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I have been in denial, but with temperatures hitting over 100 degrees on a daily basis I finally have to admit the winter detecting season in the Southern California and Arizona deserts is over. It has been a fun year, and I have met a lot of good people through the clubs I belong to, Bill Southern's YouTube patreon group and just randomly in the middle of nowhere. I have detected mostly with the GPX 6000 and GM 1000. I just love getting out into nature. The thrill of being in a beautiful area with the sense of adventure and the chance to find stuff is exhilarating. My best gold finds were a patch of eight small nuggets in the Cargo Muchacho Mountains, a 4.1 gram nugget with two small nuggets (.2 and .3 grams) each nestled less than six inches away near Yuma, a 17 gram complete chondrite meteorite with regmaglypts and contraction cracks from Coyote Dry Lake, a "perfect" old tin can with solder seam and applied top, a mule shoe found at the top of a high hill in the middle of the Vulture Mountains in Arizona and a bird band in Gold Basin that I reported. I got a bunch of other small nuggets but the artifacts and animals really help me get through those days when I get skunked. I will be making trips to Northern Nevada and the Yuba this summer. See you there!

Last night I got this very strong feeling that I should go hunt a local beach. Memorial Day weekend is over, and most people have left this area. There is a very small beach near me, it's only about 200 feet long but it's public. I was here last fall and cleaned out most of the junk. Today started out pretty cool but it's going up in the 90s. I got out early hoping no one would be there, and no one was. Got out on the beach and almost immediately got a 13/14 on the Equinox (I didn't want to take time dressing up the Deus 2), and dug my first gold ring, this band with Roman numerals: guess it's a custom date ring or something. I see them for sale for about $350. I swung back over the hole, and got another 13/14, couldn't believe it. I dug a few more inches down (they were 6-8" deep) and got another one! It's a 14k Keepsake, probably from Walmart. No matter, it's gold. Got a total of 5 grams: Covered the whole beach, including the water to about knee deep. Saw some young jellyfish in there so I didn't venture out too far. Got a couple of toy cars, a Matchbox and a Hot Wheels. Here's the trash: I managed to wipe this place out in the 3 hours I was there. 😀 people started showing up so I left. Settings: Beach 1 Sensitivity 24 on the dry, Beach 2 sensitivity 22 in the water. I found nothing in the water but the sinker and a rusty nail. Follow your hunches, y'all... 🤣

Yesterday JW suggested we take our GPX 6000's out and compare them to ensure mine is now working properly as I've had no confidence in it after my woes. Unfortunately we were unable to compare our 11" coils like for like as his coil is still away for warranty replacement, it must be 3 weeks now and no sign of a replacement, they just have no stock to swap it for which is pretty poor, but with the number of faulty ones I've seen on Facebook I'm not at all surprised they have no stock as it's not a coil they'd make a lot of as extras seeing everyone gets one with the detector. JW suggested we go to an area he's used his 6000 a lot with the 11" before it died so he would know how mine should behave to see if anything is out of the ordinary. I just wanted to use his detector for a bit to see if EMI was as troubling with it as it was with mine, so I took it for a spin with the Minelab 17" coil on it, I found it was no different with it's EMI behaviour to mine, in fact I thought it was worse but I guess that's to be expected, a bigger coil. We were quite close to a standard normal power line, not the high voltage transmission ones like at the other area that I wanted to wrap the GPX around a tree and say goodbye to it for good. JW had a fair while on mine checking it out and doing factory resets and just experimenting with it, he thought it ran similar to his with it's EMI behaviour so I guess it is how it is, he had my threshold running reasonable, much better than it was at the other location that's for sure. The other spot with the transmission lines is my favourite area but it just suits the GPZ better as it doesn't care at all about the transmission lines, even right near them its as if they barely exist and you can run it with the normal coil you'd use and your normal settings. The GPX requires the DD and adjusted settings so it makes no sense to use the GPX there, the same reason I didn't like using my 4500 there. Once JW had approved my GPX I felt a little more confident in it, knowing that more ratty threshold is normal, I'm just not good on ratty detectors and feel I'll always miss the faint targets with them by comparison to more stable detectors where as JW doesn't mind a more ratty detector, experience level differences I would guess. I had another confidence booster, the Avantree Torus speakers, I've never been much of a headphone person and the ML-100's that come with the GPX have a high pitched hiss all the time once connected to the 6000 which would give me a headache listening to that all day but the Torus speakers are perfect sound, no hiss and very clear audio and easy to hear even in a noisy environment, where we were has a rushing river nearby with quite noisy water sound in the background but the Torus was fine, perfect in fact. Quick and easy to pair with good sound quality and volume level, I was able to turn the GPX volume right down to minimum to stabilize the machine even more and run the Torus on the volume level that suited me. One thing I will point out is with the Torus on you'll like finding 22 shells, sure the noise is booming but the Torus gives you a shoulder massage every time you sweep over one so you'll find yourself swinging over them multiple times enjoying the vibrating massage 🙂 I like the Torus so much I'm going to use my Bluetooth transmitter on the GPZ and use them on it too, so I can finally retire my harness that was only there as a way to hold my SP01 and speakers. The neck gap on them is huge, designed for someone with a neck like Shrek I think and my Pelican neck is a bit skinny for them but they held on perfectly fine and I had no concerns of them coming off. I'd highly recommend anyone considering these things to give them a try, I doubt you'll be disappointed. They even talk to you 🙂 It started to rain a bit while using them and they're not water resistant but I just put my jumper over top of them and the sound came through it perfectly fine (not sure what Americans call it) and Kiwi's never even know what I mean when I say jumper as it's a Queensland/Australia term as far as I can tell. Once we'd done tinkering comparing detectors we started detecting, I wandered off 20 or so meters away from JW so I didn't interfere with his detector and started detecting some bedrock. I was running my GPX in Auto as if I tried manual 10 or Auto+ it became a bit too unstable for my liking I guess due to the nearby power lines. It wasn't long and I had a good target noise, super faint but very repeatable and after scraping away all the soil off the bedrock I was pretty sure it wasn't a pellet, I started breaking away the schist to try get down to it, I was attacking for for about 20 minutes and I guess JW noticed as he came over, I told him what's going on and showed him my target response at that time, it had improved to a point it was very obvious after smashing some bedrock away. He said lets check my 17" coil over it and see how it responds, so he waived the coil over it, nothing at all, he pushed the edges right into the cracks in the bedrock and nothing, he spent a bit of time trying to get a response from the target and he couldn't get one. We fired up my GPX again and waived it over it and straight away a reasonably good response. After seeing that I'm glad I didn't buy the 17" coil seeing we mostly hunt smaller gold it's not near got the sensitivity of the 11" on this stuff. to be completely blind to this piece when the 11" was getting it pretty easily. JW had also lost a couple of targets he was recovering with the 17" coil so we went over to them with the 11" and tried to find them, the 11" found one of the two lost targets straight away. JW then hung around to help recover the target, he's a lot better at getting gold out of bedrock than I am, I'm not aggressive and hack away at it slowly as I'm so scared I'll lose the nugget, it's happened before 🙂 He just smashes the hell out of it and gets it out quickly. It didn't take him too long and he had it out, as per usual with the GPX once the target is near the coil it ROARS on it, a few inches away and it's a quiet response so once out we had it in no time. The dug out bit of bedrock is below the coil in the photo above. The nugget circled. That's where it was, I was so surprised the 17" coil had no response on this nugget when in there, it was probably on its side in a layer of the schist but still, the 11" performed so much better. This is the nugget. I'm confident the GPZ with my favourite little 8" would have hit this far easier than the GPX did, it wasn't what I'd call deep but it was faint on the GPX and missed entirely by the 17" even with some of the bedrock broken away. Next up I kept detecting around this same bedrock and it falls off a bit of a cliff down to the river below, it's pretty wild on the way down but I went off the edge a bit as I could see an area I could start to get down and detected one of the many ledges on the way down, I found a few pellets down there but also a nugget. It was very shallow and a louder signal than a pellet. It was really only a couple of pick scrapes to remove the grass and I had it, it's lucky I wasn't being lazy ignoring the first pick scrapes assuming they're pellets. The reason I didn't ignore it and I ignore many pellets is the pellets the GPX finds harder to detect, sure it booms on them when you first go over them as they're close to the coil, you do a couple of pick scrapes and move the pellet into a pile of soil and the target signal drops off dramatically to a point they can entirely disappear or be very hard to locate compared to the screaming signal when they're near the coil so you find yourself flattening out the pile. It's a bit of a giveaway with lead pellets I think as gold tends to remain a decent signal as it's not as difficult of a target as a small sphere like a lead pellet. Here is a video of the spot the nugget was, not usual for me to go off edges like this I usually leave the mountain goat stuff for JW 🙂 My threshold was pretty savage in this video, I did a factory reset not long after this as it was starting to go wild. Good ol' Geosense. It's amazing doing a factory reset fixes it up when no amount of noise cancels will. I hope its a bug they can fix and a firmware update comes out some day. I decided I'd go back up to where I found the first one and give it another go, a couple of meters along the same run of bedrock I found another faint target signal that lived beyond clearing the dirt off the schist bedrock. Because I'd just only done the same thing I knew this was going to be gold so I did some filming. I didn't film the entire process as I'm very slow getting gold out of bedrock 🙂 This is the better video of the two to watch as it gives a better idea of the recovery I switch to manual 10 in the video from Auto and you'll see the target response improve, I just preferred hunting in Auto while I'm still getting used to the more ratty threshold of the GPX over the GPZ even though I know I'm taking a performance hit doing so. And the happy snaps. This one was a bit deeper than the last one, took me a long time to smash it out. A bit more of a ball nugget, again the GPZ would have hit it easily. It was now starting to rain a little bit and likely snowing on the mountains above us so our day we nearing the end, we only started around Lunch time so I was pretty happy with my results. JW at this stage had given up on the 17", I guess seeing it entirely miss the first target I got wasn't really encouraging. He'd put on the 14" DD now, I'm sure he wished his 11" wasn't away on warranty at this stage as he'd not found anything yet. I went back towards where we stored our bags and started detecting around there and found my last nugget of the day, another very simple target, it was in someone elses dig hole spoils, they'd dug up the nugget and rejected it, I guess they thought because it was in soil and not on or in the bedrock it wasn't gold, so I recovered it and it was my biggest of the day 🙂 It was right near where the cliff drops off to the river below. I checked with JW, it wasn't his dig hole so someone else had been there, he did point out when we arrived it looked like someone else had been there recently as there was dig holes that were not his so someone donated me a nugget. So overall my GPX was working much better at this spot, it still had its Geosense quirks and is nowhere near as stable as the GPZ, and the GPZ I know is just as sensitive if not more so than the GPX when its using small coils on the GPZ, it'll be interesting to see the improvements with the smaller coils on the GPX. Where the GPX appears to be more sensitive is small pellets near the coil with the way it really roars on them, but any depth on those little pellets and reality sets in, it's just hyper sensitive to targets close to the coil, it'd be good for bedrock hunting with that behaviour. My total for the afternoon. We bailed out because it started raining and only started at lunch time so a good result for me. JW found one little guy at .19 of a gram and that was once he changed over to the 14" DD, he was certainly digging away all day though, I could hear a lot of smashing on the bedrock! Damn pellets! My junk level was really low, I was rejecting known pellets by the strong pellet signal dropping off to next to nothing in the dig out pile quirk the GPX has. Those 22 shells give a nice massage with the Torus 🙂

Gold found in in Pima County, Arizona. There's still BIG GOLD NUGGETS in Arizona!

Today I got the deepest piece of gold I have dug to date. Using my 6000 I was detecting an old push in the Cargos. It was a very faint signal that got a little stronger with each boot scrape. I started removing more dirt with my pick and the signal kept getting stronger. When it was finally out and in the pile the hole was deeper than the coil turned on edge. I was real slow and careful about removing the target so I did not bury it. This thing was coil on edge depth. The orientation had to have been very flat. I only wish it would have been a little more portly. This is the first PI machine I have ever used and I am pleased with it.

Yesterday JW and I went for another gold hunt to the same place we'd been going on all the previous missions I've posted about in the past couple of weeks, I've always liked this spot, it's been my favourite. You do deal with a lot of junk here though, mostly shutgun pellets but I guess it's good practice for me sorting the junk from the gold. I felt like I was up to a bigger walk this time, JW invited me up to the spot he did last time we were at this place, If you recall I stayed right at the start and spent the day in a very small area last time while JW went for a stroll far further into the area and he managed to find 8 nuggets. This a photo of the 8 nuggets JW found in the area on the previous day when I stayed at the entrance to the area. It seemed a worthwhile spot for me to take on a big walk to get to, my broken foot seems to never feel better, it's been a long time now and it feels no better than it did at the start, although it has its good days and bad days and it felt like it was going to be a good day. We walked up to this area and JW showed me around and told me where he'd found some nuggets in the past, I hadn't been here for a couple of years back when I was using my GPX 4500 and I found nothing with it in this spot from memory. So we fired up our weapons and off we went. I headed up higher and JW went off to the right and down from where we stored our packs, the higher ground looked alright to me although my detector was nutting off constantly on pellets straight away, big pellets like someone had been hunting elephants in the area, only NZ doesn't have elephants, but the really large size rusty magnetic pellets, I don't normally encounter these sort often, usually it's the tiny little lead ones. They were absolutely everywhere and driving me mad. I kept going in the area anyway and then I encountered a target noise that was not like the others, a softer quieter sweeter sound, a few scrapes to remove the chances of it being a small lead near surface pellet and the signal improved, I kept digging and digging and the signal was better and better, this was getting exciting although I'd dug so much junk since getting here I had it in my head it's 90% chance some sort of junk, maybe a boot tack or something so I wasn't overly concerned about doing any video. Once I was fairly deep I decided it might be time to flick on the phones camera just in case and I'm glad I did, now I have some memories of my second biggest ever nugget find! Over a gram nuggets or even gram size nuggets are an extreme rarity here, so it's a happy day when you score a gram size nugget, this one however was a lot bigger than a gram. This is it's hole, and if you'll see the video you'll see it wasn't a fisherman's story about the size of his fish catch, exaggerating the depth on the hole, this is precisely the depth of the nugget. A beauty, and very odd for a NZ nugget based off what I've found before, mine are generally always pretty smooth, this one was a chunky rough looking nugget, more like the nuggets found in Australia. And here is the video, I'm so annoyed I didn't film the entire thing from the start as I like having videos for my future watching of my nugget finds, especially when it's a nugget out of the ordinary for me. Oh well, at least I got some of it on video. Pretty happy with this one, my second biggest nugget so far and only just behind my biggest by .1 of a gram. I ran down to show JW, we were both pretty shocked a nugget this size was found here. I now had a dilemma, the likelihood of me finding a nugget now was low, usually if I find a nugget right at the start of the day I find no more 😛 Hours passed and exactly that, plenty of junk and no more nuggets, I had some lunch and figured I'd move out of the bigger nugget area and see if I can find something down lower on the hillside. I didn't really want to walk too much on steep ground with my foot but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. At this point JW had found one nugget also from memory so I didn't think my hopes would be too high down lower on the slope where he was but that's gold for you, you never know. It wasn't even 20 minute and there it was, my second nugget. A nice easy signal, the 8" loves small gold, even a bit of gold weighing 0.03 of a gram is a booming signal compared to a very small lead pellet. This piece wasn't exactly small though, well for me 🙂 within a few steps of that nugget I found another one almost straight away, another easy target signal. Here is what the ground looks like we were hunting, from a cut out the old timers had done. Things dried up again for a while now and JW appeared crossing over a ridge into sight, he was heading back to his bag for lunch so I decided I'd go sit with him and have a break, we had a look at the nugget again after the initial shock had passed and at this point he had 3 little nuggets with his GPX 6000, so we were sitting on 3 each at this point. his were similar size to my smaller two. Back at it, this time we both just hung around near our bags for a bit where I'd just found the two nuggets, and after an hour or so of nothing we gradually moved on, I decided I'd go back a fair bit in the direction of the car so I took our bags to save us having to go back for them as JW was slowly heading in that direction too. I went for a walk to some thyme bushes on the downward slope hoping the little 8" would give me an advantage over anyone else who had detected there as the spaces between the bushes are so small it takes a small coil to get between them and the 8" had done extremely well doing this in the past, it slides between the bushes no problems. I don't know why I didn't take a photo of them. I was only in the bushes for 20 minutes and digging plenty of pellets and junk and then I had a signal that seemed different to the others, I scraped away the grass and could clearly see I was on some bedrock. The signal was pretty good, unmistakable, although tiny it was a nice little bit of gold. It was my smallest bit of the day so I wanted to see how it responded on JW's GPX 6000 to compare it in my head to how it responded with my GPZ and 8" X-coil. I was very satisfied with how good the target response was on my GPZ so it would have been good to compare, I walked over to where JW was to find him fiddling with his GPX unplugging the coil and removing the battery and so on, he said it was doing its usual EMI thing where he just turns it off and does a factory reset and it seems to clear up the EMI, however this time when he switched it off and on again it came up with an error so he was unplugging everything and making sure it was all secure in an attempt to revive it. After many attempts it was clear the thing had died. Either the coil or the detector. We took a video of it which you can see here. This put a bit of a downer on what was otherwise an excellent day. Minelab have really outdone themselves with the build quality of the GPX 6000, for the price things are not too great I think, it's pretty disappointing. I told JW we should just leave now, I didn't want to continue with him having to sit around and wait for me to finish, it was sad enough his detector died without having to sit around watching me have all the fun so we left to go get some Chinese food on the way home, we got there right as the place opened for dinner so the buffet had all the good stuff! We got ourselves an excellent meal. Once we got back to JW's house we tried another coil on the detector and it worked, so it was the 11" coil that failed. My theory is the security chip in the coil has failed, my reason for this is the detector was working fine until it was turned off, so a fault with the windings or cable connection or anything like that is HIGHLY unlikely to be the problem, the EMI he was getting that prompted him to turn it off and on was nothing out of the ordinary, he does this many times during a detecting session to fix the EMI when a noise cancel doesn't seem to do it. When the detector was turned off and on it uses that chip to verify the coil, if the chips dead the detector will error exactly like what's happened. A bit of a downer on what was a good day. JW ended up with his 3 little nuggets, I can't remember his weights but his total was about .3 of a gram from memory, I'll put up his total photo if he sends it through on email, he normally sends me his photo of gold weights. We also weighed my gold at JW's house, I wanted to know if my big one was my biggest ever, it was close. The little one I wanted to check and compare with the 6000 came up as 0.03 on JW's scales, when I arrived home checked the weights on my scales as they're more accurate and it came up slightly heavier than on his. It's not my smallest GPZ nugget which is 0.023 of a gram on my scales but it's getting down there. It's heavier than it looked. Here is my junk for the day lots of tiny little metal shards, they were so annoying as they're a great signal. I think I lost a fair few pellets out of my pocket, it happens pulling my scoop in and out all day. And my days total My best day in about a year I'd guess, pretty sad about JW's GPX though, now he's got the hassles of dealing with the warranty.

I was out again in the same environment and same general area last weekend. The weather was beautiful - and it can be hot this time of year in the lower elevation country, but it was not hot last weekend. There was scattered gold here and there in and around the old workings of the miners. I dug a number of loud, non-ferrous targets, but they were all lead - got over 2 ounces of lead. I got 6.7 grams of gold in 17 pieces. All were dug with the GM 1000 and wireless headphones from Fossickers. The wireless headphones are nice, I should use them more often.

Went out a few weeks ago to prospect in California at the same location I was at a few weeks back. Did pretty well with the GM 1000 - its a pretty trashy area and if you dont want to dig 200 pieces of rusty iron junk, you will be using some discrimination. I did try the SDC and the 7000 in a few areas, but eventually the trash got to me and I was back on the GM1000. I know that a lot of guy preach dig it all, but there are places which have gold but the amount of trash will make your head spin. What do you guys think? This is the gold I dug last time - 5 grams. I'll be returning soon because success breeds more success.

Hit the grassy area this morning in hopes of finding another seated dime didn’t happen but did find a 5.1 gram gold nugget a little smaller than a dime. No discoloration it came out of the ground looking like in the pic. ID at 66 on the D2 at 6 inches deep. Also dug up a wheatie and. V- Nickel. Denny

While not quite as exciting as Reg and James and their colours I did manage to pop a few up myself yesterday. JW and I went back to the same place I found my KFC nuggets the other day, I once again stayed right at the entrance due to my broken foot, I really can't walk very far before the pain is too much and I need to save some life in my foot for the days hunting, If I walked too far I'd have nothing left in me for swinging the detector. JW fortunately has healed up quickly from his leg muscle injury and was able to walk off into the distance, he ended up going a fair way away to an area I've not been to since I was using my GPX 4500. He did well too, ended up with 8 nuggets. Seeing I was going over ground we mostly went over the previous days I didn't have much hope for myself, but I wasn't going to let that get in my way. I was more determined than ever to at least find one nugget we missed. It's a very small area where I was hanging around, I first found gold in this exact spot with my GPX 4500 a few years ago, I found a 1.2 gram nugget down by the creek, and a couple of little ones near it, I then asked JW to go over it with his GPZ and stock coil and clean up anything my 4500 missed and I vaguely remember him finding another 6 or so tiny little nuggets I'd missed. It really is a small area, there is a dirt road and about 10 to 15 meters (30 to 50 feet) wide on one side of the road is where the gold has been found, it goes for a stretch of about 50 meters I would guess (165 feet) along the side of a bit of a drop off into a creek. It's on a downward slope and drops into a little gully and down the bottom of this is where I previously found the 1.2 gram nugget. This is the area I confined myself to that we both confined ourselves to a couple of days ago. Over the other side of the road is another area with quite long grass and deeper ground. I had an explore over there on the road side for a few hours and found nothing but junk. The other day I stayed up near the top of this area where I found 6 nuggets including my KFC pieces 🙂 This time my focus was more down towards the bottom, JW had a bit of a shot down there the other day but I didn't make it down there as we keep our distance apart to stop the detectors messing with each other, both the GPZ 7000 and GPX 6000 JW is using work remarkably well next to each other though. He was going to use his GPZ this time as it's just better for in the long grass, the shaft on the 6000 twists, the coil ears don't appear strong enough for pushing the detector through long grass so he's a bit worried about breaking them doing what we do with the GPZ. We use our detectors as a way to push down and flatten the grass, and with the GPX this isn't really possible so you have to do it by foot stomping and then detect over it which takes more time. His little flap cover on the back of the detector is always hanging open too, that thing just never holds shut, might have to tape it down or something. The GPZ is much more robust and you just bulldoze the grass down. Anyway, he just ended up using the GPX again as it was ready when I arrived at his house, it was a bit of a last minute idea to go on our gold hunt yesterday. This is the long grass I'm talking about, the 8" is a breeze in this stuff, it just squishes it down and the nice tough GPZ shaft has no problems doing it, being dry the grass is quite firm too, not nice soft green grass. JW doesn't have this little 8" coil though so he'd be using a 15" Concentric coil which wouldn't be quite as good in the long grass although he'd still be able to bulldoze it over with the stronger shaft, I've used the 12" Concentric fine doing that, but still not as easy as the 8". The little dig hole to the bottom left was just a pellet in this photo. My first nugget of the day was right down the bottom where the road drops down into the gully, right near where I found the 1.2 gram piece a few years ago with the 4500 and where JW had checked with his GPZ and stock coil at the time cleaning up the bits I'd missed. Down by the water in the shade of the willows the grass stays green, unusual for in this area as its so arid and brown. Sorry about the spit on the scoop, I had to clean the gold to see it was even gold 🙂 It was quite deep down, its hard to tell in the photos but you can sort of see the soil pile in this one above. The 8" is like a laser, you can dig pick width holes to get your target out as it's so small and accurate. And the nugget, I thought it was going to be heavier than it was, it was my biggest of the day. I was happy now, I thought at that point it was extremely unlikely I'd find another one, we'd just done this ground too much for there to be any more nuggets we'd missed. JW rang me from his location way out of my walking range to check up how I was doing, at this point he'd found 3 nuggets and I'd just found this one, I guess he was about a kilometer away along the dirt road at the time. A little further along down the bottom I had another target, weird, perhaps a pellet that was rejected or something so I dug it up. A little ball 🙂 Although a lot smaller it weighs more than the bigger flat one. And it wasn't 10 minutes and I'd found a 3rd, all in a similar area down near the bottom of this little dip in the road. This one was probably hidden due to the long grass, because I was able to squish the grass down so easily I was able to get close to the ground. In fact it's probably similar for all of them, with the clumps of grass the GPZ just has more push strength to crush it down to get closer to the soil. A little KFC mini drumstick 🙂 There isn't much meat on the KFC mini drum. I gave up in this area now, I've absolutely slammed it and so has JW, I was honestly surprised to get anything. I went over the other side of the road in the small area between the road and the fence, it was just full of trash, although I did find a silver ear ring, probably from a hiker. The really bad bit about detecting along this road was hikers, they kept walking past me, I felt like a monkey at a zoo with them all stopping to watch me and talking to me with the same standard lines, "have you found anything" or "are you looking for gold". This place is normally pretty empty, you're lucky to see one other person in a day, this day I am sure there was 20 or 30 hikers go past! so weird! JW encountered them way further along where he was too. He probably wasn't right at the road though so wouldn't have had it as bad as I did. The ear ring I found, I also found a wedding ring from a mouse. Poor little guy probably got a big lecture from Mrs Mouse for losing his wedding ring. and my junk, I zoomed in so you can get a real good look at it! I was rejecting surface pellets, if it moves on the first scrape or two it stays there, these are the ones I had to dig, using the same dig and recovery process of a nugget, very time consuming. I don't understand how the pellets get down deep into the ground, maybe they've been there a long time, some get down in cracks in the bedrock and everything and really get you excited. A majority of this junk came from the opposite side of the road to the gold along where the fence is. JW has found gold on that side in the past, I wasn't able to find any there this time. I had a fun day, even though I confined myself to such a small area I was happy to get some gold. I'll post a photo of JW's nuggets weight when he sends one though to me. And for those wondering, yes we got KFC on the way home 🙂

Waiting for a storm and a change in the seabed, a few days ago I went scouting along the coast that I reach more easily. Like me, far too many locals have abused the place and signals have become rare. Even if they came from the wrong direction, the waves still made a fair leveling, barely visible from the shore. I was not very inspired by what I saw, but I was still willing to use new settings and test the behavior of the detector. In almost two hours of session, despite having found a good balance with the instrument, I had no reference points on the ground for an ideal area to start from. On the verge of leaving the area, already satisfied for the test but without decent targets , one last signal caught my attention .... and this is the result ... Happy hunting everyone. https://youtu.be/IH1ZcQjzE70

JW and I went on another prospecting adventure yesterday, JW was taking the day off work as the night after our first hunt he woke up in the middle of the night with a cramp, and his leg is now very sore, although that didn't stop him wanting to go look for gold, he is dedicated so he contacted me asking if I wanted to go, of course that is a hell yes. I still have my broken foot so we were both hobbling along. We planned to go to the same area where I found my KFC Chicken drum stick nugget On the way to the area we stopped at another spot, I'd only been here once for an hour or two, that time I tried to use my Gold Monster but had no success, this area is very salty and just drove the GM nuts, I couldn't use it but in his car I had the GPX 4500 with Nugget Finder EVO coil so I got that out and used it, it found me a piece of gold, I don't remember what settings I ended up using it was a couple of years ago but I know I had to adjust my settings from their usual settings for the salt. This time I had the GPZ and Equinox with me, I was going to try the Equinox but never got around to it, I just used the GPZ and 8" X-coil, I wasn't too confident it would work well with the salty soil and was going to change to the Concentric coil but JW encouraged me to give it a shot, there is a lot of thyme bushes in this area so the smaller coil would be very helpful to get between the bushes that the 12" coil would struggle with. JW was right, the 8" worked fine and within about 5 minutes of putting my coil to the soil I had my first bit of gold. I'm not that organised but I think it's this nugget It wasn't all that deep but it was a very booming signal. You'll notice from this shot how different the soil looks compared to the other area we were heading to. About 10 minutes after I found my piece JW found one with his GPX 6000, we spent another hour or so looking around and found nothing more so we moved on, so we had one each from this area. The next place we went we decided to just stay right at the start seeing he's got a bung leg and I have a bad foot we didn't want to have to walk far, especially on hillsides, and by that I mean right at the entrance, we didn't even leave the dirt road area going in, we'd done this area before a couple of years ago at the time I would have been using my GPX 4500 and GM1000 and JW was using his GPZ 7000 with standard coil, it has been a while since we've done it, he'd previously done it with older GP detectors too and VLF's. I stayed in High Yield, Normal 20 all day and JW had his GPX maxed out too. It wasn't long after arriving and I had my first nugget. It looks like one of the fries to go with my KFC chicken drum stick from the other day 🙂 A decent weight too for the area. It sounded pretty funky being a long thin bit but was a simple target. The next ones were all quite small but I just kept finding more and more, it was fun. This spot had three next to each other, you'll see where my coil is, just down below that is two big rocks, each of those rocks was a dig hole for nuggets. Another one 🙂 A bit of a ball. This one was tiny, a 0.043 of a gram nugget, simple target though as you'll see if you watch the video of it. And another one I even lost count of how many I found, usual for me 🙂 Here is a video of my second smallest one, a 0.065 of a gram We often compared the nuggets we found on each others detectors and both the 6000 and 7000 were equally doing well on all the nuggets, there was no obvious winner that's for sure, very close and I'd say I'd prefer to use the 7000 as the smaller coil was beneficial for poking around especially when the thyme bushes are involved, but soon the 6000 will have small coils anyway from various brands. So here are my weights And my total Jw was hunting within 10 to 20 meters of me all day (30 to 60 feet) and the detectors behaved very well, he had to get very close to me for the 6000 to cause a problem with the 7000, and the same the other way around, it was pretty good being able to hunt near each other like that without any problems. Here is Jw's total for the day with his GPX 6000, 1 at the salty spot and another three at this KFC drum stick spot.

Had a great time metal detecting for gold nuggets with Steve Herschbach and Steve Freeman (Condor) over the weekend of April 8-10th. We camped out for 2 nights and for the most part the weather was great. Sunday morning was in the teens. But we packed up and got out early due to some mechanical issues with Steve (Condor)'s truck. I can't thank them enough for the great time and conversations. They are both a wealth of knowledge and experience. I had a truck load of metal detectors packed with me which included the the GPX 5000, Equinox, Deus 1, Deus 2 and Legend. But got a surprise when Steve Herschbach insisted I use his GPX 6000 to ensure I would find gold. So he used the 7000 and Steve Freeman and I used 6000's most of the time. We all found gold and that made the trip even more enjoyable. But honestly I could have found nothing and been perfectly content just getting out with them. Over the course of the 2 days I found 13 nuggets ranging from 1 gram down to pinhead sized nuggets, total of 3.2 grams. Some of you are going to laugh, but that's the most gold I've ever found in a weekend. I did some gold hunting 15 years ago in Lost Basin AZ when we had property down there and I could walk across the street and pick up a nugget here and there. And more recently using the Deus 1 with the HF coils to snag a small nugget here and there in Gold and Lost Basin. So most of my experience has been with AZ. I would assume the success I saw this weekend can be attributed the detector used, location and expert advice. So I thank you again Steve and Steve. Below are some pictures of the gold I found and a video (Day 1) if your interested in watching, I'll post day 2 video later. Hopefully Steve and Steve will chime in with some thoughts and pictures of their nuggets.

Yesterday I went for a bit of a gold hunt with JW, we went to a spot we've done to death but it just keeps on giving. JW went between using his GPZ with 15" CC and GPX 6000 and once again he won the tally for the day, by a significant amount this time, I blame my sore foot, I've got a broken bone at the moment in my foot so walking and getting down digging was a bit difficult but I survived 🙂 It was quite good we were able to go to a spot that involves only a very short walk. I can't blame my tools as he found the best of his gold using the same equipment as me so I can only blame myself and my foot seems a good thing to blame 🙂 One of JW's finds was particularly interesting, he found a nugget that we estimate is about a gram in a spot I know for a fact I'd covered that exact same ground with my GPX 4500 and Nugget Finder 14x9 EVO coil, I am 100% confident I covered the exact spot he found the nugget, I've covered in more than once too, it's at the edge of a drop off into a gully and quite a small little area of deep soil in otherwise bedrock covered ground. When he showed me the spot he found it I knew I'd been there so many times with my GPX and possibly with other coils on it too although at the time of using it in this area I was almost exclusively using the 14x9" EVO, I'm pretty sure I've had the Equinox there too. He was using the GPZ with 15" CC at the time of the find. By far the biggest nugget of the day. He said it was a faint target, but it was deep. It's always a shock to know you've walked over a nugget and missed it, probably happens to me a fair bit, I don't yet have the skill levels of JW, he tends to mostly always find more nuggets than me when we're using the same equipment. Anyway, here is my KFC chicken drumstick, my favourite nugget I've ever found. If the only food available on earth was chicken, I'd be happy. 😄 It wasn't particularly deep, about 10cm I would guess, approximately 4 inches. I dug quite a lot of junk, I was mostly targeting the deep ground hoping to find something we've missed in the past as the more shallow bedrock ground we've done the most, although it paid off for JW as he seemed to mostly target the shallow bedrock ground and found more than me by a lot 🙂 The place is riddled with junk, especially shotgun pellets so it can be a challenge and possibly why we can still keep finding more gold there. Here is my junk for the day that didn't fall out of my pocket to be found again next time, I lost quite a few pellets 🙂 I also found some nails, but the weird one is the tiny little nail, I wonder why the miners had such a tiny nail, it was down quite deep, I think it's pretty old. What on earth would they use such tiny nails for? It was a nice day out and my first one in a few months as I'd broken a bone in my foot which has kept me at home. I'd like to see your favourite nuggets that resemble something so feel free to post them on this thread, I do love my Chicken nugget 😛

One big step for Ian 😉 Finally some Scottish gold.I was expecting Fine gold,but there’s a couple of flakes in there. The panning process is difficult thanks to the yellow stones in these burns,which are heavy and therefore only appear when panning back.The photo below shows what I’m talking about. Looks like gold,acts like gold,but thankfully doesn’t glint like gold or I’d be snookered.There isn’t any black sand either,just blonde sand and very fine at that.I would say it’s frustrating stuff to pan out.A little patience and an eagle eye and the gold can be seen,and being Scottish gold,it’s as pure as can be.

Here’s a video a friend of mine did of us digging another chunk off the ugly nugget patch.

First off, I have been off the forums for a while. It's not that I have not been out prospecting, but to be honest, things have just been a little down the last couple years... and well, maybe I got a little in the habit of not talking to people. I'm sure everyone knows the feeling. Anyways, I did a trip with a couple buddies to an area we have been expanding upon for years. (in the desert of Arizona) We do ok here and there. Usually, I have quite the luck, but this time my buddy was rocking it. He managed to stumble upon a patch and true to his word, after he collected a few, he called out to me so that I could come home with a little gold as well. It sounds weird, but when we travel off to a place, we try to make sure everyone goes home with gold. This usually means, get 2 or 3 pcs, you call your buddies over. So I got there and went to work. After a couple hidden cans, I found my first square specimen (sort of strange piece) and then we took turns until I had found my second piece. Well at this point, we were content. My buddy that found the patch kept looking and so I moved on, thankful that I would not go home with the skunk. At this point it was time to get away from the patch and find new areas. I tried washes nearby and then ended up circling to the other side of the hill with the patch. I see a little flat area and head right up to it. It only seemed like seconds when I got a booming signal. Once in the scoop, it wasn't long before I felt the weight fall into my hand. It ended up being a nice chunky 11 grammer. This day just got better. Another smaller patch. Of course my buddies always rag on me for finding the chunkers and skipping over the smaller nuggets. I guess I can live with that. Honestly, it was just a good time hanging out. Some before and after pics are shown below. Best of luck to everyone in the New Year!!

This is a list of Greater than 10 Tonne Gold found and recorded (a lot of early finds were not recorded) in Victoria Australia.

Recent gold found not by me but it's nice to have friends that know where to look for it and send me these beautiful enticing pictures of the yellow...makes ya want to pack everything up and head up hill. He said something about looking for or in his pocket what ever that means.... strick

Not sure if I posted this here before, but found this crazy nugget last summer. Now my wife brags to her friends, that her husband has the golden...well, you tell me what it looks like, 😄

The weather the last couple weeks where I live in Colorado has decided to remain cold and snowing leaving very little opportunities to go detecting even though spring is just around corner. I usually take this idle time to catch up on cataloging and photographing gold specimens that I’ve cleaned. Here are some recent examples of mother nature great works:

How good are your eyes or your experience In the centre is a 6½ ounce nugget but the other yellows are only rocks.

Nobody gets it all. That's true enough for sure. Sometimes it's the easiest ones that get left behind. The pile to the left looked like it had been kicked and raked down, no telling how many times. The nugget probably had been moved around some but I still found it hard to understand why it was overlooked since it was only 6" deep. Out of sight to the right of the photo was a shallow, narrow stream full of reeds etc. with sparse water flow. The remains of a couple of old wooden Long Tom's, probably from the 1930s lay mostly submerged in the mud. A few rusty bolts and washers came out of the back pile but no gold.

Location: BLM land-Western Wyoming. Elevation above 7,000' Mid July-Temp: 70's, Clear, Sunny and Cool. Rolling hills and sagebrush. Most gold was found from 1" to 3" average depth, on pediment/bedrock; and/or on a clay layer at 3" deep (except the largest flake didn't have a gold stop. No clay, no bedrock, no gravel or hard pan. Just dirt) Mineralization in the area: Moderate. Research indicated that the source of the gold was from an elevated rich lode district about 30 miles away, that was transported by Glacier action which pushed huge boulders across collected gold deposits, smashing/flattening nuggets along the way. Access to mining area required permissive crossing of private ranch property to reach old Hydraulic Mining area on a plateau several miles wide with a few creeks and drainages (all of which had been placered pretty thoroughly) No sign of mining outside of creeks and Hydraulic Pit. Detecting the Hydraulic Pit full of large boulders did not produce any gold. However, 100 yards upslope from the Hydraulic Pit, scattered, flattened, nugget patches on shallow bedrock were detected. Photo of gold in pan represents about 2 half days of detecting using various detectors. By the 3rd day, several patches had been found each giving up around 9 flakes. Repeat visits to the area produced similar number of pieces of gold each trip. Detectors: Minelab Gold Monster, SDC 2300, GPZ 7000. All machines found gold. The Monster produced the most, probably because of the shallow nature of the ground. The 7000 detected a few deeper nuggets, 7-8 inches on subsequent trips to the area.