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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[Hefty1]

MERRY CHRISTMAS LANNY!!!
Came back to read some of your stuff, especially your Christmas poems, as they lighten the heaviness this holiday season.
Thanks for all you do.

Mark H

 

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[Hoser John]

Merry Christmas to one and all and hoping for a better new year-John

 

[Lanny in AB]

MERRY CHRISTMAS LANNY!!!
Came back to read some of your stuff, especially your Christmas poems, as they lighten the heaviness this holiday season.
Thanks for all you do.

Mark H

Many thanks Mark! So great to hear from you again. I hope all is well.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Merry Christmas Lanny!

Merry Christmas Terry, and thanks for stopping by with Holiday wishes.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Merry Christmas to one and all and hoping for a better new year-John

John,

I was in California for a week, but down in San Diego, and as we flew out, we went over the mountains and the fires stretched as far north as we could see, absolutely heartbreaking! I hope you're staying safe.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

The Tale of Purty Sue

Well Purty’s used by western lads
For gorgeous gals they love.
And Sue for sure, was beauty pure
An angel from above.

Now, Purty Sue, a charmer true,
The miners tried to win.
But Sue was sure of her love pure,
And never did give in.

For Sue you see, from Tennessee,
A pretty southern belle
Yearned for a man named Cougar Dan
She loved him all could tell.

A handsome man that Cougar Dan,
And muscled through and through.
For life is tough in mountains rough,
Kind, only to the few.

But Cougar Dan, that mountain man,
Had lived his life plumb wild.
And Purty Sue, though gorgeous true,
To him was but a child.

Well, mountain Dan, good with a pan,
The gold came easy true.
So folks would flow where he would go
To find gold nuggets too.

One winter’s day, he hit good pay,
And brought that crowd to town.
The whiskey flowed, his friends all glowed
As drinks were pounded down.

Yet in that mass of rank and loud
A brute, the name of Jack,
He hated Dan, the mountain man,
And went on the attack.

Dan’s fists they flew, they landed true.
Well, Dan sure hammered Jack.
But Jack the brute, the crude galoot,
Commenced a foul attack.

To cheat in life, he’d hid a knife
Inside his minin’ pants.
He slid it out, that dirty lout,
And used it like a lance.

With straightened arm, he did his harm.
Dan slumped down to the floor.
A scream was heard when Sue got word,
For Dan was lookin’ poor.

The town was glum, their best-loved chum
Was starin’ at the grave.
But Sue was true, knew what to do
For Dan her man to save.

Now Sue you see, in Tennessee,
A nurse she was, it’s true.
In Civil War, her gruesome chore
Was healin’ soldiers too.

Her father dear she’d followed near
(A surgeon next to none)
He’d taught her right to win the fight,
And victories she had won.

But Cougar Dan, her mountain man
Was surely doin’ poor.
She did her best, then lay to rest
Beside him on the floor.

She had a dream, and it would seem
An angel in the room
Held back the night with splendid light
And drove away the gloom.

‘Twas Christmas Eve, if you believe
In miracles and such,
Her Cougar Dan, the mountain man
Was blessed so awful much.

Next Christmas day, in every way,
Dan sure awoke with life!
And then he knew that Purty Sue
Would have to be his wife.

So filled with Joy, the town of Roy,
Commenced to hold a feast.
And all were there without a care,
From greatest to the least,

To celebrate the wedding date
For Purty Sue and Dan
The sweetheart that the miners loved,
Yes, every single man.

On Christmas day so far away
In peaks all filled with snow,
A love took hold in mountains cold,
So Dan the man could know

His angel love sent from above
That saved him from his doom
Was Purty Sue, his love so true
There standin’ in the room.

All the best to one and all,

Lanny

 

[Cariboo5]

As usual enjoyed the poem and looking forward to more upcoming sassy nugget adventures from this year. This year the wildfires and bush ban here was a damper and limited time outdoors.
Staked some new ground and although no nuggets were found the results so far are encouraging. I'm looking forward to next year to collect samples for Mobile Metal Ion assay.........

A very Merry Xmas & all the best in 2018 to all.........

 

[Lanny in AB]

Thanks for dropping in, and thanks for the update as I was wondering how things were going. Glad to know you have some encouraging results, and I hope you hit the nuggets this coming season. I was fortunate to have had a good season.

All the best to you and yours, and a most Merry Christmas to you,

Lanny

 

[63bkpkr]

Well Mr. Lanny that tale of Pretty Sue is a fine Nugget, one of your golden best.................63bkpkr

 

[Lanny in AB]

Well Mr. Lanny that tale of Pretty Sue is a fine Nugget, one of your golden best.................63bkpkr

Herb,

Thanks for your kind words, and thanks for taking a moment to leave a comment. It's much appreciated. I hope you and yours are having a wonderful holiday season.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[63bkpkr]

Lanny my holiday season has taken on a new meaning as I've come down with the flu & pneumonia. Spent Christmas alone trying to sleep. Starting to come out of it as meds take hold but its a slow process so, a lot like prospecting and both fevers are real though I do not usually require drugs during the gold fever.......63bkpkr

 

[Lanny in AB]

Lanny my holiday season has taken on a new meaning as I've come down with the flu & pneumonia. Spent Christmas alone trying to sleep. Starting to come out of it as meds take hold but its a slow process so, a lot like prospecting and both fevers are real though I do not usually require drugs during the gold fever.......63bkpkr

Yikes! You be super careful with that pneumonia Herb; it's nasty stuff, so take all of your meds, get your rest, and above all else, get better! After all, you'll need your strength for your next grand adventure into those gorgeous mountains of yours.

All the best, and get well soon,

Lanny

 

[63bkpkr]

Thank you gentlemen - I am taking care of me self and I constantly have the next trip in my mind, where I'm going and what I'm going to be doing. I found this spot where the "old time miners" camped that I want to detect and then there are miles of canyon wall to prospect along. Again, thank you for the kind words and likes and I am paying attention to my pills with only one more to take this evening. I'm making an appointment to see the doc as the chest is still rattly...................63bkpkr

 

[Lanny in AB]

I hope everyone has a happy new year, and I trust Christmas was a nice time as well.

The next story I'll be posting is "360 Degrees of Gold", and it's about a great time I had detecting this last summer where I started to doubt my detector, but soon found out I was absolutely wrong.

All the best in 2018,

Lanny

 

[Johnnybravo300]

Great posts and stories! I never get tired of this stuff man.

 

[Lanny in AB]

Great posts and stories! I never get tired of this stuff man.

Thanks for dropping in and taking the time to say so! I appreciate it.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Cariboo5]

Moved..

 

[Lanny in AB]

Sorry this took so long, but this winter has been insane.

360 degrees of gold.

It was the summer of burning—over three million acres of trees turned into smoke and ash.

Some days the ash swirled from the smoke to land in weightless gray and black powders on me as I was detecting; other days, no ash fell but the thick smoke was a sick yellow and orange, transformed by a shy yet feverish sun.

But, always the smoke . . .

That truly was last summer, the summer of endless fires, the summer when the cobalt blue sky became a fugitive, the summer when the visibility was measured in fractions of a mile instead of immeasurable miles, the summer when the rain renounced its friendship with the forest, the summer when the world was on fire.

Mother Nature was angry, and when Mother Nature is intent on destruction, there’s little man can do—just ask my friends in California.

Everyone knew we’d be evacuated, but no one knew when. The winds were the summer fates, the tellers and takers of fortunes, and when at last they drove the fires in a fixed direction, the call came for immediate and mandatory evacuation: the mining world stopped.

Now, I don’t want you to think that I didn’t have any fun. There were days when the smoke was less intense, and on those days I hit the bedrock of the ancient channel, bedrock that once held the insane weight of the prehistoric monsters of old as they wandered through the valley long before the glaciers did their chaotic works of mass excavation and deposition.

Looking at the bank above the exposed bedrock, I could clearly see where the glacial rocks rested on top of the bed of the protected ancient channel; those glacial stones have shoulders, unlike the smooth finish of rounded river-run. Glacial rock remains roughly hewn, always in an unfinished state, stone forever marked by those easy to identify shoulders or angles.

The pay channel underneath the deep glacial deposit was about six feet thick, and the placer miners that had left the abandoned workings had gone right to bedrock, and in some places, they’d taken several feet of the bedrock as well. Some of the bedrock was a bull quartz, super hard, and some was soft decomposed material and had been easily cut by the Old-timers.

I was lucky to find a spot where the bedrock had dropped down in a series of dips, and the clay from the glacial mess above hadn’t worked its way down into those dips. I found a place where the soft bedrock met the hard, always a good place to check, and I broke out the detector and my store of digging tools.

The spot I chose was a flatter portion of harder rock about the size of a larger bedroom mattress, bordered on one side by the softer bedrock already mentioned, and on the other side it was bordered by a zone of friable rock. I ground-balanced the detector on a quiet area, walked roughly to the middle of the harder rock where the whole section sort of crowned, and I started to swing the coil. Immediately I heard multiple hits as the coil passed back and forth. Well, this happens a lot when there are bits of steel from blade, bucket, and track, trash left from earlier placer mining, so I grabbed my telescoping magnetic wand and scrubbed the rock to get rid of the ferrous targets.

Indeed, there were bits of steel on the super-magnet, but not many, and they were tiny. That was surprising. So, I swung the coil back and forth again, multiple hits were transmitted through the headphones yet again. A bit puzzled, I checked my coil wire coming off the box to see if it was tight, checked the coil wire on the shaft for any loose portions above the coil to cause falsing, but everything was good.

I went back to swinging the coil, and back to multiple targets. Now, at that point, my heart-rate increased, but I’ve been at this nugget-shooting long enough not to make assumptions, so I started scraping into the small pockets of trapped ancient pay in that old bedrock, dragging out the contents as I worked to then scan the areas again. No signals from pockets, but there were targets in the dirt I'd removed. I ran the super-magnet wand through the dirt, no friends. Swinging the coil while listening through the headphones, I worked the dirt to put only signals in the scoop, then passed the scoop over the coil. Targets in the scoop, non-magnetic targets for sure.

I’ll break the story here a bit, for if you’ve swung a coil long enough, you’ll hit bits of copper, lead, aluminum, hot rocks, or even hot bedrock that sounds sweet, so I had to stick with the sift and sort process until I could work down the material in the scoop until I could drop the remnants onto the coil. There they were, three nuggets! What the heck? Nothing under a gram, nothing over two grams, but nuggets.

I went back to the spot and swung the coil, detected over the cleaned spot, no signal. I swept to the left, multiple targets, to the right, multiple targets. Was there something crazy about this bedrock? I used the super-magnet to hopefully eliminate bad targets, still multiple targets under the coil. I thought, “Something’s not right”, so I slowly swung the coil in a circle around me, to see if the detector was in some kind of looney falsing phase, but only target, target, target. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up, yet I couldn’t believe they could all be good targets, so I used the wand on the new areas I’d swept around, and sure enough, some ferrous, but when I swept again, still good signals, and the meter was pinning on gold!

What a haul that day from the hard bedrock!! (Another detector paid off.) And, yes, there were a few nuggets where the other rocks abutted the hard bedrock, but most of the gold, and it was one sweet day let me tell you, most of the gold was on that hard bedrock tight in little pockets of ancient run, with a few nuggets down in crevices, and a few bigger ones deeper down that I had to chisel out. But that bedrock was so hard, I’m thinking whatever they were using to excavate that ancient placer run just skipped over the bedrock to leave those little deposits of placer intact.

Nothing over three grams, yet some under a gram, but so stinkin' much fun digging so many targets from so many spots.

360 degrees of gold.

When does that happen? Perhaps only on a smoky day when the world's on fire.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[63bkpkr]

Hi Lanny, wonderful reading once again! Thank you for taking the time to share some of what you were up to this past summer.

I was out for a month late in the year searching for a spot I'd come across many years ago I did not find it on the ground though I did find it just recently in one picture I took. I compared the ~ 2008 photograph of the Quartz Vein to my 2017 pictures and when I paid attention to the mountains far in the background I realized there were clues there about where I was at in 2008. Turns out that one 2017 picture showed a section of the vein though I did not notice it when I was actually out there. So I've a project for 2018! Enjoy your time off and the mountains when you get back out................63bkpkr

 

[Lanny in AB]

As you can tell, I'm back to writing again for a bit.

The Rookie That Got Some

Well, last summer was the summer of fire, the unhindered dramatic display of nature’s wrath and fury; however, it was also a summer that produced good gold.

My son that lives in the Southern United States decided he’d use some of his holidays to come visit the goldfields. Now, he’s never been what you’d call a goldminer that’s super fired up about mining. I mean, when he was little, I took him with me on various expeditions, but he just never caught the bug like my older son. Now, my older son, he’s got a wonderful case of the fever . . .

So, when my southern son hit camp, it was hot, and most of the smoke from the fires had drifted off to the east and north that day, with the heat really getting through because of that, enough heat to make it stinking hot! Furthermore, if you add to the heat the idea of dropping into a canyon with old workings where the sun beats down and is reflected several times from wall of rock to wall of rock, and then picture the sun reflected back up from the bare bedrock beneath, it’s nature’s clever way to cook you.

As we packed up before leaving camp, we made sure we had hats to protect us from the sun, white long-sleeved shirts, lots of water to drink as dehydration is always a concern in the summer mountains, and sunscreen for my son as he’s a walking ad for why that stuff is necessary. If he even thinks about being in direct sunlight for very long, his light skin starts to turn red. Me, I just turn brown, then browner.

We got to the rim of the canyon and hit an old road where we were able to work our way down to the canyon bottom to get to the abandoned placer workings. There was evidence on one of the berms of twisted old mine rails from a drift mine, rails that were obviously yanked out when the miners had hit old tunnels while excavating the bedrock.

In the bottom of the pit were seven large boulders, the largest being about the sized of several fridges roped together, and it was tilted at a crazy angle. There were a series of rolling dips where the softer bedrock had allowed the miners to cut into it, and some of those dips had water standing in them, with a large pool of water off to the right of the biggest boulder, with water bordering a cut that ran along the edge of the ancient placer channel, with a portion of the channel clearly visible under about fifty feet of overburden.

Now, my boy had never truly detected for gold before. I mean, he’d done a tiny bit of snooping around with a machine just listening to signals back at camp to know what a positive response was versus a response that would only waste his time, but that was about it.

In that pit, there was some mean bedrock. Mean in that it was hot. Hot in that it had stringers and bundles of iron pyrite that drove VLF’s crazy as any VLF had thought they’d hit the mother lode over and over again! But of course, it was only pyrite, but try telling that to a VLF when its all juiced up thinking it’s finally found something. (It had fooled me in the past, driving me to cut holes with hammer and chisel to see what was sending such a nice signal.) So, this was a rather tough schoolhouse to put him into for training, but I wanted to see what he could do in challenging conditions.

I walked him back through the strengths and weaknesses of the Bug Pro, told him how to watch the display (especially to watch for the sweet zone on the meter), reviewed how important it was to swing the coil properly, how to overlap his sweeps, how to reorient ninety-degrees to the original signal response, how to use the magnetic wand to quickly remove ferrous signals close to the surface, how to use the proper tools (chisels, hammer, bars, picks) to dig to recover a target, how to use the scoop to sift and sort [what I call reduction], how to use the coil to drop the last bit of dirt from the scoop onto it to make the final ID of any metal target, how to always investigate anything that in any way broke the threshold, etc.

He’d only made a few sweeps when he hollered that he had a signal. I walked over to see what he had, and the meter was pinning right in the sweet zone, but it was bumping around just a bit. I listened to the signal, had him cross it with a ninety-degree sweep and the meter bumped around a bit more. Next, I watched as he dug to isolate the target, using the nose of the coil to pinpoint where in the hole the target response was the strongest. Using the small pick (I always have two sizes with me), he uncovered a ledge of harder bedrock, and the detector was singing a sweet song. He worked out a piece of the bedrock with some surrounding material, threw it in the scoop, sifted and sorted while passing the scoop under the coil until he was certain the target was still in the scoop, then shook the remaining material on his coil. Whap!

Well, it was a good tone, an interesting signal that was in the right area on the meter, but the target was definitely a stringer of pyrite, and I believe it was arsenopyrite, at least that’s what a geologist told me one day when he was strolling through the pit doing a bedrock assessment on another day earlier in the spring. So, I reviewed a few things with him, ran the coil over the pyrite so he could watch the meter carefully, altered the path of the sweep so he could see how the meter jumped a bit more, and then I sent him off to have at it once more.

Soon, he hit another signal, checked the meter, dug the target, went through the reduction process, and he’d liberated another piece of pyrite. He kept at it for two hours, pyrite, pyrite, pyrite, but he kept at it, and I noticed that in some spots he slowed down and scrubbed the coil over the bedrock then used the pick on the spot and scrubbed again. Obviously he’d hit a faint signal or a whisper and was trying to get a tone.

At the end of the two hours, we took a break, and we found the only shade there was, on the side of that big boulder. We hydrated while we rested, broke out some high energy snacks and just geared down while we took a brain and heat break. Now, taking a brain break is critical, but lots of nugget-shooters ignore this as they’re out to cover as much ground as possible, but I’ve found that without the breaks, the brain, the body, the whole human system dulls down, and that’s not good when most of the nuggets to be found on the first pass aren’t screamers but only threshold breakers. Moreover, it doesn’t matter how many times I review this with rookies when I’m putting them in a sweet spot where I KNOW there are nuggets as far too many are only in a hurry to hear a signal that smacks them up the side of the head and says, “Dig me!”. So, they burn through the ground and get nothing but bits of steel. However, every once in a while you get a rookie that really takes the advice to heart, and those are the ones that find the gold. Now, I’ve written a story or two about this phenomenon in the past, and it’s always amazing to see the long face on the pit-burner versus the face of the happy rookie that slowed down and checked out every threshold break and therefore got the gold!

However, once again, I’m off track with my story. So, back to it . . . We finished resting our brains and reenergizing our bodies, and then I walked my son over to the other side of the pool of water I mentioned earlier in the story. The ground here was different. There were still rolling drops in the bedrock, but there was more clay material stuck in the cracks and crevices, and the composition of the bedrock went through several transition zones with hard bedrock meeting softer bedrock, and there were some zones of bull quartz as well. (Bull quartz? All I know is the same geologist pointed it out to me, a different color cast from the other bedrock [sometimes a brownish-pinkish look and super hard stuff for sure, but great for having lots of little dips, cracks, and crevices, but crazy rock to try to work with a pick and tough sledding indeed when it comes to hammer and chisel work.) But what I wanted him to notice were the variety of transition zones in the bedrock that were missing from the other side he’d worked for two hours. That other side was mostly uniform bedrock that the miners had been able to rip into quite easily, with only a few areas where the bedrock resisted their efforts, but on the new side, there were at least three contact zones of differing bedrock: friable slate? (I’m no geologist), bull quartz, and a gray zone of softer rock that held the pyrite stringers. Mother Nature sure had enjoyed herself when she bedded that bedrock!

So, having dispensed words of practical advice, I set him loose on the new ground. Shortly thereafter, he called to come look and listen. This time the meter was pinning and not bumping at all. Indeed, he had a nugget after he’d gone through the reduction process! A little over a gram (when we weighed it later in the evening), but a nice nugget for a rookie. However, better than the find was the look on his face, a look somewhere between wonder and satisfaction. I mean, after two hours of BBQ conditions and no gold whatsoever, he finally had a nugget.

Well, he kept at it, and the hits just kept coming. (I know, corny musical analogy, allusion, cliché or whatever it is.) Nugget after nugget until he had a nice collection in his palm at the end of the next two productive hours, a nice variety of various sizes of chunks of gold with one that was quite unique.

He called me over as he had a signal that was clearly audible, but he couldn’t find it. He used the pick in the bull quartz to chip away at the surface, used a pry-bar to see if he could find any loose spots indicating a crevice, but there didn’t seem to be any obvious avenue to the gold, yet the signal was nice and crisp, so whatever it was, it was down in that hard bedrock.

I gave him the small hand-sledge, a chisel, the Garret Carrot for pinpointing, and I told him to carefully work his way down into the mother rock. It took him a while, but then he gave a yell for me to come see. At about five-inches down, he’d broken out a piece of hard bedrock, and there trapped in the jaws of the bull quartz, jaws that had last snapped shut when the dinosaurs played in that ancient streambed, was a gorgeous nugget, rectangular in shape and definitely held fast. After a few more lessons on how to safely liberate a nugget so imprisoned, he held it in his hand. It was rectangular indeed (significantly longer than wide) with a small hole through one place where it looked like some quartz had been eroded while Mother Nature’s hydraulic hammer-mill, her preferred process for moving stream gold. It was over a half-inch in length and had some thickness to it, certainly a beautiful piece.

There were other nuggets found that day, a few along the borders of the pool of water where there were more contact zones, but his haul was the biggest of the day by far. However, my best haul was the satisfaction that I’d finally passed the fever on to my younger son, the golden gift that keeps on motivating.

And yes, he’s ready to come back this season to try his luck again.

All the best,

Lanny