The Thing's We Do For Some Gold

[phrunt]

Yesterday, JW and I went for a bit of a hike to a remote spot in the mountains, I hadn't been here at all since my GPX 4500 a few years ago, and JW had been a small few times since trying out his GPX 6000 and found a few bits.  The hike in is what puts it on the backburner all the time 🙂 

It's a close drive from JW's house, but a big steep uphill hike, and from my house it's about an hour's drive so by the time I get home I'm stuck to the car seat, man it's hard to stand up after a massive hike and an hour's drive home after a day's detecting with the hike back to the car, at least the hike back is downhill all the way.  I ran the car's seat heater the whole drive home to help the muscles recover!  JW has a few years of age over me, but he is certainly fitter.

It's a really cool place to go though, with great views of the surrounding mountains, unfortunately I can't put up scenery photos for fear of revealing the location to prying eyes, as you can work out the basic location by using the bigger mountains to get an idea of where I was.

There has been a bit of mining in the area, and reworked in the depression years, but the earlier mining was done with a lot of work and water monitors (canons) blasting water at the hillsides to recover the gold.    The Chinese hit it pretty hard too, staying longer than the other miners going over it again.

It's interesting how they get somewhere, then just stop.

The soils an interesting colour, almost white.

Quite the drop off here down to the ground below, but oddly at least I think you'd be crazy not not to detect these high areas, as gold often pops up in the most unusual of places.

My first bit of gold for the day was a bit of a surprise to me, it was a fairly faint signal, yet it was very shallow, I thought it is more likely a pellet although this area barely has any pellets at all, in fact it barely has any targets, if you get a target the chances are high its gold, aside from the occasional old bit of miner's junk like cans and a few nails most targets are gold so it's certainly a dig it all location.

I took a little video of the target, so weak of a signal for the size of the gold I thought, although I'm more used to using the 10x5" Coiltek which is more sensitive but still, I was pretty disappointed.

This is the little scrape of a hole it came from.

The piece of gold.

And its weight, quite a reasonable size piece for me, anything over .1 is pretty decent size for me 😛

I was so taken back by how weak the signal on it was I tested it this morning with the Algoforce to see how well it would do, even though it has the larger 10" round coil on it, I thought the Algoforce gave a better signal response on this particular piece.

 

It's a bit of rough looking piece.

The other interesting thing is it was right next to someone's previous dig hole, probably JW or I, we were likely using older technology at the time, as I'd only been here with my 4500 which no doubt would miss this piece of gold.

It's very unlikely this person didn't go over the nugget and they missed it.  The joys of newer technology.

Next piece was in the path you walk on to hike to this area, there are tracks all over the place, mostly from old miners I guess however now they're hiking trails and go all through the area, you can even walk from one of my favourite ski fields to this area on tracks.

This is it's dig hole, another very shallow target, an OK signal.

This is the little guy

Smaller than the last bit, but a much better signal.

Just ignore the shaft twist in this photo, it's a feature of the 6000 🙂

After that I was walking along detecting the path, but no other gold to be found in that particular area, I did find old boot tacks though which is pretty cool, one spot had a bunch of them in one hole so I gave up recovering them, that miners boots must have fallen apart at that spot 🙂  The gold spot is the dig hole just above the pick in this photo.

Here is a little video of it, I haven't watched the videos back yet but it likely shows this one had a better target signal than the previous bigger bit I found.

It was pretty easy to film gold finds here as there is so little junk about, so filming bits of digs is worthwhile knowing they're likely gold.

Next piece was on top of a little ridge

It was my biggest bit of the day, had trouble carrying it for the hike back to the car.

Deepest of the holes too.

A smooth bit.

This is its spot.

And a little video of it, the second target next to it was one of 2 pellets I found all day.

That was my last bit for the day, the day felt like it went really quick though, we finished up detecting about 7pm, but both of us didn't realize the time and thought it was about 5pm I guess.

A benefit or a negative depending on how you look at it coming from the GPZ and GPX 5000 is the 6000 can have the pick so close to the coil it's not funny, it always surprises me how close the pick can go, even when you lay it down recovering targets so while using it I have a belt attached pick holder and in this location I am glad I did, as sometimes its half an hour between targets so nice to holster your pick.  The super strong magnet I've got in my pick handle makes life easy too, if I'm using it more regularly, I can just attach it to my pick holder using the magnet to save the effort.

It stays there when walking around as long as the pick doesn't bottom out on the ground.

So other notable things from the day, this piece of quartz was so weird, it doesn't show up as well in the photo but its flat smoothed off and much like a tile or bench top, and really glossy, so weird.

You can see the shine on that one side, but the entire flat surface of it is like that, and its smooth and flat although the photo doesn't show that well.  It's like someone's cut it smooth and painted it with polyurethane.

And my junk for the day, there was also a nail which I left behind and you can see why I say it's a dig it all location.  I'm used to digging hundreds of pellets on the farm land locations, this spot, 2 🙂

Both big pellets too.

And last but not least, some old miners' tins I found, I left them where they were, a bit of history.  I think this tin can was never opened.

This one looked like a giant sardine tin.

I think I'll get a bit fitter so the hike and day of swinging a detector around going up and over hills and mounds of soils doesn't wear me down so much and go back to this spot more often, I do really like going there, it just takes it out of me.  It's very difficult to E-Bike there too as much of the path is on a cliff side with a big drop and very skinny path no more than 40cm wide in many spots, I've done it before but ended up walking the bike much of the way as I wasn't crazy enough to ride it through the steep drop off areas.  Today I'm completely jelly legs and walking is a challenge 🙂

JW doubled my gold count, he came away with 6 pieces, pretty small ones too, he was using the GPX 6000 and 10x5" Coiltek coil, a better choice of coil for the day, I think.  I only had the NF coil on as it was left on there from a previous time.  It was good to take the 6000 out though, leave it much longer and the old motor may seize from lack of use.

 

[Joe L]

Sounds like one heck of a day and adventure.  Really like the photos and even though I am just, for now, an armchair prospector, I do live through guys,,, until the my first gold detector shows up.   Joe

[beatup]

good looking country 

[MSC]

cool, I like the 11 inch on the 6000.

[phrunt]

1 minute ago, MSC said:

cool, I like the 11 inch on the 6000.

Yep, I like the 10x5" and 11" best out of my GPX 6000 coils, which are the 10x5" Coiltek, 12x7" NF, 11" and 14x9" Coiltek.

[MSC]

I have some questions about different coil manufactures, I will have a bit of a winded question concerning some of them coming up.  phrunt, your post is part of what inspires my upcoming question/post. 

[jasong]

Those are the best places to detect! I love that feeling where you think yeah I can take the camera out here and probably not be wasting time.

Some of NZ reminds me of detecting the Rockies here, except of course minus the nearby ocean. Looks somewhat like home.

The quartz face may be a slickenside. You can find it in shear zones, areas with lots of faulting, etc. It's when two faces move/grind across each other with enormous pressure, which ends up polishing the surfaces (and often leaving lines/striations called slickenlines). Similar things can result with glaciers and a lot of that hydraulic area looks like glacial till. 

[RONS DETECTORS MINELAB]

4 hours ago, phrunt said:

Yep, I like the 10x5" and 11" best out of my GPX 6000 coils

Same here, the 10 x 5" has the best depth on 2 grain and smaller of all the coils offered and where it starts to lose depth on larger pieces the 11" starts to excel. 

[GotAU?]

27 minutes ago, jasong said:

Those are the best places to detect! I love that feeling where you think yeah I can take the camera out here and probably not be wasting time.

Some of NZ reminds me of detecting the Rockies here, except of course minus the nearby ocean. Looks somewhat like home.

The quartz face may be a slickenside. You can find it in shear zones, areas with lots of faulting, etc. It's when two faces move/grind across each other with enormous pressure, which ends up polishing the surfaces (and often leaving lines/striations called slickenlines). Similar things can result with glaciers and a lot of that hydraulic area looks like glacial till. 

I was going to also mention glacier polish… there even seems to be some parallel lines in it that would indicate directions that it flowed or shifted (if slickenside related). Simon, any small lakes or natural ponds in that area? Glacial moraines?

looks like a great day, good for you Simon. I’m curious, why did you feel that the 10 x 5 Coiltek would have been a better choice than the larger 12 x 7 Nugget Finder coil? Was it due to the terrain or performance?  I have both but not enough experience to say yet.

[phrunt]

3 hours ago, GotAU? said:

I was going to also mention glacier polish… there even seems to be some parallel lines in it that would indicate directions that it flowed.  Simon, and small lakes or natural ponds in that area? Glacial moraines?

looks like a great day, good for you Simon. I’m curious, why did you feel that the 10 x 5 Coiltek would have been a better choice than the larger 12 x 7 Nugget Finder coil? Was it due to the terrain or performance?

Yes, there are massive lakes in the area, I drive half an hour at about 62 mph along the side of one to get to this spot, and that's not even half the lake length, it's called the Lakes district 🙂 It had glaciers all over the place, still does have some but much smaller ones now, this area we were detecting in was a big glacier at one point.  From Bing search. "An inventory of South Island glaciers compiled in the 1980s indicated there are about 3,155 glaciers with an area of at least one hectare (2.5 acres). Approximately one sixth of these glaciers covered more than 10 hectares."

It does indeed have little lines all going the same direction through the smooth surface, it looks like it's wet it's that shiny but it's not.    I can't get a good photo of it, well one that shows how it really looks.  Tilt it on an angle to show the sheen of it and it gets too glossy to see, and straight on doesn't show the shine.

We aren't called the Shaky Isles for nothing, no shortage of earthquakes and faulting here.  

The 10x5" would be a better choice in the area due to it being deeper on smaller gold, which seems to be the gold we are finding in the area.  I don't like to use the term more sensitive as much with the 6000 as the 11" will hit gold as small as the 10x5", so it's not so much sensitivity, it's depth on the sizes of gold and the smaller coils seem to hit the tiny bits deeper, which you would expect.  I'm betting the 10x5" would give a better response to the piece of gold I was quite disappointed in the performance of the 6000 with, something I'd like to see, I can't do like I did with the Algoforce and just turn it on in my house and try it out though as the GPX just makes all crazy sounds 😛  Only the Algo can be tested in a house like that.