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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[Lanny in AB]

LANNY!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks Terry, much appreciated.

All the best,

Lanny

 

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[Lanny in AB]

Lanny has anyone ever mentioned to you that there is a possibility that you might have a way with words! ..............63bkpkr

Herb, always the gentleman, and always appreciated that you drop in to leave your kind comments.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Howdy Lanny… thanks for sharing your gold sniping experience with us. It looks like you guys found a real honey hole at that site. Your son was wise to return the next day. It is always a good idea to harvest the bird in hand while you can do so.

Your comment about hotrocks got me thinking that prospecting country means having to deal with quite a variety of hotrock types. Interesting, but not much fun for the VLF operator as a rule. In our area of northeastern Ontario, the ground-balancing PI units silence the non-conductive hotrocks belonging to the mineralogical oxide group. These include the red-hot positive “metallic” signals generated by the reddish-brown iron oxide maghemite, and most but not all signals produced by minerals belonging to both the sulfide and arsenide mineral groups as well.

The non-conductive, but magnetic susceptible iron oxides such as magnetite, maghemite, and in some areas specular hematite are the usual culprits that trouble electronic prospectors using VLF units. Various dark rocks associated with serpentinization or metamorphism such as black serpentinite could possibly be included with this group.

Photos of some potential “hotrocks” are included below for readers who might appreciate some visual help with hotrock identification. Magnetite is not included because most goldhunters are probably familiar with it. But we should point out that the variably magnetic and conductive pyrrhotite pictured separately below has widespread occurrence. Its size typically varies from fingernail to multi-pound variably-shaped configurations, and the surface weathers to quite a dark brown discoloration from the original pale yellow of a fresh surface. It normally responds strongly to both PI and VLF units, and at least in our territory is considered to be the foremost bane of electronic prospectors.

Conductive graphitic rocks often associated with metamorphic outcrops represent a widespread conductive type of hotrock with no magnetic properties. Similarly, we occasionally detect some of the dark sulfides, for example the sooty-grey, conductive copper sulfide chalcocite. It looks like a typical darker hotrock, has no magnetism, produces a very strong “metallic” signal to VLF detectors, but won’t react to my PI units. Unless there is some surface (green) oxidation present, I doubt most detectorists would recognize it in the field.

The list of potential arsenides that produce strong VLF signals is lengthy, but most of our conductive arsenides here in northeastern Ontario tend to be light-hued, grey-white, or silvery on a brittle fresh surface. Some of the common ones, for example, skutterudite, safflorite and copper colored nickeline also react strongly to PI units, but fortunately arsenopyrite only reacts to my VLF units. Its signal strength seems to be more dependent on its grade and structure than many of our complex arsenides. There is no point in listing the arsenides because there are numerous varieties, and many cannot be specifically classified without sophisticated lab analysis. The important thing is to realize that quite a variety exists in many areas we frequent, and that may apply to some of your areas too.

Congratulations on what looks to have been an outstanding gold recovery experience for both of you guys. We do enjoy reading your gold adventure tales, and look forward to more now that winter is firmly entrenched in the West. Oh yes, we’ve seen the weather reports for your area!!! All the best to you Lanny, thankyou, and please convey our best regards to your son.

​

Hi Jim, and as always, I am blown away by the depth of your knowledge of things that I can only guess at.

Your specific descriptions of the types of mineralized or metallic stones will be of great benefit to anyone chasing valuable metals, anywhere, with a detector.

Some people that dabble with detectors are known perhaps as metal detecting specialists (heard that somewhere), but others like you Jim, I'd have to call metal detecting experts, far above my level of understanding of the technology or how minerals and metals react to the signal put out by a detector. I take my hat off to you sir, you being one that I would easily call an expert!

Thanks again for the explanations, and for your kindness to go to so much work to post highly specific and valuable information on this thread for the benefit of all who visit here.

Thanks as well for your regards about my son. He truly is becoming a great nugget shooter, and I am proud of his accomplishments. (He now has an ever growing collections of sassy nuggets!)

All the best to you and yours, and hopefully someday soon, we'll be out of this icy prison here in the west that has locked down the land,

Lanny

 

[Jim Hemmingway]

​

Thanks again for the explanations, and for your kindness to go to so much work to post highly specific and valuable information on this thread for the benefit of all who visit here.

Thanks as well for your regards about my son. He truly is becoming a great nugget shooter, and I am proud of his accomplishments. (He now has an ever growing collections of sassy nuggets!)

Thanks Lanny… I enjoyed adding the hotrock information and hope it proves interesting to your readership. Thanks again for those appreciative words, most kind.

I clearly remember my first experience with hotrocks during a trip to the silverfields on a sunny, warm Victoria holiday weekend some 32 years ago. Operating an old Garrett ADS Deepseeker in the true all-metal motion mode, equipped with a 7-inch concentric coil, I was detecting a narrow gully running parallel and immediately below an abandoned mining trail far removed from any signposts of civilization. I didn’t anticipate seeing anyone out at that remote site.

It was certainly an introduction to metal detecting paradise that morning as my wildest hopes were realized while digging one shiny silver ore after another. It had vaguely occurred to me that the silver didn’t look quite like I thought it should, but that nagging doubt at the back of my mind was easily shrugged away. After all, they were responding to the detector loud and clear, and plenty too.

Then an unexpected dark shadow fell across my diggings, and I looked up into the kindly, weathered countenance of a rather grizzled old timer. He asked how it was going and could he see my silver. I readily complied, but began to feel rather apprehensive as he gravely examined my precious recoveries. My fertile imagination started to run along rather precarious lines. I began to regret showing him my silver because he just might broadcast the news of my bonanza to his cronies in town, or might he not be a rascally thief in the guise of a mining authority?

But none of the above applied, he was a fine individual who had spent most of his life involved with mining in the area. He bent his keen gaze upon me, quietly informing me that what I had recovered was something or other he identified as a worthless arsenic pyrite or whatever. He invited me to come into town to his hotel for tea and to view some examples of native silver.

So off we went into town and I spent the remainder of the morning getting an introductory lesson to distinguishing native silver from other locally prevalent minerals. Much later, as we were saying goodbye at the door, he handed me a small example of specimen grade native silver for future reference in the field. I’ll always remember that kindness, and that’s how I was first introduced to prospecting for silver and to the fascinating study of rocks and minerals.....................Jim.

​

 

[Lanny in AB]

Jim,

Thanks for posting the story of when you got started, and how you were mentored by a caring individual that was kind in letting you know you weren't on the right track.

I'm glad he set you on the right path and built the fire in you to learn the right way to chase the metal, as we all can now benefit from your passion and expertise.

As I stated earlier, I've figured out a few ways to find nuggets with the detectors, but I'm not the dedicated expert with all of the technical and specific understandings you possess, so it's nice to learn a few more things along the way, and it's nice to have an expert onboard, much appreciated.

Once again, I enjoyed hearing how you started off on your rookie journey, and it's great you stuck with it to be such a dedicated enthusiast that is always willing to help explain the technical details to others.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

This thread is so long now, and it's been around forever, so some new viewers may not be up to date on what I'm up to in regards to chasing the gold these days, so here's an update:

Just wanted to take a moment to introduce myself to those that are new viewers taking a peek at this thread.

I mainly metal detect for nuggets now (chased the gold in Alaska, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, north-central British Columbia, south-eastern British Columbia, Alberta, but now I spend almost all of my time chasing the gold in British Columbia, Canada), used to dredge, sluice, high-bank, snipe, etc., (still do a bit for fun) but for more than a few years now, I've been associated with a large-scale placer operation, one that has slapped on me the title of their mining consultant. Sounds grandiose, however in no way is it, but they like to have me do testing for them with my detectors after they've finished cleaning a section of bedrock with their massive, heavy equipment.

Why have me on site? To see what they're missing. Furthermore, after I've finished poking around, they've gone back and taken more bedrock (sometimes several feet) at times when I get a lot of gold in a hurry (or they've headed in another direction if there's a good line of pay shooting off under the overburden away from where they were trending), and other times when there's hardly any gold found with the detectors, they bury that bedrock right quick. It's a win, win situation for both of us as they value what I can do with my machines, and I value the privilege of the incredible opportunity. Their only caveat is that I can't tell the total weight of the gold I find to anyone outside of their crew (and I always must report it to them), but hey, who can't live with that, right? Oh, and they let me keep what I find, won't take a percentage (I've tried many times).

In addition, I know a lot of other claim and lease owners that have properties they're not currently working, ones with abandoned excavations and sites, or ones they haven't got to yet, and they love to have me snoop around with my detectors as well, and if I find anything promising, they set up and get after the gold. I've been doing that for quite a few years, but I still like to check out unfamiliar, un-staked ground too.

In addition, I like to write stories about my gold hunting outings, and oftentimes, I'll include information for any rookies out there that are trying to figure things out as they get started. Why? That's how I got started; a few good people (my original mentor is now 88) took me under their wing and taught me the ropes (a few clichés too many in that sentence, I know).

My one son is now a dedicated nugget shooter (the other one lives thousands of kms away), and I love training him, plus my wife is now onboard with chasing the gold (she used to love panning my dredge concentrates, always heavy with goodies and always a good time for her and my mother-in-law [yeah, I know, sometimes the word fun and mother-in-law don't get used together in the same sentence]), and I'm ordering my wife a shiny new detector this winter because she's seen what we're getting (she loves to pan down our scoops of quick finds from the detectors which we slap in the pans when they're target rich for her to have some fun with; we call that speed-panning as it saves us the downtime of isolating the positive signals out of the scoop each and every time, giving us bonus time swinging the coils).

So, it will be great to meet some of you that are new, and for those that are acquaintances, it's a wrap!

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Jeff95531]

All I can add to the above is Lanny helped teach me...a "Gold Rush" fevered rookie...collecting vials of fool's gold...to find gold flakes and even a picker.....in the true Northern California....
AND under the most gruelling conditions ever faced by any prospector! Calif state laws, "rules" & regs! Thanks buddy!

 

[Lanny in AB]

All I can add to the above is Lanny helped teach me...a "Gold Rush" fevered rookie...collecting vials of fool's gold...to find gold flakes and even a picker.....in the true Northern California....
AND under the most gruelling conditions ever faced by any prospector! Calif state laws, "rules" & regs! Thanks buddy!

So great to see you posting again!! Many thanks for your kind words, and I think you've written, from what I can tell, an apt description of what's happening to the pursuit of chasing gold in California (seldom took out less than a pound of gold a day!).

All the best,

Lanny

P.S. Here's a link to a first-hand account of what it used to be like while chasing the gold in California, if you enjoy old historical accounts as much as I do. https://archive.org/stream/cihm_02753?ref=ol#page/n71/mode/2up
Just click on the pages to go forward or backward.

 

[63bkpkr]

A Word of Caution!!

A word of Caution about the book Lanny has so Kindly (?) supplied for our enjoyment! It would seem that the account's of the Early Days are Rife with day's of Copious Quantities of the Yellow Metal such that the mere reading of this book could drive a soul to Insanity and to rush off to the hills to find even a small Quantity of the "Leavings" as these miners went from a glory hole to find an even larger glory hole. Be careful to have a FULL bottle of sedatives next to you as you burn your way through these True Stories as otherwise you might find yourself running down the street to reach the mountains rather than to use your own personal mule (a Ford or Chevy or Dodge truck) that you could drive to the hills with. Thanks Lanny, quite a read!....................63bkpkr

 

[Lanny in AB]

A word of Caution about the book Lanny has so Kindly (?) supplied for our enjoyment! It would seem that the account's of the Early Days are Rife with day's of Copious Quantities of the Yellow Metal such that the mere reading of this book could drive a soul to Insanity and to rush off to the hills to find even a small Quantity of the "Leavings" as these miners went from a glory hole to find an even larger glory hole. Be careful to have a FULL bottle of sedatives next to you as you burn your way through these True Stories as otherwise you might find yourself running down the street to reach the mountains rather than to use your own personal mule (a Ford or Chevy or Dodge truck) that you could drive to the hills with. Thanks Lanny, quite a read!....................63bkpkr

Herb, your eloquence is refreshing. The atmosphere you generate with your comments sounds right infectious, and I certainly hope people don't get as fired with the fever as you suggest (unless it's a healthy case, of course). I mean sedatives? Leaving town on foot? What have I done?

Lots of true stories for sure, and the rare time when I wander down the road of fiction, I hope it's perfectly clear to anyone that reads the stories when that switch to fiction occurs.

This thread is indeed long, and it's been quite an undertaking, but it does present a book of sorts for anyone that wants to know a bit more about chasing the gold, I hope . . .

Thanks for your kind words and for your dedicated encouragement, and all the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Golden Bonanza Days, Part 1:

I got the call last season for the chance any nugget shooter dreams of.

A friend of mine owns and operates a large placer mining operation. They had been working an ancient channel deposit (60,000,000 years, plus or minus, but hey, what’s a million years here or there, right?) and as I wrote this account, they were in the final stages of moving all of their heavy equipment to anther site. So, I got a call that people usually only dream of ever getting.

I was invited to bring my family to nugget shoot a section of virgin bedrock. After sixty million years, it was finally exposed to the sun’s rays once again, and as the entire mining operation was shut down, with no active mining in progress for the changeover, my buddy wanted us to come and check the bedrock for him before they had to do the reclamation work and bury it once more for perhaps another sixty million years.

I couldn’t believe it! What a chance, perhaps the call of a lifetime . . .

I called my son, who I’ve been training how to detect sassy nuggets, and he said to count him in. My wife, who is a speed-panning wonder of target-rich scoop dirt, said she was in too. So, we packed our gear and headed for the mountains.

For whatever bizarre reasons the weather gods had last winter (2017-18), the weather was terrible right up until the first of May, and then it was like someone hit the sun-and-warmth switch for instant summer. The transformation was surreal and wonderful. Fresh pine heavily scented the valley. A wide variety of mountain song birds were back in force, the flowers were blooming on every slope, wild honey bees, heavily laden with pollen, buzzed a honey-hunter’s symphony. While high above, the hawks and eagles choreographed their ageless aerial ballet as they rode the invisible thermals of the cobalt blue expanse. In addition, red-throated, as well as iridescent green-breasted humming birds initiated impossible angles of changing flight as they darted from spot to spot while visiting the innumerable mountain blossoms. To say it was breath-taking is a feeble attempt to capture the impossible, and those of you that frequent the wild reaches of the Rocky Mountains already know of what I speak.

We set up our gear, and I unpacked the feisty Makro Gold Racer and connected my shiny new sniper coil. I was going to take the Racer for a hard run, as I was still getting used to it, and with all of the ancient cracks and crevices exposed, I believed it had a good chance to sniff out some gold. The other nugget shooter, my son, would be learning more lessons on the Gold Bug Pro. (For final clean-up, I always check the bedrock with my GPX 5000 after running the legs right off of the VLF’s.)

So, I set my son up with the Gold Bug Pro, outfitted with the 5X10 elliptical DD. I reviewed the basics of the detector with him (I love how quick the learning curve is on the Bug Pro), and off he went to a corner where the bedrock rose steeply, a jagged wall of bedrock rising close to 45 degrees up from the floor of the excavation, and that bedrock was iron hard (similar to some other bedrock we hunted later in the season) so there were lots of gutters, cracks and crevices visible that held intact material due to the hardness of the host rock. My son ground-balanced, adjusted his headphones, then made a few swings. He stopped dead right quick, then repeated a swing. With the numbers on the meter in the sweet zone (40-70 on the meter, if you’re familiar with the Bug Pro, usually depending on the size of the piece of gold), he quickly captured the target in his scoop and dropped it in one of our green plastic gold pans we’d already set out. A few more swings, and he dropped another scoop of target-rich dirt in the pan. Having got off to such a fast start, it looked like it was going to be a good day.

To be continued . . .

All the best,

Lanny

 

[63bkpkr]

What an interesting and enlightening start and the words oh the words are special. The one instruction you barely glanced over like a pearly water rounded quartz rock being fired from a tree crotch with inner tube bands and the tongue from an old shoe as the worn leather holster with the rock only touching the outer fuzz of the target was that your wife is a super fast pan operator. So what does that have to do with the metal detecting trip? When your son put his sample scoop into the pan and returned to detecting that pearly rock hit me square in the head, save your time for swinging the coil and look at your gold later! Nice input Lanny!................63bkpkr

 

[Lanny in AB]

What an interesting and enlightening start and the words oh the words are special. The one instruction you barely glanced over like a pearly water rounded quartz rock being fired from a tree crotch with inner tube bands and the tongue from an old shoe as the worn leather holster with the rock only touching the outer fuzz of the target was that your wife is a super fast pan operator. So what does that have to do with the metal detecting trip? When your son put his sample scoop into the pan and returned to detecting that pearly rock hit me square in the head, save your time for swinging the coil and look at your gold later! Nice input Lanny!................63bkpkr

Yes, you're on the money Herb by figuring it out. That's why I call it speed-panning. Not that the panning is rapid-fire fast, but the time saved is what lets us keep speeding along only worrying about detecting, not wasting time isolating and identifying each positive target.

To elaborate somewhat, we locate a positive signal, drop the target-rich dirt in a pan, and when there's enough dirt in the pans, off they go for my wife to pan down the contents to see what the targets are.
How this works with VLF's is, if the coils of the detectors are close enough to the gold, and if there's no masking effect from pesky hot-rocks, ironstone, etc., the meters on the VLF's are quite accurate at pinning a reading in the gold zone (some hot-rocks fool them, etc.), so, with the positive targets in the scoops, then in the pans, it really does leave a lot more time for detecting.

You indeed waxed eloquent with your metaphorical representation of the sling-shot/flipper crotch, with makes me think you spent some time as a youth constructing such elements of rudimentary weaponry. Nicely done sir.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[IMPDLN]

Hello Lanny, Dennis here. Just stopped in to thank you for all the snow you sent down to Arizona, lol. We are getting pounded right now, breaking some records for snow fall and might even have a chance to break the drought that we have been in since about 1997, roughly 22 years. Next week might be a good opportunity for some people to dredge in some normally dry washes.

Where I live here in north central Arizona we got about an inch an hour, or maybe a little more over the last 24 hours. Haven't seen snow like this in such a long time that people have no idea what to do. It has basically shut the area down completely and will likely stay closed through tomorrow as the snow is still coming down with no end in sight. It is supposed to stop snowing Friday night and start warming back up through next week which will likely have just about every wash in the state with flowing water. Be awhile before anybody will be drywashing, but an opportunity to wash the dust off some dredges for sure.

So thank you sir for all the lovely snow, lol. Dennis

 

[Lanny in AB]

Hello Lanny, Dennis here. Just stopped in to thank you for all the snow you sent down to Arizona, lol. We are getting pounded right now, breaking some records for snow fall and might even have a chance to break the drought that we have been in since about 1997, roughly 22 years. Next week might be a good opportunity for some people to dredge in some normally dry washes.

Where I live here in north central Arizona we got about an inch an hour, or maybe a little more over the last 24 hours. Haven't seen snow like this in such a long time that people have no idea what to do. It has basically shut the area down completely and will likely stay closed through tomorrow as the snow is still coming down with no end in sight. It is supposed to stop snowing Friday night and start warming back up through next week which will likely have just about every wash in the state with flowing water. Be awhile before anybody will be drywashing, but an opportunity to wash the dust off some dredges for sure.

So thank you sir for all the lovely snow, lol. Dennis

Hi Dennis, great to hear from you again; it's been too long.

The weather in your area does sound bizarre, but I guess you're probably glad to have the moisture any way you can get it, but Mother Nature seems to be having a rather severe tantrum in your case. However, 22 years of a drought is a long, long time, so perhaps you'll get the relief you're after. Moreover, if all of that snowmelt moves some dirt, it could do some gold replenishing in your washes and make the dredging that much better if the opportunity arrives, the dredging being something people likely don't get that much opportunity to do in the desert I imagine.

That much snow in that short of an amount of time Dennis is remarkable, and something we hardly ever see here, so it sounds like you're really getting an arctic blast, but we've been blaming our recent cold snap on Siberia, so if you're happy we sent the moisture your way, I guess we'll take the credit.

My friends in Vegas sent pictures of the snow they had there, but they had nothing close to what you've had, but it still stunned them.

Thanks for the update, and once again, great to hear from you; furthermore, if you're a dredger (I already know you're a nugget shooter), I hope that sluice clogs with nuggets!

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Golden Bonanza Days, Part 2:

In the meantime, I’d finished all of my adjustments on the Racer, and I went off to investigate a different spot, some way off in the excavation from the area my son was detecting, as I had seen some little pockets of intact channel that had some spidery cracks in the bedrock running outward from them on my initial walkthrough. After a few swings (no kidding), I had the coil over a soft sound. A bit of scraping later, and I’d trapped the signal in my scoop. Into the pan it went. (Now, please remember that I use a super-magnet on an extendable wand whenever I detect bedrock [worked recently or anciently], so it really helps eliminate ferrous trash, and this means that any target that goes into the scoop is non-ferrous.) After a few more swings, I’d hit on two more targets that went into the pans for my wife’s speed-panning operation. Then, a slew of targets went into the pans.

Meanwhile, as I was collecting signals, my son was busy adding more targets to his pans. (I had two pans to fill, and he had two pans for target material as well.)

During our nugget hunting, my wife set up her panning station in a convenient bedrock pool of crystal water, water about the temperature of glacial meltwater by the way, and she was ready to get her panning gloves wet (she uses those little gardening gloves that have rubber palms and fingers with a canvas back as they insulate well enough to take the sting out of the coldness), so she wandered over to my son to gather a pan of possible goodness, and she swung by me to grab one of my pans too.

(To describe the site in more detail, there was a sloped ramp that led down into the excavation where the rock trucks had run back and forth to be filled by the excavator. There were the remnants of a pad by the ramp where the excavator had sat during the last scraping of the dirt for the last cleanup, the pad having been moved up above the level of the excavation so the last of the pay could be scraped from the bedrock.

In opposition to this, the far end of the excavation had been worked first, the work proceeding backward in the direction of the exit ramp until the cleanup reached that location. What remained in the excavation or open-pit site were ridges of rising bedrock, deeper excavated low-lying areas where the bedrock was soft [or areas of contact zones where soft bedrock met hard] or where ancient channel material had gathered in natural gutters or larger crevices, and there were pools of standing water [I always check these with a waterproof coil] where seepage had found a way to fill depressions or where runoff from springs on the margins of the excavation had filled low spots. On a related note, some of the bedrock had been bent and warped by tremendous geological forces in the past, and these places held little concentrations of material left over from when the bedrock was super-hard enough to resist the might of the excavator’s bucket.

In a few places there were small sections of friable rock [in this case slate] that when found, I always detect first, then later pan as those plates of perpendicular placement [in 90-degree opposition to the underlying bedrock] act as excellent gold traps, traps that were working in earnest as the dinosaurs plodded across the ancient streambed when large sections of the planet were in a more tropical state.

As well, there were those aforementioned contact zones, always excellent places to detect as small slices of the softer rock were sometimes in place against the harder rock, or there were ledges, sometimes terraced, with bits of material intact, and these traps often produce some nice gold. [On a related note, I learned a long time ago to trust my detector, not my eyes when scouring bedrock. What I mean by this is that oftentimes bedrock appears to be solid, especially when is is of uniform color, so it seems a better use of time to detect areas where visible intact material is concentrated, but this is one of Mother Nature’s grand deceptions, whether the bedrock has been worked by recent miners or mother rock worked by the Sourdoughs.

Mining tip for the rookies: always, always, always take the time to go slow to let the detector read the bedrock contours and surfaces, to check the little invisible gutters and pockets, and yes, to find the hidden crevices that snapped shut when some monstrous dinosaur tromped on it while crossing, or more likely, when some massive boulders tossed along those streambeds, by some titanic hydraulic event, forced their will upon the yielding bedrock.

To be continued . . .

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Terry Soloman]

You need to put the book together Lanny.

 

[Lanny in AB]

You need to put the book together Lanny.

Terry, you've always been a great support, and a fine friend to encourage me. Now that I'm thinking of changing a few things in my work life, who knows? Maybe I'll be able to find the time . . .

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Mountain scenery and that beautiful blue alpine sky.


We grow tall mountains around here.

The time of year when the bees get busy.


Some of the ways the water moves around.



All shut down getting ready for the move.

Speed-panning wonder!

This bedrock is heading uphill at an insane angle.

My son trying a little high-banking, but he zeroed in that spot and quickly went back to detecting (just because a spot looks good, doesn't mean it is).

This bedrock has a great chance of hiding something . . .

My robust, torquey blue mule. That diesel engine is just starting to get broke in (million mile Cummins wonders).

My son cutting his teeth on the Minelab GPX 5000 (I hope his wife still likes me as he has a wonderful case of the fever!).



Look what the Gold Racer sniffed out: small and chunky!


Some of the meat to go with the smaller potatoes.

I think this picture says it all about the clichés about gold and rainbows. (Shot this after a brief rainstorm while detecting.)


All the best,


Lanny

 

[63bkpkr]

Lanny your pictures of the Mountain Wonderland you are in just stops my heart as they are just so lovely. What Splendor!

Now your diggings site is also a wonder but of a different kind, yes you can see some things off to the sides but how to determine were to start in the machine worked places. Big question there!!!!!!!!!!!!! Herb