirt. Ever so faint signal in one direction. I decided to settle this thing and dug up a foot square down about 4 to 5 inches. Finally, a repeatable signal. I got to the hardpack layer and after a couple tries got it in the scoop. Really tiny so I measured the depth. I measure 9.5 inches. Now I can't say that nugget was actually resting at that depth, but he was damn close. He weighs in at .1 gram. The total for all 3 nuggets was 1.1gram. I'm liking the Zed with the threshold at absolute minimum. The background is chattery, but a target breaks through with ease.

I ran the 2300 almost exclusively at 4. I also attached a booster and ran in ear studio style earphones. The AZ heat makes headphones a chore for me. The wireless function of the Zed is a pleasure.

I made it home to godforsaken Yuma AZ. Temps are downright awful. Low of 84, high 107. Fortunately, there are a couple hammered gold areas 30 min from my front door. I've been out for a couple hrs at sun up for the past few days. The ground is relatively mild so I run the Z hot, HY, ,Normal, Sens 12, minimum threshold. Clay domes and red bedrock send the machine into yowling and growling fits, but I'm getting impressive depth on tiny bits. The smallest is 2 grains, the largest 2.9 grams. The 2300 missed that bigger nugget last year. I saw my own dig spots not a foot from the bigger nug, but it was down a solid 12 inches. Can't wait for cooler weather and a chance to do some serious detecting.

I tried balancing over a small ironstone, pretty difficult to balance it out. That stuff is just too hot.

I thought we had a break in the weather down here in Southern CA so I took the 7k out to ironstone heaven.  There is so much ironstone that Kaiser Steel once mined it nearby.  I know of a small hillside placer that had produced a few dozen 1 gram and smaller nuggets.  I used the 2300 in there last year for some decent finds.  The problem is its a long, hot, dry walk.  I was going to hike in and overnight it, but at the last minute decided a roundtrip with lighter pack was a better plan.  I started out at first light with the 7k taken down and stowed in my pack with 4 liters of water.  The hike was longer than I remembered, took me just shy of 2 hrs to get to the placer zone.  I had already sweated through my shirt and drank one liter of water.  Not a good start.  I fired up the 7000 trying to concentrate on deeper gravels where the 2300 should have left some gold.  Man, that 7000 can find ironstone real deep.  I tried various settings to dumb it down, including General-Difficult with a lowered sensitivity.  No go, too many golf ball sized chunks of ironstone down 6 to 10 inches.  By noon I had enough of kicking and digging ironstone, even 1 nugget would have kept me going.  By then I was down to 1.5 liter of water and it was heating up.  I packed it up and plugged in my ipod with a decent audio book and hiked back out of there.  I got to my truck about 2:30 and it was 105 degrees with 20mph winds.  I hosed down with a 5 gallon jug of water, changed clothes and drove home.  It was not a total loss, because I can now cross off my list a place to work the 7k.  Looking forward to cooler temps and more time with the 7k.

Goldbrick, Fred et al,

I'm glad you all understand my perspective, my passion can override my sensitivity. I thoroughly enjoy the fellowship of this forum and the freedom to share mutually beneficial experiences, ideas and comments without the negativity that pervades other venues. Bravo Zulu to all who participate and those who quietly benefit.

I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but I am a retired LEO and there is no such thing as a bond as a condition of employment.  The government's employees don't need a bond because they have qualified immunity from suit.  The only way to pierce the immunity is bring a constitutional tort.  For federal employees the suit is called a "Bivens Action".  I am intimately familiar with this process because another federal agent and I sued our government employer for a 4th amendment unreasonable search and seizure claim as is pertains to rigged random drug testing.  We won, but lost.  The federal judge concluded that the government had indeed violated our 4th amendment rights, but that our government supervisors were still entitled to qualified immunity because they could not be expected to know the intricacies of the 4th amendment.  It's only the friggin Constitution after all.  Lawsuits are expensive and time consuming.  The government will nearly always indemnify its employees acting within the scope of their employment.  They can be wrong and still be protected as long as their belief was reasonable.   They have unlimited resources to wear you down.   I'm not bitter, but no longer naive about the concept of justice.

I agree that it pays to know your rights, the laws and local regs and have those at your disposal, but it can still go wrong with the discretionary powers of the law.   Coming off too strong could cause you to fail the attitude test and lead to more problems with badge happy police. 

Sorry for the rant but after 30 odd years of law enforcement,  27 yrs as a fed, I am still riled by the injustice of the arbitrary and capricious powers of police. 

I spent 5 days out at Sawtooth, N. NV desert practicing with the 7000.  I lost a couple days to some summer electrical storm activity and a little rain.  There was actually some big rain out towards Imlay, but the weather was tolerable at Sawtooth.  Low 90's during the heat of the day and high 50's at night.  I tried the Bogene silent threshold settings to combat the electrical activity, but still was a struggle.  I'm not knowledgeable enough about the area to get over any serious gold, but I scored 5 tiddlers adding up to a whopping 1.7 grams.  The smallest won't register even 1 grain on my scale.  These came from obviously pounded areas judging by the dig holes.  The ground was relatively quiet so I nearly maxed out the 7000 and moved at a snails pace.  I settled on the Bogene setting for this crumb hunt, adjusting volume and target signal to a manageable level of morse code type background chatter, I think Nevada Chris uses a similar setting. The faintest target signal would just rise above or smooth out background chatter.  It worked for me, but its all a matter of personal preference.  Running the 7000 with that much power would not be my choice for a prospecting mode, but certainly proved itself on known gold producing ground.  I kicked a lot of hotrocks and dug a bunch of tiny ferrous targets all part of the learning curve. Some frustrating target recovery efforts with that coil.  Finding a sub-grain piece at about 2 inches improved my confidence in this beast for sure.  As Steve H has pointed out, "if you're finding the little ones, the big ones will take care of themselves".

On my last day I ran into a local prospector, Smokey who claims he taught Lunk everything he knows about detecting, not really but he spoke highly of Lunk.  He has also met Steve H. and Reno Chris out there.  He showed me some pictures of pounds of gold from the old days of the White's Goldmaster and untouched ground.  At 76 he's still going strong with a passion for detecting.

All in all, I enjoyed my trip.  Decent weather, tolerable food and good health, can't ask for much more than that.  I'm still learning this 7000, but I'm looking forward to some new low and slow opportunities.

You probably saw my tracks around that same spot from 2 weeks ago. I followed the logging road down and hiked a long way down to the creek. The creek was posted no prospecting every 100 ft.

My Dr suggested Zyrtec antihistamine. I took it everyday during a 2 week prospecting trip. I was exposed to a lot of poison oak, it was unavoidable. I still got the itchy bumps, but it never really broke out like before. In the past I've had to take non anabolic steroids to break up the reaction. Antihistamines worked for me.

You could not have had a better instructor plus an amazing historical place to hunt. Congrats

Yeah, we went down to the main pit and I saw all the spots where you guys found gold, including the Lucky Lundy and Mrs. Lucky sweet spot.  Looks like excellent rattlesnake country.  Mike ran into one small one.