Rye Patch Report

[mn90403]

6 hours ago, phrunt said:

Is this the Rye patch I hear about so much? Looks pretty well hunted ?

Simon,

On the left hand side of the reservoir there is a road.  That is the road we use to turn towards the mountains which are mostly off of your picture.  If you look at the 'light area' on the left side of your picture just about in the middle are areas we hunt.  These at one point had been the shoreline of the lake that Jasong mentioned.  Several of us have hunted a pattern there that tried to trace the old lake shore at a time when the gold was moving down.  Nuggets stopped close to the existing shoreline.  It is a much less productive pattern now.

Your picture was taken at a time when the lake level was low so it has much more salt exposed.  Your picture also does not show the dam which really isn't that big but it is effective.  There can be some good fishing above and below the dam.

When you get a good snow in this area everything in your picture will be white except the water but it doesn't last too long and if you want to go skiing you have to go back to Reno/Tahoe about 100 miles west.

[mn90403]

Actually the little 'light' area is closer to 1/3 up from the bottom left.  It is 2 miles from that road.  Your picture is about 20-25 miles wide.

[Gerry in Idaho]

13 hours ago, mn90403 said:

Gerry, well done of course.

But my point is ... "Rye Patch ... what have you done for me lately?"  haha  I mean this summer.

June is as close to "lately" as I can report.  

I'll try to get down there in October and beat Lucky Lundy to it, but last I heard, he moved so close he could use his spotting scope to see if I was swinging the new GPX-6000.

[Gold Catcher]

7 hours ago, mn90403 said:

Actually the little 'light' area is closer to 1/3 up from the bottom left.  It is 2 miles from that road.  Your picture is about 20-25 miles wide.

Did you ever find anything on the right of the street (east)? I haven't

[mn90403]

2 hours ago, Gold Catcher said:

Did you ever find anything on the right of the street (east)? I haven't

I have heard of nuggets being found on that side and there are some claims on that side but I have not found anything there.  I have heard of arrowheads being found there when the water is low.

[jasong]

The Lake Lahontan maximum elevation was somewhere around 4370ft, it can be traced on aerials. The Black Rock desert which is the biggest white splotch in the background was part of the same lake 12,000 years ago. Now it's home to Burning Man.

The Bonneville Salt flats (and the Great Salt Lake) are the remnants of another more famous but equally massive ancestral sister lake which has mostly evaporated. But it shows a current example of how freshwater lakes can actually deposit salt when it's concentrated due to evaporation.

I believe that the lake sediment caused a lot of placer deposits in NNV with sources beneath the lake level to become buried and so they may still exist at some depth, many tens of feet, or a hundred. I'm not talking about Rye Patch but NNV in general. The lake was quite recent geologically and so it probably came after many placer deposits had already eroded into the soil.

While little to nothing has been written about it, I believe strongly based on my own observations that there exists multiple ancient river courses through NNV that originated in the Sierras, Oregon, or Idaho, which are now buried or faulted up into the mountains, much like the Sierras contain similar channels. I believe these old river courses eroding out, which predate Lake Lahontan are the mystery source for much of the apparantly river worn, rounded nuggets found in the middle of the prairie with no sources nearby. A lot of my exploration up there is now centered around locating these old river deposits. Which usually means I find nothing more often than not since it's a lot of ATV'ing around since there are no books or research to start from.

I own 40 acres of land just barely visible in the aerial Simon posted. The region is fascinating geologically and from a prospecting perspective. It and other parts of NV represent to me some of the last great exploration opportunities in the Lower 48 for prospectors. 

This whole area fuels almost exclusively my desire for new detecting technology to be developed which can exploit exploration like this. The amount of ground to cover is massive, and the difficulties due to salt can make things even slower.

 

 

[flakmagnet]

I love the area as so many of us do, but have no earthly idea about the incredibly confusing geology.
Every nugget I have found there seems random although I know it's probably not.

 

 

[Gold Catcher]

29 minutes ago, jasong said:

The Lake Lahontan maximum elevation was somewhere around 4370ft

Here is an interesting read about it. Makes me wonder if there are more undiscovered locations with conditions similar to those at Rye Patch 

http://www.onlinenevada.org/articles/ice-age-nevada-and-lake-lahontan

[jasong]

The geology at Rye Patch is pretty similar to the geology found in many other patchy locations in NNV, until you get further East. I am pretty sure the nuggets there are derived from discontinuous pods and veins of hydrothermally derived ore, swarms of them. Most of these have eroded away or been buried, leaving no readily apparant source.

A lot of the nuggety gold in NNV seems to originate from the interface topographically speaking between the mountain and the pediment. Rye Patch is one such location. The reason is probably because this is where surface expression of the fault is which uplifted the mountain, and that fault provided conduits in the country rock for hydrothermal fluids to permeate, and some of these fluid channels carried dissolved gold in great quantity. They flash boiled upon hitting the surface, precipitated out the gold all once creating nuggety gold. And left little or lower grade gold buried deeper in the conduit where flash boiling didn't occur.

Being largely near surface, or surface occurences, these eroded away quickly, leaving no apparant source for the nuggets. They are also relatively new deposits in a historically arid area, so gold tended not to travel too far. It's also why a lot of those bonanza grade prospects and mines petered out relatively quickly. It's pocket country.

So, when looking for new patches, this is why it's important to pay attention to where the faults are in NNV when narrowing down areas to detect.