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Lanny

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  1. This is a very informative thread, and thanks to those that have contributed. Moreover, Simon, you've outdone yourself in explaining things, nicely done! Heavy PI's/hybrids is one of my main beefs with the technology, not a fan of a heavy detector, though I still swing my 5000 but only when I'm in nasty ground or need to punch super deep. The newer dedicated gold VLF's are better at dealing with mineralization than the old ones, so that lets me operate (even if sometimes with a noisy detector) where I couldn't before. Someone has to figure it out, the weight issue, and be able to provide a variety of good coils as well, so here's to hoping it happens sooner than later. All the best, Lanny
  2. Truly enjoyed catching up on the story and its accompanying adventures. Times were still wild and wooly during the 30's it seems, must not have been many civil suits filed for roughing people up or for gunplay, neither must there have been much police activity regarding assaults/people willing to file charges, quite a bit like the Wild West up in those mountains at that time. Having said that, I've had encounters with some pretty rough types in gold country in the late 20th Century (had a gun swung in my direction as a warning as well, even when we were in no way encroaching on anyone's territory, just posturing and outright intimidation by the offender. There were also sluice box robbers around so the boxes had to be completely cleaned every evening), and it seems like the farther unscrupulous people are away from law enforcement, the more risks they're willing to take. So, not all of the rough stuff has been tamed yet in modern times in the wilds of the goldfields. Thanks for taking the time to keep entertainment coming, and all the best, Lanny Post script: If there's gold that's been shifted around in the area you're testing, you should be able to find anything near the surface with a good gold dedicated VLF, so it would be worth it to have one around, plus they're light enough you can scamper around on hillsides/mountainsides much easier while detecting. But, as has been pointed out, if you're trying to find deeper gold, you'll need a PI or one of the newer hybrids. (I always have a one-two punch when I'm out nugget shooting, a good deep-seeker, and a light VLF as they are both invaluable in their specific roles.) Having said that, as regards nugget shooting, it takes time to learn how to find gold with any detector, so you'll need to get swinging one as soon as you can, and whichever model you buy, get watching some YouTube videos/read some good articles/online posts so you'll know what to do and what to expect (ground balance, hot rocks, EMI, etc.). All the best, and thanks for your efforts, Lanny
  3. Yes, I hardly ever fish lakes, but I've gone back to edit my original post to clear things up. Thanks for noticing, and all the best, Lanny
  4. I'd like to add, that enough times to keep me looking, while I've been stream fishing, I've spotted some great panning/sluicing spots, as fish and gold like to drop out of the current in similar places. The fish of course do it to get out of the fast current to allow them to ambush food as it zips by and to conserve their energy in the quiet water as they wait for the next opportunity to ambush a snack. Great quote, thanks for posting it, and all the best, Lanny
  5. "There is very little large rock to move and the river channel is evident. " Love this quote, as I have seen intact channel many times, and once you've seen it, you never forget it. Moreover, it makes it easier to trace the course of the gold because of it. This story has more twists and turns than a rattler tossed into a frying pan! Really enjoying the read, thanks for posting the entries. All the best, Lanny
  6. That's great gold Chris, congratulations, and thanks for the pictures and the write-up! All the best, Lanny
  7. Ghostminer--hope you don't mind me jumping in here: Jim, in the mountains, it often helps to see a fault by looking at the mountain peak or mountain side to see if there's an obvious sign of slippage, where one part of the mountain dropped slightly or drastically below an adjacent section. As well, there will usually be an area of different (perhaps softer or distorted) rock that assembles between the two sections. Sometimes this can be seen from far away, other times you have to get closer. It also depends on forestation or lack thereof as to how easy or difficult it is to see. If the area has been covered by deep clay deposits left by glaciation, then that's where geological reports would come in handy delineating lengthy, hidden trends as you're not going to see them with the naked eye. I've been lucky to be around geologists in the field to point some of these things out, if not, I'd be at a total loss as well. All the best buddy, Lanny
  8. Your journal writer may not have been an author in the true sense, but his entries have all the hallmarks used to hold an audience's attention and generate suspense. Thanks for posting, and all the best, Lanny
  9. Such a sweet find! Always great to find a patch. Nicely done, and all the best, Lanny
  10. Where I detect, the sharks would have to climb the mountains to get me, so I guess I'm double safe (detector frequency protection and the shark non-mountain status). This thread is an informative and fun read, thanks. All the best, Lanny
  11. Rookie Bedrock Gold Looking back at some earlier writing, I came across a note about a Greenie panning session one day. It illustrates how too many people don't respect bedrock's ability to hold gold. I was helping a rookie one day who wanted to learn to chase the gold. He'd studied up on the basics of panning. He'd read a lot of books and articles on the subject. He'd seen some videos on techniques and practices, and he was ready to tear up the hills to get some gold. He really ripped up the dirt. He dug holes on slopes packed with river-run, dug holes on the downstream side of boulders, dug holes in gravel bars, and he dug holes in the stream-bed as well. But, he only got little specks. He was one discouraged greenhorn. All of his book learning and knowledge, and all of his sweat equity produced almost no gold. I took him back to a spot on the river I’d shown him earlier in the day, right before he set off to light the panning world on fire. While he was gone, I had stayed in that one spot. It was a place where the river had shifted course that spring, and in doing so it had exposed some nice bedrock. The bedrock was now a foot or so above the water. It didn't look like much, as there was no gravel covering it, and that's why he'd left. He wanted to run a whack of dirt, so he did. But now his back was sore, along with lots of muscles he never knew he had. As I was panning, he peeked over my shoulder, and I showed him about three tablespoons of material in my gold pan. I’d freed it all from cracks and crevices in the bedrock. I told him how It had taken patience and time to get that tiny pile of material. Still, I could tell by looking at his face he was unimpressed with my small sample of pay-dirt. After all he'd read, listened to, and watched about prospecting, his head was filled with the grand idea that a good spot had to be a place where you could dig, sort, screen, work and wash volume to find gold. So, I asked him if wanted to wait while I panned my little bit of pay-dirt. And, with a pessimistic shrug, he waited. It took hardly any time before things, beautiful golden things, started peeking through the black sand. And what do you know, lots of fines, nice flake gold and pickers to boot! In fairness to him, I knew what to look for. This wasn't ordinary bedrock. It had been under the water for ten years at least (the river channel had shifted). However, just being under water wasn't what made it so sweet. Its structure was engineered with hundreds of perpendicular plates, from two to three inches high, bedded on top of more solid bedrock. I knew that these little plates had been sluicing and holding heavies for many years. All I did was clean those riffles out. There was no movement of volume to get gold that day, just patience, past knowledge, and the understanding to recognize a likely spot. So, guess what the rookie did the rest of the day? He staked his spot then and there on the bedrock and worked until the sun went to bed. When he stumbled back to camp that night, he had a nice catch of sassy gold, and his very first picker! You'd have thought he'd found the Hand of Faith nugget the way he carried on around the fire, and I was proud of him for what he’d learned and earned. The lesson in this tale is with bedrock, rookies don't give it the respect it’s due. Most prospecting books don't give it due respect either. Yet, it's one of the most productive places to check to catch a nice little pile of gold, and often enough, a nugget or two. Too many rookies head off to dig holes, move big rocks, strain muscles, sweat and swear to find a speck or two of gold. But, for a solid shot at getting nice gold in a small area with a small amount of volume, good bedrock can’t be beat. All the best, Lanny
  12. Glad you were able to relate, and thanks for your feedback, much appreciated. All the best, Lanny
  13. Bedrock Drain Gold Back in March of 2011, I did some reading/research about a goldfield (rare, out-of-print book) that was worked in the 1890's, and found a couple of fascinating accounts. In one of the references, a company of men was hired to cut a bedrock drain for a hydraulic operation; they cut a trench in solid rock to drain the water to stop the hydraulic wash from pooling, thus stopping the sluicing recovery. (I've seen cuts like that before, anywhere from 3-4, all the way up to 8-9 feet deep. Deeper ones are rarer.) The cuts discussed in the book were in bedrock that was cleaned, with the pay shallow to bedrock (laying 3-4 feet above), with lots of coarse gold recovered. The miners had to cut 300 feet of bedrock drain. While cutting the drain, they must have seen pay trapped deep in the bedrock (this has to be implied from the context of the narrative). Moreover, enough gold was found trapped in the bedrock to fund the entire project! That fact is interesting enough, but later in the chapter, there’s a discussion about the Chinese claim holders and their workings. The Celestials (as they were called) were also working a bedrock area previously cleaned, and yet, with their bedrock drain completed, they recovered 625 ounces of gold! While reading those stories, it struck me as odd how the Oldtimer's seemingly rushed to work bedrock yet left so much gold behind! That seemed to be the case. However, I reflected on bedrock I've broken and worked by hand, and unless there’s some surface indication of gold under solid bedrock (the Oldtimer's were limited to hand-tools, no electronic advantage), like an obvious crevice to break open, there’s no way I’d cut down into bedrock six to eight feet either! After reading that out-of-print book, it really made me wonder what might still be buried under the stacked, washed rock and gravel that covers so many areas of bedrock once worked by hand. Quite the thing to ponder, as the book really jarred me. (Some of you may have had success working such bedrock. I know I’ve chiseled nuggets from bedrock that had no indications of any crevices whatsoever—a perfectly smooth surface. The only indication of gold beneath was given by my metal detector, and the nuggets were sure there, multi-gram beauties to boot.) All the best, Lanny
  14. Thanks for leaving a kind compliment, appreciate it. Lots of fun, always some unknown in the North, sometimes rewarding, sometimes scary, oftentimes a grand adventure. You'll have to do it someday, something you'll always remember, glad you enjoy the stories. All the best, Lanny
  15. Local miners and exploration Way up north where the wolverines roam, we were out one day cutting firewood, then took off to find drinking water. We found a local spring up the canyon with sweet water whose taste finished with a slight buzz on the tongue, strange, but great stuff. The next morning, after starting a fire to kill the chill in the wall tent (water in the fire bucket covered in ice), and after a miners’ breakfast cooked on the wood-burning stove, we lathered up with bug-dope, hopped on the ATV, and bounced along the rough, twisting road through pines, fir, and stands of aspen and birch. Fresh yellow and purple mountain flowers grew thick along the road-side. Lazy bumblebees tumbled from flower to flower while butterflies and humming birds sipped nectar as the pleasing smell of new-growth pine filled the air. The ATV climbed in elevation toward the active upstream placer claims. We stopped and introduced ourselves in every mining camp along the way. Two upstream operations bordered the main logging road, with a total of eight workers. Both operations had exposed old drift mines from the 1800’s and 1930’s. Staring at those now open tunnels was fascinating, and one of the miners offered to lift me up in the bucket of the excavator if I wanted to poke around inside. But looking at the collapsed and rotting timbering, I passed on his generosity. The larger of the two placer mines was working upper-strata dirt that ran six grams to the yard, but when they hit bedrock, it ran eight grams to the yard. The bedrock gold was coarse, with nuggets in the half-ounce to ounce-and-a-half range. That coarse gold had tons of character, bumpy and rough. The bedrock that held it was graphite schist and slate. The other operation was smaller, their equipment much older, with lots of down-time to repair equipment. Moreover, both mines were located where several ancient channels intersected, and the smaller mine was getting the same gorgeous gold. At both locations, the friendly miners shut down their wash-plant and excavation machinery to chat with us. Both groups of miners invited us to detect their claims whenever we wished. We just had to tell them what we found and where. Furthermore, they told us to keep all the gold we detected, great people! (We went home with some fantastic nuggets thanks to them.) Leaving the two mines, we took a branch off the main logging road, exploring an inactive logging trail. Along the way, we noticed where old growth trees were cut long ago in the canyon, their massive, moss-covered stumps accompanying the new growth. To our surprise, we found a placer miner far up that trail, located downslope in an adjoining gulch. With an old WWII-era D-8 Cat, he was patiently working a small-scale operation with a pay layer that was six feet off the bedrock. Strangely, there was no gold on the bedrock (lots of pyrite though), yet the gold he was getting was magnificent—some of it was crystalline, and all of it was coarse. He was a very trusting sort, and at the end of the day, when the cleanup was taken from the wash-plant, he gave us the concentrates and told us to pan them out! (They were loaded with coarse gold.) He left us to keep panning, then headed off to have a bath in his outdoor tub, heated by a clever invention he’d connected to the water-jacket of the engine block of his Gen-Set. From him, we learned the gold deposits in that area required real detective work. The pay-layers had to found and worked wherever they were; they weren’t deposited in a normal way due to multiple glaciation events. It required forgetting former gold ideas, keeping the mind open so as to accept new techniques and strategies hard-earned by the locals. So, we threw out the idea that gold always concentrated on bedrock and accepted his new teachings. We spent the entire day exploring, meeting people, and asking lots of questions. While cruising from mine to mine, we also oriented ourselves to our new surroundings. By the time we got back to camp, it was getting dusky (about 11:30 at night). We were both bone tired, not yet recovered from the sketchy trip in to our base camp. So, back at camp, we were eager to drive the bugs out of the tent by firing up the wood-burning stove, as well as making sure the Winchester 30-30 was loaded for business and within easy reach, just in case an apex predator decided to call. With the tent nice and warm, we crawled into our sleeping bags, and we drifted off accompanied by the solid heat, and lulling crackle of the logs burning in the stove. We spent weeks in the area and had many adventures. It is a nugget-shooter’s paradise for sure, and I hope to return one day. But the trip is hard on vehicles and tires, and the air is filled with bugs. So, perhaps I’ll visit one year in the fall, after the frost has knocked the bugs down, and it has firmed the roads up a bit. All the best, Lanny
  16. An explanation on the nature of boulder clay, and glacial gold action People have asked me what boulder clay is. Well, the only explanation I have comes from local knowledge shared with me by the placer miners in the northlands. When the glaciers were running many miles deep, and countless miles wide during the ice age, they dragged unsized rock and soil with them. They packed along serious boulders mixed within stubborn clay. While parked and melting, or when melting and retreating, they dumped this nasty mess all over the lower areas, as well as the mountains and valleys. To understand this, it’s necessary to remember those huge glaciers were miles thick, covering many mountains completely. With such titanic forces moving these glaciers, and when they dropped their loads, they often left forty feet and more of this boulder clay which smothered the existing stream beds. This protected any golden stream deposits for untold eons. Over countless thousands of years, successive glaciers and post-glacial streams chewed away at the boulder clay in the canyons, erosion working its way down to those hidden deposits. When they cut into that former river-run (freshly exposed), they started re-concentrating the gold in those existing streams. Sometimes, the early prospectors got lucky enough to find a bedrock outcrop that was the rim protecting an ancient channel from glacial gouging along a river, and then they’d tunnel in, drifting along the bedrock to mine out the deposit under the huge deposits of adjacent boulder clay bordering the streams. So, boulder clay (sometimes called armour clay), is a solid deposit of boulders and heavy clay that overlies old stream deposits and ancient channels. It is the bane of modern miners, as it has to be stripped away to get at the channels underneath, and it often requires ripper teeth on the back of huge bulldozers to break it up sufficiently so it can be bladed out of the way. Clearly, it takes a lot of time and money to strip it off. But, once that overburden is stripped away, and if the Oldtimer's haven't beaten the modern miners to the deposits underneath, it is sometimes a glorious bonanza to behold! The nuggets in the sidewalls of the channel are easily seen (a foot or two off the bedrock). I’ll never forget that incredible sight twice seen: multi-gram nuggets spaced eight to ten inches apart, making it easy to finger-flip the nuggets out of the channel material into a pan. Too bad those nuggets weren't mine to keep! All the best, Lanny
  17. No cell service where we were either. Had to make a drive to a tiny store with a satellite phone for any kind of connection. (Lots of places I still chase the gold where cell service goes to die.) We used to hang those black shower bags (the ones with the red nozzles) in the trees in the sun to get warm water for our showers. Lots of people can't relate to truly living off-grid, nice to meet a kindred soul. Good luck chasing that gold, nothing better to keep life amazing, and it sounds like you're on some likely ground. Looking forward to the rest of Jed's story. All the best, Lanny
  18. I've done the off-grid living, in a wall-tent to boot, with a nice wood-burning stove to drive off the cold mountain morning air. Lots of fun, but the apex predators up here in the north always keep that type of off-grid living fresh and exciting, and the bugs keep it interesting as well. Still, lots of great memories from living off-grid, ones I wouldn't trade for anything. All the best, Lanny
  19. Suction Eddy Gold, Part II My brain at last connected that directly above me was the bedrock hump, and here was steeply rising bedrock trending in the same direction. Talk about a cross-wired brain (and one snapped shut, remember?)! In hindsight, the eddy exposed a shelf that must have connected to the hump. Of course, there were tons and tons of overburden between me, the rest of that rising bedrock, and the hump. Anyway, my brain at last tuned in, and I scraped the exposed bedrock and sluiced the remaining material. (I had an aluminum river sluice in my vehicle up on the cat-trail. Freighting it down to the river, I had a near-death experience from the header I took while taking what I thought was a short-cut; however, I made it to the river in one piece.) I started sluicing. The first shovel of dirt produced an instant nugget. It was around two grams, and L-shaped. It didn't even get into the first riffle. It just hit and sat in the header, sparking golden in the summer sunlight. I sluiced the remaining dirt and recovered chunky gold throughout. It was getting dark, and I didn’t want to leave, but I’ve no love for mountain lions or grizzlies. So, I headed back to the safe, comfortable log cabin I called home in that northern land. (On a side note, I need to mention it had been raining for three days straight prior to my first find on the river. This helps explain upcoming details.) When I floundered my way downslope through the much safer face-slapping route the next morning, I saw the river had dropped about four inches. Seeing a fresh, soft bedrock edge exposed by the lower waterline, I was suddenly stunned. There, winking in the morning sun, was a nugget! (A little sunbather taking advantage of the new beach so to speak.) My mind, now wide-open to prospecting lore, started calculating what had likely happened at the site. I reflected that there was consistent gold right up to the boulder clay on the bank where the suction eddy had torn into it. Moreover, that gold was being drug down into the pool. So, I scraped with my shovel out into the pool as far as I could I could, but the bedrock dropped off quite sharply into that eight-feet of water. As well, for any that have scraped off river run, while fighting hydraulic pressure, it's tough-sledding indeed. In spite of the challenge, the coarse gold that came up from the submerged river-run was spectacular! By the time I'd retrieved all the material I could, I had a quarter-ounce of nice rounded coarse gold, and several nice sassy nuggets to boot. So, what’s the analysis of that suction eddy gold deposit? Well, those early square nail finds were everywhere because the suction eddy had plucked them from flood-level waters, and the bedrock held them fast. Cleary, the gold was yanked from the flood water along with the nails as well. But, the haunting reality to me now is that a whack of those “square nail signals” were feisty nuggets! This leaves me with the uncomfortable reality that what the heck did I throw into that eight-foot-deep pool as I cleared the overburden? What the heck indeed. . . . All the best, Lanny in AB [Author's note: I heard the next year that some dredgers went into that pool. One of the mine-workers had seen my truck parked on the trail, had walked down to the river to investigate after I'd left, had seen the suction eddy as well as my diggings, and he sent his buddies the next year to dredge the spot. Well, they had a field day in that hole and took out ounces of coarse gold! As I reflect now, It's clear to me that the suction eddy had cut into an old channel that trended up the river bank to that old drift mine. (Likely how the Oldtimers had found the higher deposit of gold in the 1800’s.) This gold tale is just one of my missed opportunities that still haunt me.]
  20. Klunker, check out boat shops--maybe your nuggets could sell quicker as anchors. All the best, Lanny
  21. If it flattens out, good sign. Some of the pictures do look like alloyed gold, some look like a purer form. My son always takes anything he's not sure of to a pawn shop for analysis (XRF) and they always do it for free. Best to know for sure before you head back to dig up that big one. . . . (Not sure if this counts as wisdom as it's pure speculation after looking at your pictures and reading your posts, but the XRF will let you know, if you can get to one.) All the best, Lanny
  22. This is a captivating story, thanks for the entries. That kettle hole reminds me of other stories I've read where miners hit potholes/large crevices in gold-bearing rivers that were thick with gold. Wouldn't that be amazing? (I hit a hole once while dredging and the entire bottom was covered in gold.) I love the 1860's+ gold era of gold rushes, so I'll guess 1860 ounces--a phenomenal haul if he pulled it off, and if it's more, booyahh! All the best, Lanny
  23. Really enjoying this thread and the tech explanations. Love your pack-mule setup as well. Nicely done on getting those sweet nuggets! All the best, Lanny
  24. Suction Eddy Gold, Part I I prospected a river quite a while back. It was far to the north, down in a steep canyon lined with lots of alders, pine, and fir. Rugged slopes led down to the stream, and I was trying to find a spot where I could detect or pan for some of the nice coarse gold the area was known for. I took a wrong step and got smacked in the face by an alder while trying to get down to what was clearly an active suction eddy during Spring Flood. The eddy was straight down the mountain slope from where an old placer tunnel went in, about a hundred feet up slope. The mine (called a “drift” mine by the locals) went into the mountain on a bedrock hump, about seventy feet above the river. The Oldtimers had seen the hump and drifted toward it along the up-sloping bedrock that rose from the river, hitting the hump then driving underneath about fifty feet of boulder clay (almost exclusively clay, yet sprinkled with boulders and lesser rock dumped from the long gone Ice Age glaciers). [The mine entrance is still there, but the tunnel is caved in.] Some modern miners had come in with big equipment and made a road around that bedrock point on the hill, cutting into the bedrock as they widened the road, while slicing across the drift mine entrance. Now, what a dummy I was--I didn't detect that scraped off bedrock hump where the drift mine had gone in! Instead, I went over to the entrance, and hauled several heavy buckets of material down to the river to pan. What a miserable time I had getting those buckets down to the river, skidding down that 30 to 40-degree slope covered in broken bedrock and loose cobbles. Fun? Not as much fun as a double root canal, but just about. Still, I was way over the legal-limit for fun. Every bucket held gold, but only flakes. And, as I was chasing coarse gold, after lugging three five-gallon buckets of clay goo from the mine entrance to the river, I'd had enough fun. But, since the eddy I’d picked to prospect was exactly below that bedrock hump, I dropped into the spot, a truck-box sized hole high water had cut into the river bank. It was littered with bread-loaf sized cobbles. I was in my own little enclave down there, and I couldn't be seen from the equipment-trail above, nor could I be seen from up or down the river on my side of the stream. I had packed down my old VLF detector and a shovel with me. I fired up the detector and scanned the cobbled section. I immediately got a loud signal. I chucked a load of bread-loaf cobbles into the river and scanned again. The target was still there. Moving the underlying loose stuff, I exposed a nice square nail. What the . . .? That wasn't what I wanted, but square nails were everywhere on that bank! Well, being the dimwit that I was, I never made the connection this was a good sign (heavies dropping out during flood stage). So, I scanned more bank, got more signals, then gave up detecting because I KNEW every signal was a square nail. (Dumb yes, but I was quite a rookie back then.) I cleared the rest of the loose stuff from under the cobbles and chucked the stream-run back into a hole (eight-foot deep) in the river. That hole lay downstream from a series of bedrock drops, it being the only calm water in a long stretch. This clue should also have lit up my gold-getting brain, but my rookie mind was a steel trap, and once shut, no helpful gold logic was getting in. What I found after clearing the overburden was friable rock standing over a layer of soft decomposing bedrock. So, I scraped the shingle-like pieces off and panned it all out. Immediately I had coarse gold in my pan! What the . . .? My rookie brain began to make connections. All along that eight-foot section of bedrock, there was fantastic, coarse and sassy gold! Sitting down, I looked at that river eddy excavation. The bedrock, where the eddy had dumped the heavies, rose up into the bank. At that moment, my brain finally made another connection. (Part II to follow) All the best, Lanny
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