Hillside Gold Nuggets

[Victorius]

1 hour ago, Gerry in Idaho said:

Yes the 4.5" coil is most desired for the smallest of Au nuggets the AT Gold can recover.  You mentioned clay layer and conglomerate.  Many times we have found nuggets on old clay layers.  Sometimes the hardpan layer is tan in color and many times it's a reddish/orange or even a off yellow.  In some of Oregon, it's glue/grey in color that holds the gold.  Either way, be sure to swing any little rise on the side of a hill as those are natural catches as gold works it's way down.

We look forward to seeing your 1st success posted with a big grin here on DP.

A few folks might get a trick or two from this video we did years ago when i was a Field Tester for it.

 

Knowing the size of gold in an area and your detectors capabilities is crucial.

 

 

 

Thanks for the support, small hillside climbs as gold accumulation areas are also great advice. Is it possible to determine by the appearance of quartz whether it can produce nugget gold? What should it be?

[Gerry in Idaho]

I've changed my thoughts on the abundance of quartz and associate with gold.

When I was chasing it 25 yrs ago, I thought the presence of quartz was a great area to hunt.  As I spent much time in the field in many areas and including Australia/Mexico, I've learned that gold is where you find it.  I remember in Aussie flat lands, I could go for miles and never see quartz, but I found gold.

Quartz is an indicator though but not a certain to hold gold.  The nastier and more stained the rotten quartz is, the more indicators of a variety of minerals that might promote the occasional Au elements.

At the famous Rye Patch, we find very very very few pieces attached to quartz.  I look back at the thousands of nuggets and only a few had quartz attached.  Then in other areas, it's a certain type of quartz veining we look for and if that area is gold indicators on old maps, it's worth a swing or 2.

Hopefully other chime in and give their thoughts.

Sometimes a rare occasion Rock of quartz, just beeps loud and clear.

[GotAU?]

This may help showing the process of hillside weathering from one of my Geomorphology texts-  if one is trying to get down to bedrock, the shallowest soil deposits will be upslope from the foot of the hill.

[GotAU?]

1 hour ago, Gerry in Idaho said:

I've changed my thoughts on the abundance of quartz and associate with gold.

When I was chasing it 25 yrs ago, I thought the presence of quartz was a great area to hunt.  As I spent much time in the field in many areas and including Australia/Mexico, I've learned that gold is where you find it.  I remember in Aussie flat lands, I could go for miles and never see quartz, but I found gold.

Quartz is an indicator though but not a certain to hold gold.  The nastier and more stained the rotten quartz is, the more indicators of a variety of minerals that might promote the occasional Au elements.

At the famous Rye Patch, we find very very very few pieces attached to quartz.  I look back at the thousands of nuggets and only a few had quartz attached.  Then in other areas, it's a certain type of quartz veining we look for and if that area is gold indicators on old maps, it's worth a swing or 2.

Hopefully other chime in and give their thoughts.

Sometimes a rare occasion Rock of quartz, just beeps loud and clear.

Wow! Haven’t seen that one in your posts Gerry!  I’ve been another one of those quartz chasers too, but it’ was confounding at first at one area that historically had free milling gold  I occasionally go to has a lot of very white bull quartz outcrops and pieces of it strewn all over the surface. But then by looking closer at the old  diggings there, I realized that the miners concentrated on a narrow  band of ore with mineralized quartz, along with other material, deposited between the bull quartz dikes and surrounding rock, so I’ve been concentrating in those areas on the hillsides where quartz dikes and smaller veins are and detecting on them directly as well as doing some scrape and detecting of the soil downslope  of each of them.

[Victorius]

By the way, here is a photo of the hillside where I searched with a metal detector (photo screen from my video).

[Norvic]

3 hours ago, Gerry in Idaho said:

've changed my thoughts on the abundance of quartz and associate with gold.

Aye, I think doesn`t matter where we prospect a golden Irish rule is "tis where tis". With time in our golden journey we can look back and realize the more we experience the more we realize we don`t have the answers, just a lot more questions. 

[ghansen]

Have you tried panning a few pans of dirt off this hill  side to see if there is any sign of gold at all?

[dig4gold]

18 hours ago, geof_junk said:

The less the slope the more time for the smaller gold to remain. Try any area with a change in slope. The crown of a hill and where it goes flat at the bottom is also worth a try.

The steeper the slope could be the chance of bigger heavier gold getting caught up in a crack or crevice too & remaining there. More detectable than the smaller gold.

D4G

 

[geof_junk]

Some gold in Quartz.

16+ Oz in big one 4+ in middle one, gold yielded. Noted quartz is over 7 times larger.

That should show the different Quartz.

[GB_Amateur]

Regarding your last photo, Geof, if it weren't for the sparse scraggly vegetation I would have figured this was a photo from the Mars Rover.  (And Mars might have more water, too.)