My 3 Days In Arizona

[mn90403]

Some of you may be wondering if I made it back from Arizona.  I did and I'll tell you a bit about it.

I left here last Tuesday night at 11 PM (midnight in Arizona) for the 300 mile 5 plus hour trip.  As it turned out I was heading to a place where Chet had been the week before.  I have a friend who is staying there for the season.  It is also near the area where I've found my two largest nuggets so why not go exploring with the 15x10 X-Coil.  So that's what I did.  I got there after a couple of stops for a total trip time of about 7 hours because the last 10 miles is on a road I can only go 15 miles an hour.

We didn't head to the club claims but a couple of other washes away.  The bullets, wire and trash were similar to what Chet found but Chet documented his finds much better than I did.  I was using Chet's settings part of the time, Lunk's settings part of the time and some others.  Many of them seem to work.  I was very keen this trip to get that smooth threshold on some occasions and listen to the noises jump around it.

I'm a bit out of super prospecting shape but I didn't want to hit the tops only or the bottoms of the washes so I went for benches and sides.  The 15x10 let me do this more easily than the other two coils I have.  While I use a bungee and hipstick many times I was holding the detector freely as I did for a month or so with my 3030.  I have no complaints with its ergodynamics of letting me nose point and get under bushes.

The two of us hunted hard for 2/3rds the day trying to take advantage of some pointy fingers and research but came up short.  I suggested that we go find something in the meteorite patch before it got dark and that is what we did.  We went on the north side of the railroad tracks and hunted for irons.  This is the first place I went to hunt for meteorites with the Zed 14 when it was new.  I spent a day there on my way back to LA but I only had about 1.5 hours now so we had to get out there quickly.  My friend is new to the Zed and hadn't ever found a meteorite so we walked to some well pounded patinas a little less than a mile from the parking area.  The strewn field for the irons is 4-5 square miles but we were at the nearest edge.

It wasn't long before I had my first.  I think it is the .13 gram meteorite.  These are never very deep and some are really sunbakers but you just can't see them.  But, they really sing when you swing over them.  My friend could hear it with his 14 when I laid it down for him so he knew what to listen for now.  It was not long before he bent down and using his scoops and magnet he had his first Franconia Iron.  This was also his first meteorite.  That's a good memory.

He went on his way and I went my way for the next hour.  I didn't find any big ones as they can get over 1-2 g but I know I had gone over the same areas with the 14 because I could see my previous scrapes from years before.  I was now getting good results with the coil but I had limited time.

We ended about dark.  I had 8 irons and my friend had 3.

 

After this experience we decided to go to Gold Basin where there is gold and meteorites!  I spent the night near the noisy 40 Freeway and we were off the next morning to Gold Basin.  This was the first time for my friend so we did a bit of a 'sightseeing' tour around to the club claims and then went to a patch where I've found about 30 nuggets in the past.  As a matter of fact it was the place where I found my only 19" gold.  This place has been gone over with everything out there and we were not successful with this trip.  (I had sworn I'd never go back there the last time ... haha)  

We went by a club claim and talked to a couple of dry washers and they were doing ok.  They were also detecting as they went and said they had found some pretty nice nuggets totaling several grams so we decided to go swing down away from them.  Once again the X-Coil was a pleasure to walk around at cruising speed.  I got down in the bottom of one wash and got a really good sound that I knew wasn't surface trash and down about 4 inches was this little 7g meteorite.

This was not ideal meteorite territory but I thought I might find others but that was not the case either.

When I walked up out of the wash I looked over a mile or so and saw Jason's place and there was a truck there.  I had shared some PMs with him about his theft and I had just missed him on a previous trip with Chet so I wanted to go introduce myself.  I'll have to tell you he doesn't know me or know what I drive so when we went up to his trailer we were on video!  haha  When I told him who I was he was relieved and we had a good chat about the basin, X-Coils and the scavengers that live out there.

The next day we tried to follow up on some of Jason's geological suggestions and it ended up being a lot of interesting driving but no gold.  Once again at the end of the day I targeted an area where I've found a lot of meteorites in the past but it was not to be.  I left for Santa Monica about dark.  My way home is through Las Vegas.  Once on the other side I go opposite the normal Friday rush to Vegas but I'll tell you it was much less this past Friday.  I think it is the virus.  My trip ended about 1 AM.

I've been back recovering and reflecting.  There is a lot of gold still left in Gold Basin but you need friends and geologic knowledge to find it now.  It is very difficult to get lucky but that can happen if you have enough time and you just set out to go areas where you have not been before.  It really is an area where good gold is found with the first detector as much as the best detector.

[2Valen]

Great finds on areas that have been picked to death.

I guess luck and knowledge goes hand in hand when your swinging a detector. I know I feel that way sometimes and it gets me when I don't find anything except trash.

[jasong]

Nice to meet you. If I see you again I'll drive you out to a few old patches. 

The key to finding peripheral gold around old fields in NW Arizona is to look for 3 things on aerial imagery. This is how I narrow down a massive area to a few specific targets. This is specific to this part of the Mohave desert. 

1.) Wash gradient

2.) Soil composition and age

3.) Areas draining metamorphic terrains with felsic intrusions

Sounds cheesy, but there is something that I call a "magic gradient". Too steep and the rains flush out the gold, too shallow and the wash chokes off with sediment and gets too deep. The gradient of the washes coming off my land is the Goldilocks zone, so to speak, so it's a real life example of what to look for. Each goldfield has a perfect gradient that varies by amount of rain, bedrock type, sand/clay amounts, and cobble geometry/composition. A rule of thumb is I try to concentrate on areas where the wash bottoms appear to be 1ft to 4ft wide as that also seems to be a width sweet spot related to the gradient and water flow. 

In NW AZ in general, the hill/slope soils derived from the more felsic (quartz/feldspar rich) intrusive areas tend to hold the most nuggets. They will have a lighter gray look at the suface, and can often be picked out on aerials. The dirt might be red, brown, or gray, but the gravel on surface seen on aerials is usually lighter colored (there are exceptions). The nuggety gold seems to have come during and after the mid-tertiary volcanic activity here. So, gravels younger than the volcanic intrusives are the best bet. If you see gravels with a lot of basalt sitting right on top, the gold often will be very slim and spread out since it's older or equal age to the volcanics. Geologic maps often differentiate between the early, mid, and late tertiary gravels and the quaternary age stuff, narrowing your search down substantially. Generally gravels older than 10 million years aren't worth wasting time on. Younger/modern gravels must be reworking sweet spot gravels to be carrying gold (or draining lode areas actively shedding gold), otherwise they too are often barren. The more modern reddish gravels usually only hold gold when they are reworking/draining older gravels or have modern pockets eroding out right into them. In Lost Basin however, the red gravels often hold the best gold since the drainage up there is probably younger, and was tilted more than GB, causing more reworking. The reason for this, I believe anyways, is partly because GB is underlain by rare low angle faults, LB is at the edge of a normal fault. 

A lot of the caliche here is derived from calcite in the intrusive units that tend to carry gold, so coincidentally gold is often located where more caliche is, not just because it acts as bedrock. The two are intertwined I guess. Caliche can also be derived from nearby calcareous sedimentary formations too though, as a red herring. 

There are always exceptions, but this is what I look for when I scout new areas. Put them all together and often you can narrow your search in a new area down to 5 or 6 high potential washes as pathfinders.

Hope that helps a bit in your branching out/exploration! You are right though, there is no substitute for knowing people that know where the gold once was. Once the leads are gone, they are gone forever.

[mn90403]

Thank you Jason for your time when I met you and this description now.

It reminds me of our Barstow area patch that had a slightly sloping surface but in some areas there was 'rotting granite' with very little quartz.  I learned to like these areas.  A couple of areas I found had a much lighter colored rock and had many nuggets around it perhaps because some people didn't target it as opposed to other color choices for gridding.  They produced for me.

I'll keep in mind the above description when exploring in the future.

Mitchel

[Gold Catcher]

2 hours ago, kiwijw said:

Maybe you have.....& threw it away as a hot rock.😄

Nice finds Mitchel......I guess. For some reason meteorites don't excite me like gold does. Maybe it is because they aren't that nice to look at (to me).....like gold is. 

JW🤠

I have to agree with you on that one, JW. It is that 'aha' moment when you get a nugget in the scoop, always recognizable beyond a doubt and reason for instant jubilation (I often do the Walter Huston dance if nobody is looking...). On the other hand, with meteoroids you might not know right away if it is one or not, so not much of an "aha" moment (more of a head scratcher), unless of course you are truly an expert in meteoroids (which I am not).

[fredmason]

Mitchel knows the sound and appearance of Franconia, Gold Basins and small irons.

 If you have come to recognize your Usual Hotrocks for your area, anything different bares checking...just a hint.
Btw once they hit the dirt the are Meteorites...

fred

[beatup]

Well done

[mn90403]

6 hours ago, kiwijw said:

Nice finds Mitchel......I guess. For some reason meteorites don't excite me like gold does. Maybe it is because they aren't that nice to look at (to me).....like gold is. 

JW,

You are quite like many people I know.  Gold is superior to meteorites in my book too.

I will tell you that this picture of this meteorite is not very good.  A few years ago when I had a light box set up I could take some better pictures.  You can really see the surfaces on some of the meteorites.  They kinda come to life and each one of them has a personality and character of their own.  (Not all nuggets are worth keeping but the resulting crushup is worth it!)

Fred has sliced and polished a few meteorites and enhanced them even more.  This makes me want to get more involved with finding crystals and minerals, opals, agates and diamonds.  All of that would take time away from finding the few nuggets that are left.  haha

Mitchel

[Gold Catcher]

2 hours ago, fredmason said:

Btw once they hit the dirt the are Meteorites...

fred

Thanks Fred! Never knew there was any difference. 🙂

[Lanny]

Thanks for the story and the pictures Mitchel, enjoyed reading your gold-hunting/meteorite tale enhanced by your photographs.

All the best,

Lanny