Unsubstantiated Huge Nuggets

[Wild Bill]

Where I lived above the North Fork of the Yuba River and the mouth of Slate Castle Creek, there is an account of a massive nugget taken from a bedrock crevice up Slate Castle Creek.  There’s no way of knowing if it’s true but for me personally I believe it’s a high probability for several reasons.  In 1986 Rob Stout pulled a 21 Oz nugget out of the river right at the mouth of the creek.  On the high ridges above the creek, there’s Tertiary channel drift mines that produced some large nuggets and over the ridge is the 16 to 1 lode mine, the Bald Mountain drift mine and many other historically rich mines.  The Bald Mountain mine was so rich that for every linear foot moving forward in the gut of the channel about three Troy pounds of nuggets were produced.  Here’s an accurate account from what records do exist.  
https://nevada-outback-gems.com/gold_rush_tales/california_gold_rush-tale04.htm

Here’s a map of part of the area of the Yuba.  In the SE Corner of the map, there’s a road that crosses the river at the Lure Lodge then on up to Slate Castle.  My place was the last house up the hill.  It was steep and from the deck I built, you could look down at the mouth of the creek.  
I sometimes cut firewood up the creek and did try to detect the creek and found one nugget the size of a BB.  The creek was so overgrown with maple saplings, I really couldn’t get through most of it.  Had to negotiate a path up on the steep side.  
Again here’s the Nugget known as the Lure Nugget or Slate Castle Nugget with my friend and neighbor Chet holding it.

[Roo]

Nice nugget your mate has there.

How big is the "massive" one supposed to be? 

[Wild Bill]

Roo, the Slate Castle Creek nugget according to the miners who dug it up weighed approximately 227 lbs.  Their scales of course couldn’t weigh anything that heavy so they rigged up some balanced weights that they could weigh.  One of the miners did bring in a pile of gold to the mint on record as I recall.  The Finny nugget was 5,000 ounces.  There’s a place in the Yuba river just down stream from Downieville off cannon point known as the Finny hole where the big nugget was recovered.  A friend of mine had a claim on it and tried to reach the bottom with an 8” dredge but couldn’t because of boulders.  I remember he had to get a longer hose and took out some nice nuggets.  Al Delprete was his name.  He had a modest heavy equipment company and a shop in Downieville.  I’d work for him at times as a mechanic/welder.  Al mined a lot of gold.  One day when I was at the shop, he brought in a pickup truck with the bed full of chunks of quartz with gold all over all the chunks.  He had been working on an old road above Gold Point Mine towards Sierra City.  He had a Cat 941 track loader up there.  I never saw the location but I did see the gold.  It was a lot!  Him and his partner were doing a specific gravity test on the pile.  It took them awhile but I don’t know how much gold.  Later he was dredging the claim just down from us in what was known as the gorge.  Huge boulders.  He took out about 800 ounces from one crevice with an 8” dredge and the loader to pull boulders.  I saw all the gold.  We were in bigger boulders just up stream and running two eights and two really big winches.  We couldn’t get to bedrock as the boulders were locked in tight.  On the way down, we found the 49ers had placed tree rounds between boulders but they also failed to hit bedrock.  We had the old mining records.  I’m confident that there’s thousands of ounces of huge nuggets on bedrock there.  The gold will probably stay there for ever.  We did really well there but not 800 ounces.  These were huge boulders like few placer miners have ever seen.  All in blue clay.  The biggest nugget I had seen mined back then in the 1980s was 53 ounces from Kanaka Creek.  Couple of guys using a 4” Keene dredge.  Biggest nugget found with a detector was 4 Oz found near the White Bear mine, a Tertiary drift mine.  

[geof_junk]

The World largest nugget is the "Welcome Stranger"

Found only 3 cm (1.2 in) below the surface, near the base of a tree on a slope leading to what was then known as Bulldog Gully, the nugget had a gross weight of 109.59 kilograms (3,523.5 ozt) (241 lb 10 oz). Its trimmed weight was 78 kilograms (2,520 ozt) (210 lbs), and its net weight was 72.02 kilograms (2,315.5 ozt) (192 lbs 11.5 oz).[3]

If a nugget was found near this size anywhere, I'm sure it would be media sensation. 

[Terry Soloman]

https://rockseeker.com/largest-gold-nuggets-ever-found/

[Wild Bill]

Thanks for the link!  It’s always a fun reminder of what nature created in gold.  Awesome nuggets from Oregon…

https://rockseeker.com/largest-gold-nugget-found-in-oregon/
 

I think with the advanced detectors we are talking about on this forum, we’ll see another monster discovered in the next couple years.  Might be you!  Any lunkers from Africa or Asia?  

[Wild Bill]

Well there is this.

https://supercarblondie.com/miners-dig-up-record-gold-nugget-in-ghana/

[Wild Bill]

South Africa, Pilgrims Rest area.  The Breda nugget 214 Oz I think it said.

https://thetagoldmines.com/projects/our-story/
Is this an IRGS?  Intrusion Related Gold System?  It mentions that the gold deposit is in the world’s largest known igneous intrusion.  🤔

[Drellim]

To bad no dredging in cal  with the sierra  blaster and a pressure washer  you could drill and break them up and get down there      On the  stanislaus river we had crevices that we could not break apart to get down into them 8/10 inches wide we would use the fire nozzle to blast them up you could see the nuggets spiral in the fast water never to be taken out we made all kinds funky tools to try and get them out we had to move on 

and move more ground to get good pay before winter hit  I imagine there are some real slabs down in the Yuba  amongst those boulders thanks for the wonderful stories of past when a miner in ca could use all his means to work his claim