Bedrock and Gold: The mysteries . . .

[Lanny in AB]

Do you love to chase the gold? Please join me--lots of gold hunting tips, stories of finds (successful and not), and prospecting poetry.

Nugget in the bedrock tip:

I had a visit with a mining buddy this past weekend, and he told me of an epic battle to get a nugget out of the bedrock, and of what he learned from the experience. I thought some of you might like to learn from his mistake.

While out detecting one day, he came across a large sheet of bare bedrock. The bedrock was exposed because the area had been blasted off with a water cannon (a monitor), by the old-timers! It was not fractured bedrock, in fact it was totally smooth.

He was not optimistic at all of the prospects of a nugget. But, for some reason (we've all been there) he decided to swing his detector over that bedrock. After a long time, just as he was about to give up on his crazy hunch, he got a signal, right out of that smooth bedrock.

There was no crevice, no sign of a crevice, nada! So, he had to go all the way back to camp to get a small sledge and a chisel. The signal in the rock intrigued him, but he still wasn't overly optimistic. For those of you that have chased signals in a similar situation, sometimes there's a patch of hot mineralization in the bedrock that sounds off, but this spot, according to him, was sharp and clear right in the middle of the signal, not just a general increase of the threshold like you get when you pass over a hot spot in the bedrock.

Anyway, he made it back to the spot and started to chisel his way into the bedrock. If any of you have tried this, it's an awful job, and you usually wind up with cut knuckles--at the least! Regardless, he kept fighting his way down, busting out chunks of bedrock. He kept checking the hole, and the signal remained very strong.

This only puzzled him all the more as he could clearly see that it was solid bedrock with no sign of any crevice. He finally quit at the end of the day, at a depth of about a foot, but still, nothing in the hole.

An experienced nugget shooting friend dropped by the next morning to see him, and asked him how the hunt was going. My buddy related his tale of the mysterious hole in the bedrock, and told the friend to go over and check it out, and see if he could solve the riddle.

Later in the day, the other nugget hunter returned. In his hand was a fine, fat, sassy nugget. It weighed in at about an ounce and a quarter! After my friend returned his eyeballs to their sockets and zapped his heart to start it again, he asked where the nugget had come from.

Imagine his surprise when he heard it came from the mystery hole!! He asked how deep the other guy had gone into the bedrock to get it. "Well, no deeper" was his reply.

So, here's the rest of the story as to what happened. When the successful nugget hunter got to the bedrock, he scanned the surface got the same strong signal as my buddy. He widened out the hole and scanned again. Still a solid tone. He widened the hole some more so he could get his coil in, and here's the key and the lesson in this story, he got a strong signal off the side of the hole, about six inches down, but set back another inch into the side of the bedrock!!

My unlucky friend, the true discoverer of the gorgeous nugget's resting place had gone deep past the signal while digging his hole!!

Now, of course, a good pinpointer would easily solve this problem. The problem was, my buddy didn't have one, so why would he widen the hole, right? Well, the other guy was the one with more experience, and that's why he did. It was a lot more work, but what a payoff!

So, my buddy's butt is still black and blue from where he kicked himself for the next week or so for having lost such an incredible prize.

Some nugget hunting lessons are harder than others to learn. . . .

All the best,

Lanny


P.S. When in gold country--check the bedrock, regardless of whether it looks likely or not! Mother Nature likes to play games sometimes.

 

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[63bkpkr]

Mighty fine Lanny, thank your for sharing your talents with all of us for Christmas and your knowledge of prospecting for the rest of the year!...........................63bkpkr

 

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[Hoser John]

You knocked it right outta the park Lanny. Fantastic poem and a good visual too. I LOVE DYNAMITE. And a Merry Christmas and a safe New Year too- John

 

[Lanny in AB]

Wow!

Thanks Terry!

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Just splendid Lanny!!!!! As I read through it I could not stop smiling. Will have to get Jo to look at it Friday night, she'll love it.

We look forward to your Christmas poetry each year... it matters to us... and you are such a wonderfully talented writer. Thankyou... holy cow... I didn't even have to ask you this year. And I had planned to do so.

Jim.

PS: Nothing arrived in the mail so far...

Why thanks so much Jim, and I've sent you a PM.

I really appreciate you taking the time to leave a comment.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Mighty fine Lanny, thank your for sharing your talents with all of us for Christmas and your knowledge of prospecting for the rest of the year!...........................63bkpkr

Much appreciated Herb! It's so good to hear from you. I constantly wonder if you're back out chasing the gold or not.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

You knocked it right outta the park Lanny. Fantastic poem and a good visual too. I LOVE DYNAMITE. And a Merry Christmas and a safe New Year too- John

John, it means a lot that you took the time to comment. I'm glad you enjoyed the story in the poem, and I think I can tell you've had some experience with blasting somewhere along the way.

Merry Christmas and all the best,

Lanny

 

[Jeff95531]

Merry Christmas Lanny. Peaceful solitude to you and yours this holiday season.

 

[63bkpkr]

Well Lanny,
I did purchase that small round coil for the GMT detector with the intentions of using both in the 2017 Season, now to make that come true! The work with the new company has been hard though the past two months have seen some real improvements that were of course hard won. I've put in a tremendous number of hours to make this company a reality and it seems like all the effort is bearing fruit. We will see what the first three months of 2017 bring, more long hours of work for sure just as long as the fruit is sweet!
I, among many others, am looking forward to a winter of comments from yourself with pictures being an added joy. Take your time with this as you deserve some needed down time as well as maintaining strong family ties. Much Happiness.....63bkpkr

 

[Lanny in AB]

Merry Christmas Lanny. Peaceful solitude to you and yours this holiday season.

Thanks Jeff for the nice note, and all the best to you during this festive season as well.

I hope you're still finding some golden goodies in your neck of the woods.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Well Lanny,
I did purchase that small round coil for the GMT detector with the intentions of using both in the 2017 Season, now to make that come true! The work with the new company has been hard though the past two months have seen some real improvements that were of course hard won. I've put in a tremendous number of hours to make this company a reality and it seems like all the effort is bearing fruit. We will see what the first three months of 2017 bring, more long hours of work for sure just as long as the fruit is sweet!
I, among many others, am looking forward to a winter of comments from yourself with pictures being an added joy. Take your time with this as you deserve some needed down time as well as maintaining strong family ties. Much Happiness.....63bkpkr

Well, I truly hope all of that hard work indeed pays off for you. You've had a string of hard-work years, but it sounds like things may be working out, so I'm happy for you.

Thanks for the well-wishes and the encouragement as I truly appreciate it all.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[ProspectorBill]

Thanks Lanny. I really enjoyed reading this poem. Wishing you and your family a wonderful Christmas.

 

[Lanny in AB]

Thanks Lanny. I really enjoyed reading this poem. Wishing you and your family a wonderful Christmas.

Thanks for taking some time to drop in and leave such a nice comment! I truly appreciate it, and a wonderful merry Christmas to you and yours as well.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

As posted by Idahogold:




This video seems to focus on how certain items can "fool" the detector into thinking a signal is no good. Interesting . . .

All the best,

Lanny

 

[63bkpkr]

Hi Lanny,
This morning I was thinking about you as I began my scan of the prospecting blogs to find you'd made a post. An interesting video! I've been thinking that since it has been three years since I've had my detector in hand that I will have a lot of re-learning to do and I will need a test garden to work with to help me get back into synch with my GMT.

The work, my job that is, has finally taken a turn for the better as two weeks ago we produced some of the best tubing ever since I started almost one year ago. The best part is that I'd established a procedure, followed it, it worked and will work every time. Then of course we shut down all processing runs and began packing for the move to our new work site. As all moves go some things will just not work out as hoped for but we will be running again and soon. We have a new component coming in around the middle of Feb that will rejuvenate our main processing machine, that is when I expect things to really take an up turn for the better.

I've been looking at my backpacking & prospecting gear of late and have been assembling the bits and pieces for my July 4th Adventure in the NorCal mountains and I've been warning my boss of my intentions to take a large block of time away from work at about that time, timing depends on the snow being gone as I cannot get to where I want to go to unless the white stuff is all gone and the upper layers of ground are reasonably dry.

Hopefully you will have some time during the winter closure to share a little with all of us here on Tnet though I'd imagine you've a good deal work ahead of you to finish off last years prospecting and setting yourself up for the 2017 prospecting year so complete what is needed and when you have time we'd love to hear about/see parts of your 2016 efforts. Regards........... 63bkpkr

 

[kiwi jw]

Hi there Lanny.....Oh my god.....160 pages to this fine line of posts. I haven't been on here for ages & I cant recall what page number it was up to then. I have a lot of catching up to do....that is for sure. So I will wade my way through all the pages. I would just like to take this moment to wish you & all who have contributed to this line of post the very best of luck, health & success out there for 2017.

Happy hunting.

Regards

John

 

[Lanny in AB]

Hi there Lanny.....Oh my god.....160 pages to this fine line of posts. I haven't been on here for ages & I cant recall what page number it was up to then. I have a lot of catching up to do....that is for sure. So I will wade my way through all the pages. I would just like to take this moment to wish you & all who have contributed to this line of post the very best of luck, health & success out there for 2017.

Happy hunting.

Regards

John

John,

Great to hear from you again, and wonderful to know (from other posts) that you're still out there chasing the gold and having success. Hopefully things slow down enough around here that I can post a few stories sometime in the near future. I've had some nice success over the last couple of years, and I've found some nice nuggets to boot, all with the detector. I'm finding that I'm specializing more and more in straight nugget shooting, but I'd jump at the chance to dredge again if I could get a permit (very hard to get these days) as I love lying on the bottom of the river watching the trout go by as I expose some nice bright gold either resting on or protruding from the bedrock. There's nothing else like that experience, the golden rays of the sun cutting through the water to highlight the bright gold nestled in the bedrock, priceless.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Interesting link on historical gold, and gold nugget finds: Finding Gold Nuggets

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Detector Learning Curve, Gold Snob Review.

Every detecting season, I learn a bit more: a bit more about how my detectors actually work, and a bit more about where to look for gold and how to refine the process of actually detecting gold.



I hope I never hit the end of the learning curve when it comes to nugget shooting because that's what keeps it interesting for me, and I doubt that I ever will hit the end as the technology is constantly changing to offer new opportunities, more detecting refinements through on-board computer enhancements to make signals crisper or to dial down interference and unwanted ground noise, or improvements in coil technology, etc.

Last summer was a very successful detecting season, and once again, I found out that I still had much more to learn about detecting, more than I thought I needed to learn or know in fact. Here's one small for instance about that: I wrote a post a while back about not being a gold snob. The purpose of the post was to remind myself to examine every aspect of a chosen nugget shooting area, not just the places my eyes told me looked like the prime places to detect. To summarize the contents of that post, I sometimes shut the more global thinking part of my brain off and get far too linear and only spend my time working spots that seem more likely than others to have nuggets. I don't know why this persists, as each successive season I find nuggets where they're far more likely not to be found than where my inflated sense of thinking tells me they should be found.

For instance, on a lazy summer's day under a clear blue mountain sky, I was detecting an abandoned section of previously mined bedrock. The excavation contained pockets of standing water (some quite deep), slumped sections of bank that had worked out onto the formerly bare bedrock, portions of bedrock that were slowly being buried by slick clay, and nests of boulders had magically migrated into the pit from the mountainside, etc.



I spent most of my time carefully detecting contact zones, working humps on the bedrock that still carried bits of placer gravel, checking gutters and troughs that still contained traces of possible pay, etc.

I got skunked!

I moved out to the margins and checked them very carefully, same result. Zip, nada.

There was a large section of bedrock that was flat, and it looked very unremarkable, thus I had avoided it all day. Moreover, the mother rock was very hard and didn't look nugget friendly in the least.

Well, since I hate to leave skunked, I ground balanced my detector carefully, threw down a test nugget to check against the bedrock background to ensure everything was still working properly, and then I headed across that boring bedrock.

Now, you can't make this stuff up, but after three sweeps of the coil, I got a solid target response. A positive response. The meter pinned at 50, and the signal sounded shallow. It took almost no time to pinpoint the signal, and as the bedrock had almost no material covering it and no place to hide anything, it also took no time to recover the target. It was a nice gram and a half nugget that could easily have been a sun-baker after one more rainfall. I couldn't believe it!! So, of course, I snooped around some more on that unlikely bedrock, and yes I found more nuggets. Did I feel stupid for assuming wrongly all day long? You bet!

The bad part of this story is that I almost walked away because I wasted most of the day looking where I thought the gold should be instead of giving every area an equal chance. I mean really, how do I know where the gold will actually be? I don't, but too often I keep making assumptions or I rely on old material and images of previous find-areas stored in my brain. Luckily, I'm learning and realizing that if someone went to all the expense of uncovering bedrock that held placer deposited millions of years ago, the least I can do is open my mind to the possibility that there could be gold anywhere within that excavation. So why do I keep thinking I should be able to visually tell where the gold is more likely to be? I give up, but when I get skunked, thank heavens it forces me to look at the larger picture or reflect perhaps on the stupidity of being a recursive gold snob.

Oh, the story doesn't end there. I got determined after finding those spare nuggets out there on that bedrock flat and came back the next day with more determination to check out every area I'd deliberately ignored the day before while detecting in gold snob mode, and there were more nuggets indeed.



But, that's a story for another day.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Old-Timer Tunnels: Three Abandoned Adits.



There were no nails!

That was a first for me. When I've detected around old adits before, there's always been nails, various sizes to boot, but this site was different. All of the timbers in the tunnels were hand-hewn with an axe; all of the uprights, the cross pieces, and the lagging all crafted by hand. No nails used anywhere! Looking in the tunnels, it was obvious they were of very old construction, likely older than all others I've ever seen.



The lagging as well was made from pieces of axe-cut fir about three inches around, the bottom layer running perpendicular to the run of the tunnel, with the second layer running 90 degrees to the bottom layer, then a third layer against the roof of the tunnel that ran perpendicular to the run of the tunnel again. However, what really surprised me was that the walls of the placer deposit were braced from floor to roof with stones (ones flat on the top and bottom). As far as I could look down any of the three tunnel lengths, they were all cribbed the same way.



Now, I've seen quite a few drift mines over the years, but they were all timbered with stout main pieces, then lagged up against the ceiling with sawn planks, with brace pieces situated at regular intervals from timber to timber to support the lagging. The previously mentioned three tunnels were dramatically different from the norm however. Moreover, I could make out side rooms in the three tunnels that were cribbed with stones as well, indicating rich pockets had branched from the main tunnels in the days of their working. Moreover, the Old-Timers had driven all three tunnels right along the gut of the ancient placer channel.



I had my Gold Bug Pro and the Minelab 5000 along for the trip. I hadn't unpacked either one yet as they were still strapped to my red mule, my 4X4 Honda ATV. The day was glorious, complete with bright sunshine, a pristine blue sky, with weather about 70 degrees to generate the perfect conditions for a fine day of detecting. Furthermore, the site had extremely limited access which guaranteed seclusion, as it was located in a mountain-walled, steep-sided canyon. The placer was an ancient run deposited on a bedrock bench, hundreds of feet above the stream that ran through the bottom of the canyon. Of interest as well, parts of the area had large slabs of concreted material left stranded at impossible angles, monuments to the efforts of past mining efforts.

I had no idea what kind of luck I was going to have, but I knew I had to give it a try. Anytime anyone puts that much mining effort into an area, I'm going to take a look, guaranteed.

I was briefly interrupted by a squadron of tiny blue and orange butterflies that were flying landing and takeoff patterns at the borders of a small pool filled by a small seep issuing from the largest adit opening. In addition to the butterflies, the hummingbirds busily helicoptered around the wild-flowers that bordered the old excavation. High above, a large hawk lazily rode the thermals while his keen eyes searched for his breakfast. To compliment it all, the pine and fir released a magical scent that permeated the air of that rugged branch of the Rocky Mountains. Lastly, large iridescent blue, and green, dragonflies generated a wing-powered buzzing off and on chorus as they propelled themselves thorough impossible aeronautical maneuvers while they feasted on luckless mosquitoes.



I unpacked the little Bug Pro first so I could scan some exposed bedrock left in the bowl in front of the adits. No luck. All that searching and no results.

I walked up to the toe of the largest adit and started scanning. I got a large target response that screamed like a fat chunk of a large square nail, only I hadn't found a single nail anywhere, so this was a surprise. I scanned again and watched the meter this time. It was locking on 60, and the iron bars were reading low.

I dug into the soft bedrock a couple of inches and popped out a black rock, completely black indeed, but heavy. It was far too heavy to be magnetite as the size to weight ratio would have required a larger piece of magnetite for the same density. I passed the target under the coil again, and the detector rewarded me with a loud, crisp signal. I took out my pocketknife and carefully worked at the black of the rock: gold peeped out!



It was no monster nugget, only six grams with no character, just a slug, but after I'd let is spend the night in a cleaning solution, that sassy golden nugget sure had a welcome shine.




I spent two days in the area, rewarded by many more finds, but the rest of this tale will have to wait for another day when I have more time for the telling.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Terry Soloman]

Thanks for once again taking me with you. I could see the butterflies and hummingbirds.