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Got a tip from a friend on some BLM land that has produced gold in the past. I spent 4 1/2 days (30 hours of detecting) while camping out there. Weather was quite good -- only rained intermittantly for part of one day; typical temps were 70's F daytime and 40's F nighttime. Got lucky to have had recent rains which brought out the flowers: I always try and learn as much as I can while MD'ing, regardless of the site/location and intended finds. I was hunting with the Minelab Equinox 800 with 6 inch coil in Gold 1 mode, White's Prostar headphones coupled to the WM08 wireless receiver. It was nice to get away from the EMI I typically deal with at home (coin hunting). However, the hot rocks more than made up for that! At the start of each day I adjusted my settings, taking advantage of what I had used previously but also trying to keep an open mind as to what would run the quietest. Over the 4+ days I tried gains (sensitivites) between 16 and 23, ran all metal or disked out just {-9,-8, -7}, notched in only {-2,-1,0,1,2}, tried all recovery speeds in {4,5,6,7}. I Ground Grabbed most of the time but did try tracking, which didn't seem to make any improvement at this particular site. The ground phase was locally pretty stable, only varying by about 1 or 2 typically. Regardless of settings there was always at least of bit of noise from hot rocks to put up with. Surprisingly sometimes the hot rocks ID'ed at 12. As if the Equinox needed one more object to read that value.... The biggest false signal I had to deal with was wet ground. This wasn't surface moisture but rather at about 2 inches and deeper. The ID's read right in the small gold range {+1,+2} and sounded pretty clean, although they weren't quite a sharp as the real thing. However, for me anyway, close enough to not ignore. Pictured below is my 'haul'. I actually found one more piece but lost it somehow in the process of putting it into the collection bottle. One more lesson learned. Bottom line is that I quadrupled my lifetime count but still haven't made it to my first gram. All read +1 TID and all were within 2 inches of the surface. One was in the grass, lying on the surface of the ground. I'm certainly appreciative of the lead I got to this location. Wish I didn't live 2400 miles away from it.

Hello all, First time poster but long time lurker. I'm curious if anyone can help me locate coarse gold canyon in the rabbit hole district. There are several mentions of this area but no area to find it and I haven't had any luck with any of my research materials or a google search. Could anyone help? Thank you!

Hello everyone. I haven't really gotten out to use my detector since buying it last year spring time (Garrett AT Gold). I'm not sure exactly how to use it and would love some pointers or would be very happy to get with someone local and teach me some pointers. I am a GPAA member and I am thinking about going to the claim they have out by Rye Patch next Tuesday Dec 04. I have never been out to that area so any info on that would be appreciated as well. Thank you very much and have a great week.

There are quite a few newer folks on the forums and some are about to purchase a gold detector. I want to give you an update. My Field Staff Experts and I will be offering our 1st of 2019 season a 3 Day Field Training on Gold Detectors, Friday April 12th - Sunday 14th. I was just notified a couple can not make it and one other from back east won't either. This means I have 3 openings right now. Any customer who purchases a gold detector from me of $2500+ can take the class for free. With the GPZ-7000 promo going on right now and you getting the additional 19" coil (valued at $1500). Purchase one of these from me...ATX Deep Seeker, GPX-4500, GPX-5000, SDC-2300 or GPZ-7000 and you get a variety of classes to choose from. Yes I also offer a 15% Military discount on Minelabs. How good is our training? Just ask the folks who have taken the class (some of them are on this forum). Please do not think you are going on a gold hunt. Our training is for Educating you on the proper use of your detector. Each of my staff members and I will be plugging in our headphones into a splitter with your phones and into your detector while teaching you the sounds to walk away from and the ones to investigate. We'll be explaining how to tell ground noise from a genuine target doing the details over and over. Each of us say the same thing, but in different words/tones, so after 3 days of instruction, you actually start to understand. From past experiences, the most gold is usually found on the last day, as you are starting to put everything together. We teach much more with the detectors, their technologies but I won't go into detail. Contact me direct with any questions.

Driving to Vegas from NorCal for a company conference and taking a few extra days to fit in some detecting to and fro ? Nox and MMK loaded, along with 6" & 15" Nox coils, and the 7" concentric MMK coil, lots of iron patches to try, some other areas more sparse with targets, yet great finds have been made in those fields, so hopefully the EQ800 with the 15" coil will light that field back up (Tom bagged a gold coin from it and I've dug a key couple of date seateds). Some other areas I want to try, including an area I suspect may have been a wagon gathering campsite, the 15" coil will come in handy for zig zagging through this area to see if there's any signs of past life to confirm my wagon campsite theory. Another area we detected in the past where I dug a super deep piece of indian trade silver, the type you see more of back east. It was super deep, and the silver was heavily tarnished and kind of crinkled up. I thought it was a junk metal tag from something modern, and it wasn't until I got it home and was cleaning my finds that I figured out the treasure I'd dug. Tom and I detected that site again and didn't find much, so he wrote it off, and I have to agree it's not promising, but given how deep this big trade silver piece was, I think the 15" Nox coil might light up something our 11" coils missed (Exp2, F75 and Racer2), it's a long shot. It's always fun to hit your old sites with your new machines, each one brings something different to the table, finding stuff your other machines didn't for whatever reason.

Long but Interesting... "Go Big" or Go Home! ?Enjoy! Ig

"Some stories are worthy of being told more than once. There are countless stories about lost or buried treasure in Nevada history. Most of these are legends that might or might not have any basis in fact. The following story, however, is one of the rare cases where a real treasure was found, when there was no previous knowledge it even existed." Full Story Here

I got permission to hunt some private property on the Nevada Utah border from a guy that owns 60 acres down in the bottom of a ravine, I think the area may also have flowing water. The area has gold mining history with a hard rock mine nearby although I know very little about the area except some deposits were discovered as late as the 1980’s and the gold reports I’ve found are very incomplete of numbers as the activity seems to have been limited. it’s a long drive, but I think I have 4x4 access into his property and may just have to drive up and put boots on the ground and look around. From google earth the area is very volcanic as is most of the desert and other minerals have been mined as well from what I’ve read, zink, copper, silver other than gold. I’ve been researching the diggins , land matters and my n Nevada mines guide, Anyone have a any idea about the detectable nature of gold from that part of N Nevada?

This year has not been going exactly as I imagined it would. My stated goal for the year was to set a new record for days in the field detecting. So far however, it has been anything but that. No complaint - I have been devoting myself to visiting family and other things that took precedence over prospecting. Weather has also been a bit dodgy this spring leading me to sit out things a little waiting for better conditions. What time I have had for prospecting has mainly been spent in northern Nevada. I am really taken with the desert and am very partial to the sagebrush and grassland country. It reminds me a lot of the time I spent in Australia with huge wide open spaces to wander. I enjoy the idea that gold can be found nearly anyplace, the exact opposite of Alaska, and I love just wandering from valley bottom to hill top because, well, you just never know. There is some old and interesting geology here that leaves nuggets in what might seem to be pretty unlikely locations. I did find one nice little patch that produced about half my gold this spring, but the rest were just strangely random isolated nuggets. I would find one and get all excited, then after several hours of methodically gridding the area wonder why that one nugget ended up there all alone. My largest nugget, at 3/4 oz, was just such a find. I wandered out of what looked to be the "good area" and just lucked into this nugget all by itself on a hillside far above the valley floor. Where did it come from? Why nothing else near it? I like to wander around freely but due to the nature of the gold deposits I am relying heavily on the GPZ 7000 map screen and GPS track to attack areas in chunks. I just start someplace and then use the GPS mapping screen to fill in all the pixels as completely as I am able in a given area. My goal is to completely hunt that area and then write it off forever as being hunted. Each hunt area is dumped to X-Change building my master map of hunted areas. I am approaching it much like building a jigsaw puzzle, each planned hunt taking in a segment and filling it completely. I still like to wander around a lot but the main focus is long term - the many years I have ahead of me hunting these areas. I could just do what I have always done and hunt piecemeal but I decided it is time to switch gears and get more methodical about things. I figure there is a lot of that random "scattered gold" out there and that a slower long term goal to gather it up is a major part of my plan going forward. Using GPS mapping is key to getting good coverage while eliminating the chance I might waste time hunting and rehunting the same locations over the years. The GPZ is also critical to this effort as I have great confidence in its ability to sniff out almost any gold that finds its way under the coil. Small gold, flat gold, wire gold, deep gold - the GPZ is my gold vacuum. All detectors miss gold, including the GPZ. But right now if I have to hunt an area once and once only, and have my best shot at finding what might be there, I do not know of a better option for me than the GPZ 7000. One detector, one coil, one pass over the ground ever - what are you going to use? If gold is found a person of course has the luxury of coming back with different coils and different detectors and trying to find gold missed before. The problem is finding that first nugget. If it does not get found, you just wander on, never knowing that maybe you just missed a great patch, for the lack of finding that first, most important nugget. I am convinced there are many undiscovered patches out there still. The patches with the big easy to find solid gold may be very rare now, but "weak" patches comprised of smaller, or deeper, and harder to find specimen type gold surely exist. They will be found by people hunting outside the commonly known popular areas. That is what I have been doing. Hunting locations where other prospectors are rarely if ever seen. I honestly think I have been a bit lucky as of late but the methodology is sound and it is what I will be doing for as long as I have left to swing a detector. I continue to follow the various posts around the world about the GPZ 7000 and people's experiences with it. Mine are pretty boring. I turn the machine on, maybe do a quick ground balance routine, and go detecting. I may not even go through the ground balance motions. I just turn it on and pick up from where I left off the previous day. I usually run in High Yield, Normal Ground, Gain of 12, Smoothing Off, Ground Tracking On. I leave most audio settings alone. The detector will often run noisy with these settings, especially in alkali locations. I may lower the threshold to 20 to knock out some excess noise, or just lower the overall volume level using my headphones. The GPZ lacks a master volume control that lowers all sounds at once, and so benefits from the use of an external booster with master volume control. The problem for me is that is one more battery operated gizmo, and so I often just use my headphones instead to gain the overall volume control I crave. I tend to run my detectors noisy but like it to be quiet/noisy not loud/noisy. When the ground responses get a bit much, as is the case with ground salt, I react more by slowing down and modifying my swing than changing detector settings. So far I would say about half the gold I found was pulled out of fairly high salt response ground with the attendant moaning/groaning or hee/haw responses the GPZ produces in that type of ground. That seems to be a show stopper for a lot of people but I don't pay much attention to it myself. I have this theory that killing those responses might kill my gold finding capability on this ground to a certain extent, as I know some of these locations have seen other detectors that ignored the salt. They also missed the gold. Coincidence? Maybe. I have plans for more experiments regarding this but have had a hard time tearing myself away from my limited detecting time to do more comparative tests. Later. Anyway, I have quietly picked up just over a couple ounces of gold with my GPZ 7000 so far this spring. The largest nugget is 3/4 oz and there are several other nice pieces I am very happy with. Nice solid, clean gold, my kind of stuff. An odd mix from very worn appearing to rough. I am unfortunately getting waylaid again with things I must attend to before I can go prospecting again and so I decided I may as well post this update now. It could be weeks before I get out prospecting again. Until then, here are some happy pictures to enjoy. More Information on Minelab GPZ 7000 Click photos for larger versions... This post was promoted to an article

Years ago, when I started to hunt Rye Patch I knew it was well past it’s hey days! Yet, I continued to see nuggets being found there by others Prospectors! Our group, finally started to pop some gold after wearing out several sets of boots and skid plates on our old trusty GPX’s. With the new generation of Minelab Detectors, SDC 2300 and the GPZ 7000, it was a new game. Having cut our teeth on the learning curve of both new detectors on the California side of the hill, we set our sites to Northern Nevada. Multitude of hours by our group to establish productive ground and techniques with our GPX’s, lead our new detectors to what seemed like brand new patches of gold. This last outing was no different! One of our hunting members had a moment of Total Recall and remembered a few years back that we found a few nuggets in a spot with our old GPX’s. Well we hit the spot swinging and soon our detector’s started to sing back to us! Now remember, I was out there a couple weeks ago, trying to track down a couple new spots for this group hunt trip. I didn’t find any new spots on that trip and we didn’t even hunt the old spots on this trip, which I did good on. Now, there is only one way to run the SDC and that’s turn it on, it’s and incredible detector and the operators of it on this trip pulled teens of nuggets with it. But, you have to know the variable sounds of the SDC when you run the coil over a target that set you apart from others swinging the same machine over the same dirt. It’s the same with the GPZ 7000, you really can’t run it wrong, just turn it on! You make it run for you and your inner self. Sure I have settings, I like and so does everyone in our group of Prospectors. You have to know what it’s telling you if it’s a target or not, there isn’t many Duck nuggets left in any old gold field(s). Air testing or burying a test nugget does not reproduce any of these nugget signals (tones). I’m still learning tones of the GPZ and will never be and expert of them. The sweet tones of a nugget, I do have lock in my mind is what keeps me and boot makers happy! Lucky...No - spend the time in your local gold field, might take a few pairs of boots, skid plates and multitudes of digging holes in hot ground and rocks to learn the tones of your settings of your detector. We had a great time, even though the wind was crazy windy and made Detecting a challenge - Persevere, press on regardless! Until the next hunt Here’s Robin’s and my 2 1/4 day hunt total in dwts

Anyone planning to go to the Rye Patch Nugget Shoot Out in September? Now that I have the EQ800 we're thinking about going to check it out. HH, Brian

I have heard a lot about Rye Patch Nevada and now that we are retired the wife and i are thinking about taking a trip down there so i can do some detecting for nuggets? We have a 4x4 PU and small 18' camp trailer. Are there areas you can get to with a trailer and set up close to where you want to hunt. Is it even possible to get a trailer in there? Can anyone go and hunt? We are thinking about some time in May, weather in Oregon and over the passes permitting. Any chance some of you might be there and be willing to give a new comer some tips on nugget detecting. I have a Minelab GPX 4000, a Minelab Gold Monster 1000 and a Whites Gold Master V-sat. all of which i need a lot more experience with. Hope to see some of you there.

Snow was all gone, but dumped 8” last night and still falling....

Poured rain here all night in Reno. Supposedly 3-4 feet of snow up in the high country - we will see when the clouds lift! We are off to a mild start and I am still out detecting, though I have mostly shifted gears to coin and jewelry detecting. I hope to stay active detecting through the entire winter - if not through mild weather here then by driving to where it is milder. It is heading into summer in Oz. Soon it will be too cold here for detecting in northern areas. And soon it will be too hot to go detecting in parts of Australia! On the other hand temps are just right for the folks down in Arizona. There is always someplace gold is being found. How are those of you who are facing an “off season” planning on dealing with it?

Made it out for half a day yester to an old patch. My buddy dave let me borrow his big coil for the GPZ and i wanted to give it a shot. Good news, i scored 3 nuggets with it, bad newsI have a 9 in metal plate in my hip that sounds off every time i moved the coil to my right. Almost impossible to hold the coil far enough away to avoid the signal. Put heavy strain on my back trying to do that. So I switched coils and tried bumping up the sensitivity to 18 ground normal. I managed to get a couple more pieces. 4.6 gram total. Big was 2.2. I had found out my girlfriends brother is a closet prospector lol. He watches all thr shows but has never found any color. So i lent him my GMT and taught him my dig, rake, detect technique and he got 7 pieces for about a gram and a half. We werent getting cell service where we were and he didn't want his wife to worry, so we packed in early at 1:30. I text my girlfriend we were on our way. She asked why so early, and i told her Jason got sick. She text back with concern asking if was the heat? I replied "hes got a bad case of gold fever" lol in which she replied that i am a dork. I guess i am. Chris

Sure, it's a little early in the season for more than just a morning hunt in the High Desert! I loaded up my truck with my gear added 4 blocks of ice and a case of frozen water bottles in my big cooler. Many asked me, how long are you staying, when my ice melts or I melt is my normal reply! Rudy, is game for any weather, as I was at his age, but now I'm looking for a shade tree to get me thru the hot part of the day...no luck in this area for a tree! Rudy, met me early to start the hunt where we left off with his 8 plus dwt'er and run of nuggets. The ground is perfect to hunt for the deep nuggets and Rudy had 5 dinks before we moved to another Patch for a change of scenery! And hour there with Sun beating what brains we had left, we decided to swing some new ground with no luck there. So, we headed back where we started the morning. I popped two dinks and I seen Rudy starting to dig a big wide and deep hole. He told me it has to be trash? I walked over and I could tell by the dirt and his screaming machine that it wasn't trash even though I tried to talk him into filling the hole up and don't waste his energy! He is much to seasoned for that line. I walked over and got the monster pick from my RZR and we started busting the shale to the target! Finally, out of the hole and into Rudy's hands was a handsome 5.70 dwt nugget at 20". This type of hunting takes time and we bust a bunch of holes chasing Threshold variations for a fat deep nugget. A couple more days later, I still had plenty of ice, but no gas left in my tank! Of course we ran into Ms Peg and a new buddy Brian from Reno...everyone had gold in their pokes! Until the next hunt LuckyLundy

1 hour ago I took a little video (frame capture below), a dry lightening storm came through and my how things can change in less than an hour. Yay... no more scrub, break out the GPZ-19 Sorry, couldn't resist. Jen

Just got back from 4 days at southern end of Rye Patch, whew, its getting hard to make finds there anymore. This nugget was covered in stone to start with and only gold peeking out one side of it, after the acid bath it weighs .55 gm. Found at 8" deep with gpx4500 and Evo 14x9, love that coil. Even found a #9 birdshot with it one morning. Another guy with us got a 1.13 grammer at 8" with his GPZ7000. That was it for our group.

Got out for my first nugget hunting trip since getting back from my "Snowbird" gig in FL (loved it!). Spent several days looking for new areas and patches.....skunked at Rosebud/Rabbithole, and wandered seemingly aimlessly along the outer edges of Rye Patch where I did stumble across a nice little nugget all by itself...unfortunately not a new patch :-( So hunkered down and got in the "zone" to hit some of my hammered areas......and the zed didn't fail me! Here's some pics...

I spent last week in and around Rye Patch. The weather was variable with rain, sleet, snow flurries and freezing wind chills...with occasional sunshine. Some days I was shivering and some times too hot, that is why I dress in layers... I found 4 nuggets and earned two from a "pot day"...no, not the kind you smoke-the kind you share! Tom liked to keep the group efforts and fun factor going so he invents these little contests...it was fun being sociable ! Hanging with the guys something is pretty new to my world. anyway I got a decent photo of this little guy-they usually run like the wind but this guys posed very nicely...there is always more to gold hunting than the gold

Got out Friday, and decided to use the good ol Boat Anchor 19 " coil on the ZED. After finding the Specimen Gold, and into it 2 hours, my Bungee broke, and I had to go to my backup bungee, and also switched back to the 14". I was using the High Yield Mode with the 19" coil, since the soils here are not to bad, and I seem to get a little more depth using the 19" with High Yield. Dave.

Some video posted in the last 30 days....

I see a lot of moisture went through nevada,anyone know if winnemucca area got any of these gullywashers up in that area. Hoping it may have stirred the ground a little up there also. Dont want to see any personal damage to the area but the ground needed a good cleansing in my opinion,springs a comin. Rick

......you guys left a few for me! :-) Was at Rye Patch and vicinity while the Nugget Shoot was going on; didn't participate in event, but met a lot of nice folks who were down for it and will next year for sure! Got some nice nuggets, several while wandering looking for new patches, but most at known areas.... that 7000 is an amazing machine! Unbelievable how it can still sniff out some gold in obviously pounded places! Here's some pics...had a great time: beauty of the high desert, comradarie of other prospectors who love the hobby as much as I, and the spiritual time of solitude....oh, and the AU! :-)