Lanny's Book

[Joe L]

I’ve read a few of your  pages in these forums and if your book is anything like them, it will be Fantastic!!  I am looking forward to it. Joe

[Lanny]

On 3/8/2024 at 3:19 AM, Goldseeker5000 said:

Glad you are making the plunge. It's a big undertaking isn't it. Putting it together can be simplfied in Quark Express or InDesign. Congratulations Lanny. 

Thanks Reese, it's a lot of work, as you well know, thanks for the tips on the software, really appreciate it.

All the best,

Lanny

[Vance in AK]

This is great news!!!  Cant wait!

[Lanny]

On 3/10/2024 at 8:46 AM, Joe L said:

I’ve read a few of your  pages in these forums and if your book is anything like them, it will be Fantastic!!  I am looking forward to it. Joe

Joe, thanks for taking the time to be so kind with your compliment. I really appreciate it. 

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

On 3/11/2024 at 3:15 PM, Vance in AK said:

This is great news!!!  Cant wait!

Vance, thanks for dropping in to say a kind word, much appreciated.

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

I've got quite a few more pages done lately. (It's a lot of work to decide which stories and notes to include, plus the time to rewrite them.) It's given me a lot of respect for anyone, anywhere, that's ever written a book.

(Sent the following to Jim today who asked about the writing--thought I'd share it as an update as well.) "I will admit that at this time of year the book writing is starting to conflict with the gold season, as I've been going through my detectors and ATV's to make sure everything is completely ready for the hunt to begin. Furthermore, I have to get out to check on the gold camp to make sure the trailers are all ship-shape for camping throughout the spring, summer, and early fall.

There's still a lot of snow in the mountains, and that's where we've been chasing the gold for quite a while now. In fact, the elevation where we've been getting the nuggets is way up there, so the snow won't be gone until June at the earliest, but there's lots of other places at lower elevations that hold good gold as well, and that will keep us busy." (My son and I chase the gold together as often as we can. As well, my wife is a great panner, and she loves to pan the nuggets we throw in the gold pans along with the attached clay, etc., so we don't have to take the time to recover each and every target--saves us a lot of downtime, so we use the time instead to keep finding targets to throw in the pan.

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

Quartz Rock With A Faint Tone

I was out in the Nevada desert with several buddies chasing the gold near a bunch of old hard-rock gold mines. I found so many pieces of old blasting caps with the Equinox, I thought I was going to go crazy because of the nice non-ferrous reading on the Nox. The Oldtimers sure did a lot of work in the area as there were massive mine dumps in front of the adits, all of them running in a crescent shape around the mountain.

I headed up a little gulch that ran up and away from a large mine, and I started finding projectile (lead) after projectile, over and over again. And, the trouble with spent rounds is they ring up on the meter right in the gold range, so after an hour of finding my own lead mine, I headed back down the mountain.

I walked over to another mine dump from a smaller mine, and I started finding square nails and more bits of wire and blasting caps (if I'd have kept all those bits, I could have started my own copper mine too), so I headed back to the rendezvous point to see what the boys had found.

One of them had an oval piece of white and stained quartz about the size of a folded pita, and he was swinging his Gold Monster back and forth over the rock, and he kept getting a weak signal. (The meter would hop over toward the positive side, but then skip back.)

My buddy had a rock hammer with him, and he started chipping off chunks of that quartz, then they'd scan them. With every chunk that gave no signal, he put them in a little pile. He kept chipping off chunks until there was only about a golf ball-sized piece of the original rock left. In that chunk there was a signal, and when he hit it with his rock hammer, it opened along a fracture line and there was the gold! Nothing big, but the only gold we found that day.

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

I had an interesting experience this past summer. 

I was hunting virgin bedrock in a placer cut/pit. There were some nice nugget finds, and then I started to work a bedrock rise with a vertical edge that dropped about three feet into a larger sheet of bedrock.

Piled up against that edge about six inches high was channel material the large bucket on the excavator couldn't scrape out. (Sometimes these spots hide nice nuggets too.) I took my pick and worked some material off the top of the dirt and scanned the bottom dirt with the Goldmonster. I got a signal and watched the display. The bar jumped to the right, then headed back into ferrous territory. With each sweep, it read the same way.

I isolated the signal, and it was a flake of gold, about half the size of an oatmeal flake. I was surprised the display hadn't pinned all the way to the right in non-ferrous territory. 

I kept scraping away top material to detect the ground below. The same thing happened again, the signal ID'd off to the right then back to the left. Another flake of gold, about the same size. I looked closer at the material I'd dumped from my scoop, lots of little bits of magnetite and dark, heavily stained rocks.

I worked more material in the same way, and I kept getting flakes with every scrape all the way down to where the jutting piece of bedrock met the bedrock sheet. There were a few larger pieces that pinned all the way to the right, but all the others, a nice catch of flakes, did the iffy bounce.

With the Monster it really pays to check out those iffy signals or I'd have left a nice whack of flakes in the ground.

All the best,

Lanny

[dig4gold]

16 hours ago, Lanny said:

With the Monster it really pays to check out those iffy signals

Yes it certainly does Lanny. Good on you.

D4G

[Lanny]

Gold Around The Big Boulder

Last summer my son and I were detecting nuggets in a placer cut/pit.

My son found some real beauties (multi-gram) on the first trip around the bedrock, and he slowed way down the second time around. 

I was doing the same thing, slowing down a lot the second time checking that bedrock. It's a strategy that really pays off as lots of smaller gold is found when going low and slow while scrubbing the ground with the coil.

My son was getting nice flakes as he scoured the bedrock patch he was working. So, scrubbing the coil and going slow had paid off nicely. 

He started to work a big boulder on the west end of the cut. He carefully checked the exposed bedrock in front of the boulder, but there was no gold. He then decided he'd get to work with the pick and shovel and move some overburden from behind the boulder where it met the face of the cut.

While scanning the newly uncovered layer of dirt, that's when his fun began.

He spent the next hour removing a layer of dirt, recovering flake gold, and then starting the technique all over again. After that hour was up he had some really nice gold in his bottle.

He was using a VLF detector (Gold Bug Pro) with the small coil, learning as he went along that small coils don't punch very deep on small gold, and that by scraping off layers of dirt in a prime gold location, it creates a new shot at the gold with every fresh level.

A great day, and there's no better time than time spent with family (and getting gold is just a nice plus).

All the best,

Lanny