Condor

I finally popped for the 7000 after having a pretty good year with the 2300.  Mike G took me out to his family claim in one of CA. famous hydraulic pits for a bit of practice and familiarization.  Within 10 minutes I found a tiny .25 gram flattened gold nug at impressive depth for something that small, perhaps 4 or 5 inches.  I pushed pretty hard for the next 3 hrs finding one more similar sized nugget.  What I hadn't counted on was the terrain.  We were hunting a steep hillside with a lot of cobble piles, downed timber, deep gullies and iron trash.  The 7000 is a beast in that kind of terrain.  No amount of tricked up harness/bungee support will help when you're pushing that big coil up and down in all directions against gravity.  

As you may recall in one of Steve's original posts about reasons not to get the 7000, he cautioned that it is best suited for open, flat ground.  I was wore out after a 6 hr trial.  Me and the 7000 were soundly beaten by another friend of Mike's pushing a belt mounted Eureka Gold with small coil.  Despite the small coil, he could actually cover more ground, under, through and around the obstacles with a nearly weightless machine and iron discrimination.  A better tool for those conditions without a doubt. 

It took me several hrs to get my ears and brain accustomed to the chatter from the 7000.  I ran it in the preferred settings, High Yield/Difficult, gain 9, Smoothing off, but it just seemed noisy.   I personally never thought the 2300 was that noisy and I ran mine through an small amplifier to boost the volume.  Its all in what you're used to and I can understand the GPX users rocky transition.   

I need a few days in some more suitable terrain to really get a good feel for this machine.  I may have to run out to the sagebrush flats of N. NV.  I've got some promising shallow bedrock desert washes back in AZ that I can't wait to try, once the weather gets a little more tolerable. 

Until then boys and girls, keep er low and slow.

Fine flood gold recovered and NRS kayak loaded

DeathRay,

Some might argue that I'm less studly and more stupid for even getting involved in this kind of crap.  The hike with that load took me 4.5 hours and a half gallon of water.  I saw the anvil last year.  Steve H. and I spent a short week down there at the spring and detected some of the old diggings.  Steve lives a cleaner life so I doubt he was even winded coming up that trail.

Steve and I saw a group of Do-Gooders round-trip the trail on a clean-up detail.  One of the women Do-Gooders came down the trail in flip-flops.  She was wearing a cotton smock dress and we nearly saw more than we wanted as she was getting water from the spring at our little camp by your anvil.

My ordeal was even worse on my first trip up with gear on Thur.  My truck was still parked at the Euchre Bar trailhead.  I had a friend willing to come pick me up, but I couldn't get phone service, so I dropped my pack and hiked the railroad tracks back to the Euchre Bar parking lot to fetch my truck.  I was one hot, tired and thirsty sombitch after that little addition to an already brutal hike.

Not only is that trail 1000 ft per mile up, but the middle section follows an exposed rock ridge with no shade and loose rock just inviting you to make a misstep.  I have become a firm believer in trekking poles and I'm certain they have saved years of wear and tear on my knees and hips.  

I'm spending the next few weeks in Sacramento and looking to do some detecting anytime anyplace.  Anyone who wouldn't mind an extra for detecting give me a shout.  I promise I won't whine in tough conditions. 

The rest of my story was delayed as DeathRay can truly appreciate because I spent 2 days hiking my gear out of the river at Green Valley.  The Green Valley trail is a nasty piece of work and each time I've hiked it over the years I swear I'll never do it again.  This time I mean it.  Yesterday I hiked out with a little over 70lbs of gear, I thought I was going to die.  I had to keep reminding myself how good the cold beer in my truck was going to taste at the end of this ordeal.

Back to the story.

Day 3:  I stayed in the steep canyon between Euchre Bar and Green Valley.  I found another nice gravel beach with decent shade and a quiet pool.  I found a fair amount of flood gold high up the bank.  I took one of the small Angus Mackirk drop riffle sluices and rigged it with a 1750 GPH bilge pump and 12 volt L Ion battery.  I glued in V mat in the front part of the sluice and that area caught most of the flood gold.  The drop riffle sluices need a lot of water to run correctly and just not compatible with this super fine flood gold I was finding.  I wish I could have run that material through the Gold Cube sluice.  But, that would mean another 30 lbs of gear.

Day 4:  I pushed on through the steep narrow canyon and reached the upper end of Green Valley.  The going got a lot harder because of the shallow water.  I spent most of the day roping the kayak down through the rocky shallows.  As I pointed out earlier, roping the kayak down was not that strenuous, it's following the kayak on foot through the shallows that's a killer.  The river was too shallow to float/swim, and too deep to boulder hop.  Those river rocks especially the serpentine were slicker than elf snot.  I tumbled too many times to count but managed to stay relatively injury free. 

At the upper end of Green Valley I found someone's camp though he must have been out for supplies.  He had an impressive 4 ft hole going on the front edge of a boulder bar.  He was obviously  way more dedicated to his prospecting that I was.  He was moving 100 + lb boulders with a digging bar and full size shovel.  All I had was my trusty short handled spade and my detecting pick.  

Day 5: I continued through Green Valley and the going got steadily worse.  Daytime temps were kicking up and shaded landings were scarce.  I reached hard decision time.  There are no trails out of the river until Pickering Bar/Touro Mine area below Iowa Hill.  I knew from past experience that I was looking at 2 or 3 days of tough slogging in this shallow water to reach Pickering Bar.  At higher water a good kayaker can make it all the way to Mineral Bar campground in one day, but this low water makes progress slow and painful. 

I was a half mile past Green Valley and opted for the known quantity of getting out at Green Valley.  I started warping that kayak back upstream.  At midday I found a small shady spot and pulled out to rest.  As I explored around I found a section of bedrock serpentine and poked around in some depressions.  Each pan had 30 to 40 colors of superfine flood gold.  I'll post a picture of the results of a half bucket of 1/2 inch screened material.  I had no whisk broom to really clean out the bedrock so I probably left behind more gold than I recovered.  A gold vac and the Gold Cube would have made some impressive recoveries in that area.  I gave the area a good go and found nothing remotely resembling a picker, just tiny flood gold.  I still had a ways to go upstream and pushed on when the sun was a little more forgivable.  I reached the last downstream trail access at Green Valley just before dark. 

More later...

Part One

Every year I embark on a new adventure, a personal challenge to prove 61 is not getting old.  Normally, I have my rock solid 20 yr old son to help me with the heavy stuff.  Not this year.  I decided that with the low water in California gold country, I should try a float trip on the Wild and Scenic, North Fork of the American River.  I've done this trip in the past, though rarely had much opportunity to gold prospect. 

I decided to make use of my NRS inflatable kayak.  It weighs in at a little over 50 lbs and rolls into a manageable bundle that can be backpacked.

1st mistake was deciding to cart the whole load, kayak, camping gear and prospecting gear in one trip using a big pneumatic tire garden wagon.  The trail at Euchre Bar is a very good trail running 6 to 8 percent downhill grade and generally wide enough for the wagon, however; there is the matter of gravity and the whole objects in motion tend to stay in motion mess.  So the garden cart ran away with me and tumbled down the first switchback.  Ouch, 3 trips down through the poison oak and grass burrs to fetch it all back up to the trail and re-pack.  I ended up walking backwards down the trail holding the wagon back to keep it from running me over.  In retrospect, I should have done 2 backpack trips down the trail and saved time and effort. 

I got it all down the trail, but my legs were so sore from hiking backwards holding back the wagon that I just camped where the trail ended at the river.  One good thing with the kayak, it has a drop-stitch floor that inflates.  It turns out to be a damn fine sleeping cot on any rough and uneven ground. 

Day 2:  I got everything packed and started downstream.  I immediately found that the water levels were about 10 inches too low to kayak the river.  Every 100 yards to so I had to rope the kayak down rocky shallows.  The kayak with camping and prospecting gear floated the shallow water well enough, but it just couldn't accommodate my 200 lb bulk.  Roping it down was not a problem, but walking/wading those algae slick boulders was a hazard at every turn. I wore a pair of thin neoprene/lycra kayaking pants and cheap knee pads that saved me an endless number of barked shins.  I was in no hurry so I stopped just after noon at the first decent sandbar in the canyon.  The canyon was narrow and steep so all but direct midday sun was blocked.  The weather was pleasant and the water temps quite tolerable.  I got out my gold pan and shovel and sampled all the obvious spots on my little sand spit.  A little flood gold, but nothing to shout about. 

More Later....

I loved the Bogene setting on my old 4000 at Moore Creek, AK.  The main reason was the sheer volume of hot rocks and auditory overload from running it for long days.  I lowered the threshold to one or two notches below audible and maxed out the sensitivity which cut out about half of the hot rock sounds.  What I listened for then was anything that brought the threshold up and relatively steady.  The Moore Creek "hotrocks" were more often "cold rocks" which caused the classic Boing sound after you passed the rock.  With no threshold you got a huge Boing which could not be repeated in the other direction.  If you went over them with an audible threshold, and swung the coil slow enough, you got a null then Boing sound.   Gold for the most part caused a soft rising meew signal in both directions.  To be fair, we were pushing big coils and looking for the big gold, quarter oz and larger.  I found a 4.9 oz specimen nugget down about 18" that offered the ever so faint mew sound.  It was surrounded by hotrocks and I doubt I  would have distinguished it from the hotrocks with an audible threshold.  I bet Steve wishes he could revisit his old Moore Creek property with the 7000.  I'm still waiting on my backordered 7000.  Chompin at the bit as it were. 

We'll make a few assumptions.  Hot ground in the US is generally not the same as hot ground in AU.  So we're here in USA, no particular EMI and you're purring along in your favorite ZED settings.  You come to some hot ground, let's say red clay with a smattering of hot rocks or more likely "cold rocks" that is the rocks that tend to make the threshold go null then wang the audio when the threshold tries to catch up.  The ground is causing your machine to get all twitchy and you can no longer hear the subtle threshold changes for faint targets.

In this situation, which one adjustment would you reach for first?  Lower the gain/sensitivity, raise the smoothing, switch timings etc..?

I need some ideas on getting a fair price for gold jewelry.  My sister and I inherited gold and diamond jewelry that appraises between 30 and 40k.  The local jeweler who actually crafted many of the pieces is offering sub-wholesale 11k, according to him most of the gold will be scraped, diamonds reset in new jewelry or used for repairs.  Many of the gold chains are in pristine shape so I doubt he'll actually scrap them.  I'm not keen on screwing around with a bunch of "tire kickers" and scammers on Ebay.  What kind of options are out there? 

The sheer stupidity and overblown egos continue to amaze me.  Every time Minelab comes out with a new machine, the same tired blathering of armchair prospectors find their audience.  "Minelab are money grubbing whores, JP and the product testers who share their knowledge and experience are on the Minelab tit, my other detector can do all that and more, blah blah blah."  Heard it all before.

JP takes so much of this crap, and all of us benefit from his willingness to step into the fray and provide hands on knowledge and experience.  I remember the old Finders Forum, good lord you would have thought that JP was the anti-christ.

There is a reason that Minelab relies on JP to do the beta testing.  He's out there day in and day out, every year.  While it is unlikely that JP gets a commission on detector sales, he well deserves one.   Not many people can say they have earned a living, kept a family clothed and educated, all from gold prospecting. He's also helped me and hundreds of others with his timely advice and guidance.

We need a category of "JP says..." so that we can skip to the important stuff and bypass the thoughtless drivel. 

To all the GPZ haters.  "DON'T BUY IT" and tell your story walking down the road. 

Steve has done a great job at keeping this forum on the track of a thoughtful and meaningful exchange of ideas.  People should be free to express criticism and opinion, but do it nicely.  As Pink Floyd says: "I mean good manners don't cost nothin do they, eh" (Us and Them)

Most definitely Detectorist and familiarity with the machine.   I owned a GPX for 2 years, putting in maybe 80 hrs and considered myself proficient.  As it turns out, not by a long shot.  I went to Moore Creek where I could detect 10 to 12 hrs a day, every day.  I had the time and opportunity to experiment.  If I could get a repeatable tone, I tried different settings, different sweep speeds etc.  I learned more as a detectorist and about my detector in that first week than I had learned in the previous 2 years.   I learned more about low and slow, listening for the faintest threshold change.  Steve was there when I left a double blip tone in the ground because it sounded like a nail.  Fortunately I went back because I got a similar tone that was gold.  Low and behold, a quarter ounce nugget that had the classic double blip deep rising tone that is generally a big old rusted nail.  No offense to the stalwarts that detected Moore Creek, but the best machine and coil combos money could buy,  still did not guarantee results.  Plenty of gold was found in holes that other people abandoned.   The weekly tote board results generally had 2 or 3 people finding more than 75 percent of the gold.  I saw many people with state of the art machines detect for a full week and not find gold.   My point is to reiterate what Steve and others are saying.  A $10,000 machine in the hands of a hobbyist probably won't beat a dedicated prospector with his tried and true, beat up ole trusty steed.  I sold my GPX and worn out a coil cover on my 2300 for decent results, and now trying to justify the jump to 7000.  Maybe you guys want to crowd fund me on the purchase and live vicariously for the results.    I'm just saying, one of us would be really happy with the deal, everybody else, not so much. 

Before GPS, my truck misplaced itself a few times, even in the desert things can get a little confused after a long hike. I've never been lost, but I've been a might bewildered a few times.

Does their presence make gold nearby more likely?

I've been exploring new areas around Yuma. Got way out there today and hit these guys. Obviously some kind of copper ore, but Yuma isn't known for copper production. I quit digging after six of them. They blow your ears away with the SDC, it could detect them easily at 18 inches, I didn't want to dig any deeper than that. They run from 4 to 6 ozt. Maybe they can be cut and polished, or maybe they cure arthritis, put one in each shoe and walk around all day.
Hey Reno Chris, these are from out near Redcloud Mine, should I keep looking for gold near these rocks.

Hopefully we can get JP to weigh in on not only theoretic depth, but daily experience on let's say a 1.5 gram nugget. We all recognize gold content, ground conditions etc will affect depth, but an 8inch coil has an inherent depth limitation. I'm not bitching mind you, I've found an oz of Yuma gold over the past month, and I've found gold measuring in grains at impressive depths. I just want a better understanding of my limitations.

I went back to the deep canyon this morning. I found 2 that I missed the other day. It seems peculiar that I found 4 quality nuggets in there with a total weight of over 1/4 oz, but nothing deeper that about 8 inches. The canyon is all bedrock with overburden ranging from 0 to about 2 ft. I covered just shy of 2 miles of this good looking ground and obviously had decent success, but just wondering what I might be missing. I found no nuggets on the margins of the wash, everything would have been right in moving water during heavy rain runoff. Today's fatboy was smack in the middle of the wash, but found a hidey hole in jagged bedrock. Perhaps when that new Minelab Super detector comes around, this spot will give up its secrets. Today's take, 3.3, and .4 grams.

I found the anti shake key, see if this helps.

I suck with that smart phone camera.  I'll check the settings and see if I can get a better shot.  The heavy, dark colored nugget has attached quartz, you'd think I could find a decent ledge or reef of that stuff one of these days.  All that hiking cuts down on my time with women who suffer a want of chastity.  Has to be a benefit in there somewhere, though I haven't figured it out. 

I expanded my search and ventured into an area of steep canyons, shallow bedrock, though not generally considered a gold producing area. I plotted the course with Google Earth and estimated a 3 mile zone with a continuous desert wash. I hiked less than an hr and started seeing exposed bedrock. I unpacked the SDC and within 5 minutes got a good target. The large flat nugget was in a shallow depression. Wow, I thought I was going to need a burro to hike out all the gold I was about to find. No joy for the next hr and a half. I reached a huge dry waterfall and decided to turn back. I took it slow concentrating on only exposed or very shallow bedrock. I picked up the heaviest nugget jammed in a bedrock crack, I had to chip away at the edges to get it out. 100 yards further, the last nugget was in narrow crack in a smooth bedrock raceway. This turns out to be my best morning, 3 hrs, 3 nuggets, 5.2 grams. I'll give her another go tomorrow, less walking and coil to the ground. The surprising thing was no little crumbs, just decent nuggets that any detector would have found..

I have noticed the same thing, dry scrub brush gives you a static burst, sometimes a couple passes to clear it. My old GPX with coiltek coil did the same thing. The NF coil improved it. I was in some hot ground today, even though the SDC handles it, I know I'm over running the threshold, I hear it catching up and overshoot on some hotrocks. It stops me and forces me to slow down. You'll be surprised at the power of that SDC, keep swinging low and slow and you can't help but find gold. Call me if you're in the Yuma neighborhood.

Hey Steve,

How would you like to follow behind Glenn with the SDC?

I got out for a few hrs and dug a bunch of bird shot, but found this guy in a spot that screams gold. A bedrock bench with a foot of overburden. Based on the birdshot, I doubt it was ever detected. I need to pull off that overburden and give her another go. 3 grams, we're getting there.

I went out to a new old spot from last year. I had taken a few pickers off an old bench with shallow bedrock using the Gold Bug II. The overburden is 8 to 10 inches with decomposing schist bedrock. The bedrock was almost too hot for the GBII, hard to separate the tones. I had raked down the overburden and went over it with the GPX 4000 with 16 inch NF round mono, no joy. I went back yesterday with the SDC and immediately got a faint tone. The bigger of the nuggets was right in that decomposed bedrock. With no more signals, I again pulled down the overburden as best I could with my short handled pick. Got another faint tone 8 inches from the first nugget. I opened up the hole and the signal just wouldn't improve. I kept opening the hole thinking the target must be in the side of the hole. Still no luck and the target just wouldn't improve. In frustration I used the pick to bust up the bedrock and pulled the whole mess out. Bang, now the target was blowing my ears off in the dig pile. That was the long looking nugget. I waved over the hole and got another faint tone. Same issue, I couldn't get the tone to improve until I got it out of the hole. My assumption is that the hot bedrock is somehow diffusing the quality of the signal, even when I'm right on the target. Once out of the hole, they sounded off like the quality of nuggets they are. 3.5 grams total. They must be fairly porous, awfully light for their overall size.

Definitely over an ounce and now that the weather is improving, I'm looking forward to searching some new old areas.  Some of those pieces are sub-grain and don't even register on my scale.  I continue to be amazed at how it can detect those tiny pieces at decent depth, I think the deepest sub-grain was 3 inches.  You really have to have a plastic scoop to recover them.  The one problem is bird shot, that detector loves bird shot and they are a bitch to recover.  My Gold-Bug II and Gold Bug Pro are gathering dust.  Already sold my GPX, these guys are next. 

Here's the photo of 3 weeks worth of detecting with the SDC2300. These were mostly around Yuma, a couple hrs each morning, all within 45 minutes of home. Some were from out near Palm Springs. Finally dropping to mid 80's, I'll extend my hrs and range next week. Total weight 19 grams.

Best decision I've made in detectors.. I get out for a couple hrs 4 or 5 days a week in yuma. I've recovered just over half oz over the past 3 weeks. Its the difference between finding a few bits or dragging that skunk around. I found a sub-grain piece at about 3 inches yesterday, unbelievable. Capped the morning with a 2.4 gram piece that howled low tone. I'll shoot a photo of this mass of dinks I've accumulated and post later. The Phase Tech headphone adapter makes a huge difference since I prefer in-ear earphones. Sweet package and keeps me motivated even if it is dink hunting. I'm quite sure the big ones will come along when I get back into some virgin ground.

Went back out to iron stone hell, long walk, much cooler, only needed 2 liters of water. I concentrated on a placer hillside where the nugglets hide amongst the iron stones. No trash, but used the Steve H concept of clearing all the targets. I kicked, picked and dug at least 100 iron stones to find 15 little nuggets. Total weght 1.9 grams. The poor SDC howled on some golf ball sized iron stone at depth. They seem to build up a halo when they're down deep, the target response is much less once they're out of the hole. Only a couple nugget targets screamed dig me. Everything else was just threshold warbles.