X Coils In Gb, Scrounging For Missed Nugs

[Jonathan Porter]

That type of porous gold is extremely fast time constant, so by the time your GPZ is sampling there’s barely any signal left. High Yield is the best option on the GPZ due to its higher freq behaviour (a little like how higher and lower freq work on VLFs).  

Your post reminds of the drizzly days in West Australia when we would camp and work in an area for 3 months straight, coming back on the quad to the wife and kids was always the highlight of my day especially when I had some gold to show off. Relying on the gold I found to support my family made for an extra layer of rawness that makes the memories so much more vibrant over time.

Thanks for the great post, hats off to you for actually doing it and making the time and effort to share.😎

JP

[beatup]

Great post Jason ,very informative about the X coils

[jasong]

Last post. I'm either heading back home soon or going out to my land to be in total isolation, waiting to hear back on a couple things first. It's been raining/drizzling pretty much every day here. The drizzles are detectable, but when it starts raining hard you don't want to be caught in it since it can wash out your road in pretty quickly with flash floods.

The sky has dropped to ground most days and there are still very few people out here. A few locals are wandering around doing test panning. A bit of the scenery here in Gold Basin. It's very Jurassic looking to me. Also a lot of old 60's Star Trek was filmed in the Mohave Desert when they needed to show an "alien" planet, so it always reminds of watching those too.

Again I'm a bit slim on detecting pics because when it starts drizzling I just put my nose down and stick to detecting, so words will have to suffice here. I was using the 17" again this day, and I decided to visit a wash which had only produced nuggets mostly on one side of the wash. Many of these nuggets were buried only a few inches in the gravel and hadn't yet reached caliche. The last time I came here 2 years ago I had found a 1/2 grammer on the top of the wash bank under some drywasher tailings, and I had just assumed the nugget had come from the tailings. As always, I entered my observations into my notes, and I was re-reading my notes to look for places to revist with this X Coil. This bank which this 1/2 grammer was resting on was on the same side of the wash as most of the other nuggets had been found on. There were no nuggets found upstream in the wash beyond this last one.

It occurred to me that it might be worth a shot to detect the hillside and benches here with the 17" to see if there might be a slopewash patch feeding the wash. This sort of thing is not uncommon out here, as the caliche on the hillside often represents older fossilized stream channels, and in places where the caliche is soft or eroding out, the hillsides can often produce nuggets. When you start digging into gravel and it turns whitish, it's always a great sign as that is showing it likely part of what once once a solid caliche layer and any targets within are almost always gold.

I used my GPS to go right to the spot I had found the 1/2 grammer on the bank, and I could see the remnants of the same old drywasher pile. I began searching the area and about 15 feet from my original find I got a short, screaming signal. A bootscrape brushed it aside and I immedietely lost confidence that it was gold, but as I bent down I saw the unmistakable glint of a tiny nugget at the side of my scrape pile. It was a ~0.25 grammer that must have been only 1/2" down. 

A radius of 25 feet produced another 4 or 5 dinks, all almost right on surface and just barely buried. Looking closer at the soil, what was happening was the surface was once an old wash bottom made of caliche, but now that wash bottom had eroded another 10ft deeper leaving this old channel up on the hillside. Over a couple hundred thousand or so years, the gravels of the old channel had eroded back down into the wash and the freshly exposed caliche on the hillside (and old wash bedrock) was now breaking down with exposure to the sun and rain, releasing nuggets as it eroded.

I went to wedge my coil in between two larger rocks that were still imbedded in the fossil channel and a boomer signal appeared as my coil neared the rocks. It was screaming by the time I got the coil edge in. This photo doesn't show it well since the background is out of focus, but I pulled a channel of dirt out between the two rocks, and then pushed the edge of the coil back in and the signal was still there, so I knew it had to be gold.  I reached in the crack which was only about 1" wide at the bottom and as I pushed around the old dirt I saw the glint of gold, and it was this nice 5 grammer.

You can see the soil is as I explained in a prior post to Mitchel, it's light grayish on top. But then often will be nice and red when you dig into it. The grayish can be seen on aerials and I use it to prospect for areas to explore. It's lighter colored for three reasons: a higher silica content, a higher content of the grayish/green schists, and a higher carbonate content (from the dissolving caliche). The dirt is red from iron oxides. All of these things are often related to good placer gold ground for geologic reasons I won't go into here. The soils that are red on surface can also produce gold, but often they are too young to concentrate it, and lack shallow caliche. There are exceptions as always, especially in Lost Basin.

Anyways, pushing the coil around produced another 5 or so more dinks in my little hillside patch, but no more larger nuggets. nothing deeper than 1" aside from the 5 grammer which was wedged between the rocks. I had found a beautiful 20 gram museum quality piece in this wash many years back so I had hoped this patch was the source for more of it, but no such luck. 

The drizzle evolved, and rain started falling in blobs the size of the tip of my pinky, so large I thought it was hail at first and I made a mad dash back to my truck with plans to revist the area again with the 10". 

In all, just over 10 grams for the day. 13 nuggets, I think there are probably a few more left. I call this a cheeseburger day, any time I get over 1/4 oz I go to town to treat myself to a restaurant cheeseburger. Unfortunately it was not to be, the restaurants were all closed, virus stuff. I had a nice bologna sandwich when I got back anyways. 

One last scenery shot, I can't believe how green Arizona is right now, with all the rain. It looks like the San Juans in Colorado, in a way. Just a lot shorter. The cows must be happy, I've been wondering what exactly they have been eating up until now in the desert.

That's all for me, just wanted to share some experiences with these X Coils. Until now, due to work and life, my experience with them has been limited to a few days here and there poking around since life has been crazy the last year. This was the first time I had a real chance to give all of them a solid run. I used the 12" the most up until this trip but I didn't take it with me since I wanted to force myself to use these other coils and I really thought the 17x12 was going to make the 12" redundant. But in the end, my least favorite coil is now the 17x12 due to edge sensitivity issues. I'd say the 12" is back to being my favorite all arounder, followed by the 17" a close second (maybe even 1st in some cases). The 10" and 17x12" are struggling to find places in my arsenal. I did put the 10" to good use in another trip yesterday though so I'm warming up to it but I think I've posted enough.

Again just to summarize, I was given the 10", 17x12, and 17" free from the manufacturer and I want to make that clear for anyone reading these posts. I have no relationship with the manufacturer, I think he just felt bad about my early experiences and was trying hard to make things right and he went above and beyond IMO. But, I know I personally want to know that information when I read opinions on any products, from metal detecting to truck mod parts, any kind of products. I have tried my best to give my unmitigated opinion on my experiences with each coil here in my series of 4 posts with them. When NF releases their coils I will try to get one and compare it's performance to the similar sized X Coil, and I can guarantee I'll be using which ever one performs the best. 

Thanks for reading and to everyone who commented, I hope everyone is staying healthy, good luck all.

[Chet]

Jason

Great results and great report.

Thank you and have a good day,
Chet
 

[mn90403]

Jason,

It helps to have good notes and prior finds.  I've gone back to my prior finds and spots too often expecting more results it seems.  I need more spots.

You've explained your method of searching here which is similar to mine when it comes to swing stopper responses but I don't have any geology knowledge to go along with it.  My hope has been to cover a lot of ground and 'happen upon' undiscovered patches.  

I've come upon this 'method' as the result of running in the mountains for many years and also running marathons.  I had never really detected for nuggets until 2010.  I started largely because I had injured my back and could no longer run and train for marathons.  I've completed 21 marathons and hundreds of Santa Monica Mountain runs over the years until then.

It is appreciated that you would point out some of the gold bearing features in Gold Basin as you go through your descriptions.  I've looked for contact zones, green/red in areas west of the GPAA claims many times.  I've heard it said that you find a big wash and you will find big nuggets.  My largest GB nugget is 5 grams found at the bottom of a wash.

I was 'taught' to go to the bottoms.  Then people told me the bottoms were over hunted and go to the tops, that was the pattern.  Then people said the tops had been detected and now it is go to the washes and detect the middles at least two or three swings above the bottom.  Doing this has gotten me little new because I lack the geological knowledge and I'm just playing battleship.

It would have been nice to see what you think of my coil but I doubt we'll be able to meet up before you go back but I'm sure I would learn more than you.

Mitchel

[Jonathan Porter]

Absolute stirling post, upfront and honest, made me want to be out there doing it too. You guys might have a lot of competition on the gold grounds but you sure make up for it in pure scenic delight, I could easily fall totally in love with that landscape. It makes me treasure the isolation and vast amounts of gold areas we have here in Australia, I can literally go to some areas and not see ONE person all season and come back years later and still see no evidence of anyone ever having been there. There are still places in Australia that are hundreds of kilometres from the nearest track, I say track because the track is just that a goat track that has never seen the bite of a dozers blade.

Thanks for sharing Jason

JP

 

[jasong]

Mitchel - the trick with going fast is to know when and where to do it. The primary difference is that you are going fast through club claims that are very heavily detected and I am going fast through areas that are much less detected where the easy signals are still in the ground and jump out at me.

In heavily detected ground you want to go slow and pick up techniques like JP and JW explain in their posts. 

The GPAA camp area produced a lot of big nuggets up to 4 or 5 ounces back in the 90's and early 2000's. I'm not a club member as I do not support gold clubs for personal reasons, so I haven't detected any of those claims with the X Coils. It would be a good spot to slow down if that's where you are detecting, and know that you'll be the first with some new equipment there.

Chet - Good luck out there, hopefully I'll see ya around next year somewhere in the goldfields again. I'm always down with engineering and science campfire talk. 

JP - Thanks, I'm glad you enjoy the scenery. It's one of my favorite places on Earth and as much I wanted to share gold, I wanted to share the area too with the forum as it still amazes me every day I go out. I was raised in the country and it's places like this where I feel at home still today. The one thing it's missing is what you guys have a bit of left in Australia, which is the adventure that comes along with being the literal only person out there and discovering something brand new.

[mn90403]

I'll get out to more of the unknown to me.  For many years others have been going west and north but they didn't take me with them.  I've hunted up towards the tank and to the south of it through those hills and back over to the State property.

This last trip when I saw you we went driving around I saw the new helicopter pad at the storage area and all the large mining operations that would be north of Dolan Springs.  It looks like more commercial is going in around there and it says there will be dust and reclamation until 2030.  The roads were very busy and new ones were being cut.  It doesn't seem quite so isolated but you can get in a few pictures that makes it look cool.

JP doesn't quite get how close GB is now to the Big City of Las Vegas and West Rim Grand Canyon.  They have resold all of the once abandoned lots which has brought in more people.  I just wonder about the farms that went bankrupt on the way to Kingman.  There is that new gas station and they bulldozed all the Joshua Trees to make the nut tree farms at the turnoff.

https://grandcanyonwest.com/explore/west-rim/