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