My First GPX Nuggets

[PG-Prospecting]

Got to go detecting on Saturday on good gold ground that was just recently clear cut.  This area has been detected in the past but it is a huge area and the clear cutting has surely made more gold detectable.  One of the guys who originally found this spot came with me.  Having first hand experience on hand is always helpful.  I was using the gpx 4800 with a coiltek 11 inch elite mono.  I started off in normal and at the factory presets, after digging a number of hot ground signal, I switched to enhance and this removed the hot ground that was giving me issues.  The first hour or so of detecting yielded normal small bits of trash, and one target that I thought for sure would be gold, but was a piece of rusty iron about a foot down in cemented gravels (that was a let down lol).  We moved up to the logging road and began detecting it, after a few trash targets, I got a nice mellow signal, it was easily heard, and upon scrapping down about 3 to 4 inches out pops a coarse little 8 grain nugget, my first piece found with the gpx.  

I continued to detect this area of the road and pulled out three more small nuggets, the smallest being 5 grains and the largest just over a gram.  By about noon the I was beat and the heat was almost hitting 90 with about 100% humidity.  So we packed up and hiked back out.  All in all I was very happy with the day, and it showed me what my gpx4800 is capable of, and now I have more trust in its ability to find small gold at pretty good depth.

 

Then today I had to go down to my normal prospecting area and pull my dredge out, and while I was there I fired the gold monster back up and went to my little picker creek picker hole.  Found some more nice little pickers with the monster, and finally got it over a larger nuggets.  Man does it scream on bigger gold.  The area that the bigger nugget was in looked like bedrock with no evident cracks.  I had to bring the crow bar over and just ripped up the soft decomposing bedrock, and out pops a nice 1 gram nugget.  I detected for about 1.5 hours and got 5 nice pieces with one being a little quartz and gold specimen piece.  

So all in all a fantastic weekend with gold from two separate locals, with two different detectors.  Total gold was about 4.5 grams for the two short days of detecting in Virginia.  

[mn90403]

That is a well written story and great gold.

Thank you.

Mitchel

[Steve Herschbach]

That’s awesome and in Virginia double awesome! Congratulations, you are a member of a very select club! ?

[jasong]

That's crazy impressive for East Coast, that'd even be a great haul for Arizona. Nice work.

Man, you are gonna start a gold rush out there. 

[fredmason]

Excellent gold! Thanks 

fred

[klunker]

Mr. PG;

Please stay East of the Rocky Mountains. (just kiddin')

Very nice work.

[PG-Prospecting]

Thanks guys!  And I would bet that if the east coast had a similar climate to Arizona or Australia as well as open access to land and not private property, that you would see a lot more nuggets coming from the east coast. 

The area that I detected with the GPX, like I said was detected before, about 5 years ago, and the gold they got from it is nothing less then amazing with the biggest piece being 7 ounces and many other large nuggets as well as small ones.  Needless to say I cant wait to get back to this spot and hit it hard.  

[PG-Prospecting]

I also took some video of both days so once I get those put together ill post them as well.  

[jasong]

Was there a lot of old timer activity there, hard rock mines, or is this newer discoveries? Some of that gold looks pretty rough and near the source. I have to admit I don't know a lot about Virginia mining, mostly just hear about Dahlonega and maybe up into NC.

[PG-Prospecting]

There are lots of old timer workings all over the place.  Both hardrock and placer.