Lanny

Glad to know I don't have a carbon-copy out there Fred, as for the memory getting worse, it's part of the challenge of getting seasoned, I guess . . . All the best, Lanny

Thanks Simon! That's really different that you're trying to kill your pines, and we're trying to save our pines and spruce from bugs and fires, as forestry is an exceptionally valuable resource here. However, thanks to your explanation, I now understand why your hills are bare, which I never quite understood, mystery solved. All the best Simon, and I hope you find a nugget big enough to cover your thumbnail, Lanny

Where do I chase the gold? Here's a few pictures, taken over the years, of one of the rugged areas where I chase the gold. And of course, the first picture, and the last picture, that's why I'm in those mountains; moreover, that's why I write the stories . . . All the best, Lanny

Golden Bonanza Days, Part 3: This section continues with the description of the cut and some of the detecting conditions.(I have been stunned sometimes by the gold I’ve found doing this bedrock examination or scouring process; It was a learning curve to stop the temptation to follow my eyes, but relying on the detector’s brain instead has been a tactic that has paid well.However, at other times when the bedrock was extremely hot or littered with highly reactive rocks, I’ve put the detectors away to rely on the slow process of sniping by using scrapers and crevicing tools to feel out the hidden gold traps. Of course, this tactic is used in areas where I’ve already been finding nice gold, and where all of a sudden with a bedrock composition/mineralization change or a sudden plague of hot-rocks tight on bedrock, I have to switch gears to look for the gold with the age-old, yet proven, process of sniping and panning. [I have a story about this as well for a later date.]The area my son was working was not an easy spot to detect. He was swinging his coil on that aforementioned steeply rising iron-hard slope of bedrock-wall, all while trying to keep his footing secure in order to gather targets, and yes he slipped more than once [as I did when I checked it later after he’d finished], so it was definitely a sketchy place to work. We both had a few scares, but the gold was there for the getting, so we were game.That wall of bedrock held all kinds of little traps [we even had to do hammer and chisel work to free nuggets], and those traps held wonderful gold. The hardness of the bedrock made trying to reduce it with machinery economically unfeasible for the placer miners as the damage to profit margin ratio would no support the cost of repairs involved; moreover, the miners recovered incredible gold regardless of what they had to leave behind as that ancient dinosaur channel that bedded the entire cut paid off exceptionally well.So, in summary, the composition of the cut was undulating bedrock with a variety of low spots, crevices, water-filled traps, small yet intact areas of ancient stream-run, large gutters, warped and twisted bedrock, contact zones of bedrock with varying compositions of hardness, terraced ledges, etc., plus a steeply sloping wall of invincible bedrock riddled with small gold traps.) To be continued:All the best,Lanny

Hi Fred, I hope there's not another Lanny out there chasing the gold and posting on the forums, that would just confuse me , and I'm already confused enough as the older I get, the harder it gets to remember things. Thanks for your kind comments about the pictures of the country and the gold. The Rocky Mountains certainly are beautiful, and I have the privilege of chasing the gold in a country where there are still massive wilderness areas, all while looking for the gold in the 2nd largest country in the world where almost no one lives, compared to its overall size that is. (For example, California has about three million more people packed into just one state!) All the best Fred, Lanny

JW, thanks for posting the pictures of your moose-sized nuggets!?? Those are the incredible pictures I remember, the photographs of your halcyon days when you were out gathering sassy NZ nuggets. (You really do take great photos and often set off your nuggets in interesting ways for effect.) As they say in the movie, Mother Lode, there's always one place you haven't looked . . . So, I'm sure you'll get your coil over some chunky stuff again one "barmy" day. I appreciate you taking the time to find these amazing pictures, nicely done, and all the best, Lanny

Thanks JW, so many pictures filed away and so many stories yet to tell, but it seems that perhaps more people enjoy pictures rather than reading stories, but I can see their point as pictures can quickly tell a story as well. As for the chunky gold, some of it is bigger than some of yours, but I recall other pictures you've posted of finds you've made of meatier gold, so I wish you and Simon nothing but the best in your quest to beef-up with bigger gold. All the best, and thanks for your comments, and your friendship, Lanny P.S. There's a guy here in my town that's a NZ WWII veteran, not a lot of those great men around these days, and fewer veterans worldwide every minute, tremendous sacrifice they made for all of us.

Congrats on doing it, still on my bucket-list. All the best, Lanny

Hi there Longhn, "Top ground is red with quartz, then about one to two feet of thick clay, bed rock, then bolder underneath... I think there maybe some gold in the bed rock". How did the bedrock get above the boulders? Is this broken bedrock that was stacked by hand-mining? Usually, the bedrock is below the boulders forming a foundation for the boulders to work down to. Have you found an literature on your area? For example, describing the material the gold runs in? For instance, smooth stream-worn rocks? Angular material? Only associated with larger material? Gold riding on the clay? False bedrock? These are all important things to know. I see your "well" is spanned by what look to be old narrow-gauge mining rails? Whatever you decide to do, remember the three rules of prospecting (after you've researched everything you can find about where the gold is usually found/what the gold travels with in your specific area: Rule 1, test. Rule 2, test. Rule 3, test. I hope you find a good spot and get some nice gold, as for your tunnel, does it continue for any length? Is that conglomerate over the tunnel mouth? If so, did the gold run under the conglomerate? Keep researching everything you can until you have/until you learn a few indicators to guide you in the search for gold in your area. All the best, Lanny

Here you go Fred. (I had no idea how long this would take . . .) Mountain scenery and that beautiful blue alpine sky. We grow tall mountains around here. The time of year when the bees get busy. Some of the ways the water moves around. All shut down getting ready for the move. Speed-panning wonder! This bedrock is heading uphill at an insane angle. My son trying a little high-banking, but he zeroed in that spot and quickly went back to detecting (just because a spot looks good, doesn't mean it is?). This bedrock has a great chance of hiding something . . . My robust, torquey blue mule. That diesel engine is just starting to get broke in (million mile Cummins wonders). My son cutting his teeth on the Minelab GPX 5000 (I hope his wife still likes me as he has a wonderful case of the fever!?). Look what the Gold Racer sniffed out: small stuff, and chunky pieces too! (The Bug Pro and the GPX accounted for a lot of sassy gold over the two days as well.) Some of the meat to go with the smaller potatoes. I think this picture says it all about the clichés about gold and rainbows. (Shot this picture from an excavation after a summer shower.) All the best, Lanny

A nice chunk indeed that has some serious iron-stained/mineral-stained quartz? I wonder what the percentage of gold is? Something to get the heart pumping for sure if those chunks found their way under a coil! All the best, Lanny

Thanks again for what you've done, and I tried to absorb as much of what you were saying as I could, did not think you were long-winded but felt you were trying to be as descriptive as possible about a new process. All the best, Lanny

Hi Fred, I've got to dive into my photos to grab some pictures for sure as I spent all of the free time I had writing the sections of the stories so far. It's just a time thing, but I have so many pictures (one of the curses [or benefits] of the computer/cell phone age). All the best, Lanny

Golden Bonanza Days, Part 2:In the meantime, I’d finished all of my adjustments on the Racer, and I went off to investigate a different spot, some way off in the excavation from the area my son was detecting, as I had seen some little pockets of intact channel that had some spidery cracks in the bedrock running outward from them on my initial walkthrough. After a few swings (no kidding), I had the coil over a soft sound. A bit of scraping later, and I’d trapped the signal in my scoop. Into the pan it went. (Now, please remember that I use a super-magnet on an extendable wand whenever I detect bedrock [worked recently or anciently], so it really helps eliminate ferrous trash, and this means that any target that goes into the scoop is non-ferrous.) After a few more swings, I’d hit on two more targets that went into the pans for my wife’s speed-panning operation. Then, a slew of targets went into the pans.Meanwhile, as I was collecting signals, my son was busy adding more targets to his pans. (I had two pans to fill, and he had two pans for target material as well.)During our nugget hunting, my wife set up her panning station in a convenient bedrock pool of crystal water, water about the temperature of glacial meltwater by the way, and she was ready to get her panning gloves wet (she uses those little gardening gloves that have rubber palms and fingers with a canvas back as they insulate well enough to take the sting out of the coldness), so she wandered over to my son to gather a pan of possible goodness, and she swung by me to grab one of my pans too.(To describe the site in more detail, there was a sloped ramp that led down into the excavation where the rock trucks had run back and forth to be filled by the excavator. There were the remnants of a pad by the ramp where the excavator had sat during the last scraping of the dirt for the last cleanup, the pad having been moved up above the level of the excavation so the last of the pay could be scraped from the bedrock.In opposition to this, the far end of the excavation had been worked first, the work proceeding backward in the direction of the exit ramp until the cleanup reached that location. What remained in the excavation or open-pit site were ridges of rising bedrock, deeper excavated low-lying areas where the bedrock was soft [or areas of contact zones where soft bedrock met hard] or where ancient channel material had gathered in natural gutters or larger crevices, and there were pools of standing water [I always check these with a waterproof coil] where seepage had found a way to fill depressions or where runoff from springs on the margins of the excavation had filled low spots. On a related note, some of the bedrock had been bent and warped by tremendous geological forces in the past, and these places held little concentrations of material left over from when the bedrock was super-hard enough to resist the might of the excavator’s bucket.In a few places there were small sections of friable rock [in this case slate] that when found, I always detect first, then later pan as those plates of perpendicular placement [in 90-degree opposition to the underlying bedrock] act as excellent gold traps, traps that were working in earnest as the dinosaurs plodded across the ancient streambed when large sections of the planet were in a more tropical state.As well, there were those aforementioned contact zones, always excellent places to detect as small slices of the softer rock were sometimes in place against the harder rock, or there were ledges, sometimes terraced, with bits of material intact, and these traps often produce some nice gold. [On a related note, I learned a long time ago to trust my detector, not my eyes when scouring bedrock. What I mean by this is that oftentimes bedrock appears to be solid, especially when is is of uniform color, so it seems a better use of time to detect areas where visible intact material is concentrated, but this is one of Mother Nature’s grand deceptions, whether the bedrock has been worked by recent miners or mother rock worked by the Sourdoughs.Mining tip for the rookies: always, always, always take the time to go slow to let the detector read the bedrock contours and surfaces, to check the little invisible gutters and pockets, and yes, to find the hidden crevices that snapped shut when some monstrous dinosaur tromped on it while crossing, or more likely, when some massive boulders tossed along those streambeds, by some titanic hydraulic event, forced their will upon the yielding bedrock.To be continued . . .All the best,Lanny

To find old sites or new ones with this technology really does look intriguing. Thanks for your time and effort, and all the best, Lanny

All the best on your trip, and I hope you find one big enough to use as a door stop! All the best, Lanny

The balance comes down to the expense for either renting a Vac-truck to do the job, buying a used one for that purpose, or buying a small excavator with the pivoting bucket. As the bedrock is not consistently rich, and as the bedrock is many times soft enough to allow the excavators and Cats with rippers to take sufficient bedrock, at which point does the cash outlay outstrip the potential income for the cost involved for alternative methods of bedrock recovery? Always a thing to ponder for good reason . . . All the best, Lanny

All kinds of great advice coming out of this thread, thanks Northeast! All the best, Lanny

Great advice, thanks! All the best, Lanny

Good to know, and I appreciate your kind sense of humour. All the best, Lanny

Many thanks for your kind words! All the best, Lanny

Much appreciated, and I'm glad you're enjoying the gold-chasing journey. The opportunity to chase the gold, given the conditions I enjoy, is wonderful indeed. All the best, and thanks for dropping in, Lanny

Not meant to be a tease, but hope you can make it to the next instalment.? Thanks for taking a moment to let me know you enjoy the stories, much appreciated. All the best, Lanny

Golden Bonanza Days, Part 1:I got the call last season for the chance any nugget shooter dreams of.A friend of mine owns and operates a large placer mining operation. They had been working an ancient channel deposit (60,000,000 years, plus or minus, but hey, what’s a million years here or there, right?) and as I wrote this account, they were in the final stages of moving all of their heavy equipment to anther site. So, I got a call that people usually only dream of ever getting.I was invited to bring my family to nugget shoot a section of virgin bedrock. After sixty million years, it was finally exposed to the sun’s rays once again, and as the entire mining operation was shut down, with no active mining in progress for the changeover, my buddy wanted us to come and check the bedrock for him before they had to do the reclamation work and bury it once more for perhaps another sixty million years.I couldn’t believe it! What a chance, perhaps the call of a lifetime . . .I called my son, who I’ve been training how to detect sassy nuggets, and he said to count him in. My wife, who is a speed-panning wonder of target-rich scoop dirt, said she was in too. So, we packed our gear and headed for the mountains.For whatever bizarre reasons the weather gods had last winter (2017-18), the weather was terrible right up until the first of May, and then it was like someone hit the sun-and-warmth switch for instant summer. The transformation was surreal and wonderful. Fresh pine heavily scented the valley. A wide variety of mountain song birds were back in force, the flowers were blooming on every slope, wild honey bees, heavily laden with pollen, buzzed a honey-hunter’s symphony. While high above, the hawks and eagles choreographed their ageless aerial ballet as they rode the invisible thermals of the cobalt blue expanse. In addition, red-throated, as well as iridescent green-breasted humming birds initiated impossible angles of changing flight as they darted from spot to spot while visiting the innumerable mountain blossoms. To say it was breath-taking is a feeble attempt to capture the impossible, and those of you that frequent the wild reaches of the Rocky Mountains already know of what I speak.We set up our gear, and I unpacked the feisty Makro Gold Racer and connected my shiny new sniper coil. I was going to take the Racer for a hard run, as I was still getting used to it, and with all of the ancient cracks and crevices exposed, I believed it had a good chance to sniff out some gold. The other nugget shooter, my son, would be learning more lessons on the Gold Bug Pro. (For final clean-up, I always check the bedrock with my GPX 5000 after running the legs right off of the VLF’s.)So, I set my son up with the Gold Bug Pro, outfitted with the 5X10 elliptical DD. I reviewed the basics of the detector with him (I love how quick the learning curve is on the Bug Pro), and off he went to a corner where the bedrock rose steeply, a jagged wall of bedrock rising close to 45 degrees up from the floor of the excavation, and that bedrock was iron hard (similar to some other bedrock we hunted later in the season) so there were lots of gutters, cracks and crevices visible that held intact material due to the hardness of the host rock. My son ground-balanced, adjusted his headphones, then made a few swings. He stopped dead right quick, then repeated a swing. With the numbers on the meter in the sweet zone (40-70 on the meter, if you’re familiar with the Bug Pro, usually depending on the size of the piece of gold), he quickly captured the target in his scoop and dropped it in one of our green plastic gold pans we’d already set out. A few more swings, and he dropped another scoop of target-rich dirt in the pan. Having got off to such a fast start, it looked like it was going to be a good day. To be continued . . .All the best,Lanny