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Lanny

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    Golden Grams Of Goodness: Nugget Shooting Stories

    in Detector Prospector Forum

    Posted

    Hydraulic Pit Gold

    (I wrote this story a long time ago, but for the rookies, there might be a tip or two . . . )

    I was detecting in a hydraulic pit one day, way back when I was using the Minelab 2100 full-time (still a solid gold-finding machine!).

    I was finding little brass boot nails, copper wire, blasting caps, old square nails (of all sizes), mine tunnel rail spikes, dozer-blade shavings, cigarette package foil, bits of old tin can (AKA, can-slaw) . . . I was hitting everything but gold! 

    I wandered over to a rise on the side of the pit where there were some white-barked quaking aspens. It was a sizzling summer day with the patented cobalt blue sky of the Rockies, and that shade in the aspens looked mighty inviting. 

    From upslope, a cool breeze brought the fragrant scent of fresh, mountain pine.

    Having been given the perfect recipe for some relaxation, I sat down and pondered what I'd been up to. The pit was huge, and I'd been hammering the exposed bedrock, and any places where there was any clay deposited tight on the bedrock. (I guess it was good that I'd been finding the junk, as it proved the area wasn't totally hunted out, but I wanted some gold, and I was tired of hitting only junk.) 

    As I sat in the shade and took a break, I suddenly noticed lots of river rock around the base of the trees, a thing I'd failed to notice before. I looked at the rise above the aspens,  and I saw where river rocks were poking from the slope as well. Freshly inspired, I took my shovel and peeled off the surface material to expose even more water-rounded rock.

    I fired up the detector and passed it over the rocks and worked my way along the edge of the rise. To my amazement, I got a signal! Of course, I automatically assumed it was another nail, as most of that hydraulic pit could have been refiled on a claim map as a nail mine! 

    (To elaborate a bit about old nails, I've been fooled by the small tips of square nails before, sometimes they sound just like a nugget. )

    Anyway, I dug down and cleared away some of that river rock. The dirt looked like original deposit, undisturbed virgin ground. Furthermore,  as I looked at the rise, it made sense. Where I was digging was obviously a small hump of intact old channel, a piece left by the hydraulic miners.  The only clue as to why it had been left was that perhaps due to all of the nails at the base of the hump, there must have been some sort of building there that they didn't want to take out with the water cannons. 

    At any rate, I kept digging, and the signal got stronger. Pretty soon, about eight inches down, I saw bedrock. I passed the coil over the spot and the sound was nice and sweet. 

    This was shale bedrock, with lots of fractures packed with clay, and lots of small river stones tight on as well as jammed down into it. I pinpointed the signal and carefully scraped down through the clay and small stones. There on the bedrock was a sassy nugget! It was very flat, but shaped just  like the sole of a shoe, about the size of a Barbie Doll boot, only thicker, and somewhat larger. 

    Naturally, I decided to detect the area more, but I got blanked. 

    But then came the thing that can stop a nugget hunter cold, the battle over whether to strip more overburden to expose the bedrock. (Was this a lone nugget, or could there be some pals somewhere?) 

    I've faced this decision many times while throwing off hundreds of pounds of annoying rock, only to find nothing. But, the place had a good feel to it, plus the shade was a nice bonus, so I decided to tear into it. 

    (As a side note, my buddy invented a slick rock fork that I had with me that day. He took a manure-fork and heated the tines and bent them about halfway down their length at a right angle. Then he cut the sharp tips off, leaving safe, blunt ends. This is a dream tool for raking off river rock from hillsides and bedrock, the long handle making the work easier. Plus, any heavies like gold will fall through the tines and stay put.)

    Using the repurposed fork, I found that the overburden varied from about six inches to a foot, and the rocks varied from cobbles to watermelon-sized boulders. 

    At last I'd cleared an area about the size of two half-ton truck beds. It took a lot of work, but I'd produced a nice patch of exposed bedrock that had the same covering of clay and small river stone as the previous spot that had given up a nugget. 

    I ran the coil over the area and got no signal at all! I slowed down and ran it perpendicular to the way I'd detected it the first time. This time I got a whisper. I hauled out some sniping tools, went to work, and the signal was slightly louder.

    I used a stiff-bristled brush and scrubbed the bedrock. I detected the spot again, and the signal was nice and repeatable. I got out a bent, slot screwdriver (end bent at 90 degrees), and I worked that bedrock hard. It started to break off in flakes, and small sheets,  and my efforts exposed a crevice! I dug down deeper and the crevice got a bit wider, then little stones packed in a wet, dark-stained sandy clay started popping out; this can be a very good sign, even with a crevice being narrow.

    I ran the edge of the coil along the crevice and the sound was definitely crisper. I took out a small sledge from my pack and a wide, thin rock chisel. I cut down on either side of the signal in that bedrock crevice, then I slanted back toward the heart of the crevice itself, breaking out the rock and exposing the contents of the little pocket. I scraped all of the material out of the crevice and put it in a plastic scoop. I ran it under the coil and was rewarded with a nice smooth, crisp sound. 

    I sorted the scoop's material under the coil to reveal a flat nugget, its body still wedged in between two pieces of bedrock. Moreover, because that little rascal had been standing on its edge, that was why it had been so stealthy in the crevice! 

    I cleaned along the rest of the crevice and found two more nuggets, smaller than the first and second nuggets, but nice to have nonetheless. 

    I went back to the same spot a couple of weeks later and really cleared off a large section of that hump. You'd have been proud to see the rocks fly that day; nonetheless, I found no more gold.

    Isn't that the way it goes? 

    All the best, 

    Lanny
     

    Equinox On Bedrock Gold?

    in Detector Prospector Forum

    Posted

    It's been my experience that any detector with the appropriate gold circuitry will find gold in the bedrock and the cracks if the conditions aren't too hot for it to handle the mineralization, and from what I've been told, the Nox is wired and programmed to get the job done.

    Seeing the gold in the bedrock or seeing it in the dirt is what great nugget machines do. The higher-end ones will punch deeper into severe mineralization (rock or soil), and that's why they demand the big bucks, but for shallower gold, where the conditions aren't crazy insane, you should be OK.

    All the best,

    Lanny

    Daughters First Trip To The Gold Claim

    in Detector Prospector Forum

    Posted

    The golden discovery of the day had nothing to do with the yellow metal . . .

    Fantastic way to build lasting memories, 24k day.

    I have a 2.5 yr. old granddaughter, and we had her out panning when she was a year old (panning used loosely, she was dipping it in the water and swirling the pan around). We're trying to give her a healthy dose of gold fever.

    All the best, and thanks for the pictures of your fun,

    Lanny

    Jim Straight Passes Away

    in Detector Prospector Forum

    Posted

    Had some great correspondence with him over the years, and he was a supremely helpful person, and he always made me feel like he'd known me a lifetime, a rare person indeed.

    Thanks for the notification, as I was beginning to wonder why he had gone silent on some of his ongoing threads.

    All the best,

    Lanny

    Headed For The Land Down Under

    in Detector Prospector Forum

    Posted

    You're having a great adventure, and I'm sure as you keep swinging that coil and continue nugget hunting, you'll find the gold, whether it's the memories that will last a lifetime, the new and unfamiliar scenery and animals, the flashbacks you're having to better days in the USA, or the great people you'll meet.

    All the best as you're out there living the dream,

    Lanny

    Golden Grams Of Goodness: Nugget Shooting Stories

    in Detector Prospector Forum

    Posted

    Gold Monster Outing

    Went to the gold camp in the Rocky Mountains last week. The weather was gorgeous, all kinds of songbirds back, plus the flowers of the mountain meadows are in full bloom, purple crocus and shooting stars, yellow buttercups, multi-coloured Johnny Jump-ups, etc., etc.

    At the camp as I was checking over the living quarters (camper and two travel trailers), a humming bird buzzed straight past my right ear! That snappy racket from those wings going a million miles an hour is unmistakable. So, we set out the humming bird feeders hoping to catch a glimpse of the beautiful and dazzling red to orange coloured throat of the Roufus variety before they head farther north, and we’ll keep an eye out for the beautiful iridescent green of the more common ones that stick around all season.

    My wife unpacked her shiny new Minelab Gold Monster, and for those of you familiar with the machine, there’s not much reading to do, but I watched a whack of user videos before we hit the mountains so I could give my little darlin’ some tips and guidelines as she set out to learn how to use it.

    I picked a spot for her to try her luck on, an old fairly level place in a valley where some placer miners once had their wash-plant. The claim is now abandoned, last worked by some modern-day Chinese miners, but they left the area under a gloomy cloud, and I doubt they’ll ever be back.

    I gave my June Bride some general instructions on how to run the Gold Monster (I’d never used one before, but the YouTube and other user-posted videos were a great help. Furthermore, I’d like to give a shout-out to Bill Southern for his wonderful educational efforts.). But, we figured the Monster out quite quickly, and that’s why I’m grateful to Steve Herschbach for recommending I get my sweetheart one due to its ease of use, and kudos to Steve and Jonathan Porter for their write-ups on the machine which helped me quickly get a handle on the basics; their input was invaluable.

    By eye-balling the old site, I could tell pretty close to where the Chinese had pulled out their wash-plant, so I used that information to gauge where I’d have my wife start to detect as there are always some “spill” areas that offer a better shot at finding a nugget or two. Having said that, it was easy to see they had bladed and bucketed the area carefully after they were done to gather any spilled material; those miners were no greenhorns.

    I blocked off in a rough rectangle an area I thought might pay, and right away, my wife was hitting targets, but they were almost all ferrous, so she kept experimenting toggling back and forth between discriminate and all iron, learning the different sounds, learning how to make it easier to ID targets (to get them to sound off louder), learning how to read the little bar graph when it gave its indication of non-ferrous more than ferrous, as well as getting used to the sounds of shallow vs. deeper targets, and learning how to use the magnet wand to save time while sorting trash signals. (To elaborate, she’s a great panner, but a green, green rookie when it comes to nugget shooting.)

    The thing about detecting an old wash-plant set-up is that it gets very easy to quickly tell where the repairs (welds, patches, etc.) took place, and the numerous bits of welding rod sure make for some interesting sounds, and curious readings on the graph! Having said that, the Monster’s discriminator sure came in handy, and yes, depth was lost, but by using the small round coil, target separation was much better, and I was impressed at how my wife was able to move slowly from target to target, separating their locations, as she dug out signals.

    While she was test-driving the Monster, I was going for a comfortable cruise with my Gold Bug Pro. That is one hot machine, at least mine is. (I’ve heard detecting folklore that some machines leave the factory “hotter” than others, and I have no idea it that’s true or not, but the one I have is a firecracker for sure, super sensitive, and a true gold hound for sniffing out gold from tiny flakes to meaty nuggets.)

    I started to hit non-ferrous targets in one slice of her search area, so I marked a few so she could check them out. Well, those miners had liked their cigarettes, and there were plenty of crumpled bits of foil from the wrappers as well as some other kind of lead foil with a gold-coloured outer covering that made for some increased heartbeat, but only turned out to be a bust.

    After having dug some of those duds, she called me over. “Hey, what do you think of this signal?”. She was getting a great reading on the Monster, and it sounded sweet too. She worked the ground for a bit chasing the target around with her scoop (when a target runs from the scoop, it’s usually something heavy, as most ferrous trash seems to hop quickly into the scoop). Dropping the dirt from the scoop onto the coil, she moved things around and there sat a pretty little picker, about a quarter of a gram! Man, was she pumped!!

    So, she kept on working that rectangle while I ranged farther afield with the Bug Pro, and I too found all kinds of cigarette foil, and that maddening, thick lead foil with gold coloring--craziest stuff I’ve ever seen, and I have no idea what it originally contained. I recovered a small aluminum parts tag, several electrical connectors, bits of lead, and pieces of broken brass likely from a bushing of some kind.

    My wife gave another shout, and over I went. Her meter was pinning consistently in the sweet zone, the signal sound nice and crisp. Capturing the target, she threw the dirt in a gold pan. Next, she then used the Garret Carrot to chase the signal around the pan. She moved some dirt then cried out, “Look at this. Is this gold?” At first, it was hard to tell what it was due to a covering of grey clay, but using a bit of water soon revealed a sassy nugget! If I’d thought she was excited about her first find, it was nothing compared to her reaction on that one!

    I can only come to this conclusion: The Minelab Gold Monster is a sweet machine that sure produces sweet results, because it’s so easy to use, and it makes my sweetheart happy (couldn’t resist punning on sweet, forgive me).

    All the best,

    Lanny

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