Lanny's Book

[dig4gold]

Excellent Lanny. Always tib bits of priceless info & advice in your writings. Thanks for sharing. I can't wait for your book.

D4G

[Lanny]

Drill Pipe Casing

Five summers ago, I set off upstream, away from the placer workings, to detect a surface channel from a river diversion done long ago. The channel held a shallow deposit of fine gold in that went down about six feet, but every so often it held a gram to half-gram nugget as well.

I found lots of metal junk, but no gold that day. However, I did find a strange pipe sticking out of the ground. So, getting back to camp, I asked the miners what the pipe was. Turns out it was a drill casing, one left there from a testing program. Now, drill casings are usually pulled after the testing’s done, but that one was stuck fast in the bedrock, so they couldn’t pull it. (The bedrock was about sixty feet below the surface gravels.)

Well, the recent excavations finally caught up to the abandoned casing last year, with four feet of it left sticking from the bedrock. The top fifty-plus feet got sheared off in pieces as the channel material was stripped.

So, last summer we had a long section of virgin bedrock to work with our detectors (my son, my wife, and I), with that stub of drill casing about dead center in the cut. It was the middle of a run of drill holes (from several decades past) that proved good gold on that section of bedrock.

That fine fall day, we dropped in and started detecting. My son found a nugget right away, and then I found a couple, and we both hit several nice runs of nuggets, some multi-gram, many sub-gram.

The bedrock humped up where the casing was stuck in some super-hard bedrock, and we took a lot of nuggets from all sides of the pipe on that rise. We also found a lots of flake gold in little bedrock gutters.

It sure was a lot of detecting fun, a great day out with family, plus I finally saw where and why that casing got jammed many years ago.

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

Well, the snow has left the foot of the mountains, so I'll be off soon to get after the nuggets.

That means the progress I've made on the book, (a whack of pages done) will be shelved until the late fall as getting the gold is way up there on the priority list, and our season to chase it up here in the north is quite short.

I was reminded today of a spot that had been placer mined in the late 1970's, which was hand-mined, drift-mined and hydraulic mined in the 1800's, then worked again in the 1930's, like a lot of old placer ground was.

They'd worked off a lot of overburden over many years, but they'd left a large wide pillar of conglomerate, stream run, and clay on quite a hump of ground. That conglomerate doesn't like to move, and it was sitting on top of the clay and small lenses and layers of stream-run, so undermining it wasn't an option.

A couple of old boys, about ten years ago, had found some nuggets in that pillar, and then the rush was on. A guy with a Cat knocked it over for them, and everybody camped in that area really went to town.

I'd seen that pillar a couple of years prior to the rush, but we were working on the other side of the river, so I didn't check it out. By the time I got back over there, the camping miners had worked all material down to the surrounding ground level.

At that time I had a Minelab X-Terra 705 with a DD coil with me. I scrubbed the surface of the worked ground real slow and soon had a bunch of nice flakes. I even hit some nice smaller nuggets. (Nothing over two grams.)

So, I thought I'd tear off four inches of clay and river stone and detect again, but I got skunked. I figured I'd been working the very bottom of a run of pay that the camping miners had almost completely cleared off. 

Regardless, I had a nice catch of flakes and some little nuggets, and that was the first time I'd got serious about using the 705 to look for flake gold; the nuggets were a byproduct of that fine-gold search. 

So the 705 did the job, and I used it after that for areas where the 5000 had found nuggets before to look for smaller stuff, and I did get a bit of gold, but I used it more often to go coin shooting, which it did OK. Then I gave it to my son so he could learn to coin-shoot, and he found lots of coins, and then some small nuggets and flake gold with it. 

There's a lot better machines for finding gold than the 705 now, but it did the job on the day I needed it.

All the best,

Lanny

(Off soon to chase some Rocky Mountain gold.)