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]

Well, I came up for a deep breath from reading the thread, and I must say that the original take has only improved. It is amazing to me that there can be so much useful info here, some I remember, some I totally grasp, and some I realize I should have known, though mostly what I didn't know but do now.

I think I stumbled on a true mother of a vein here.

like I stated elsewhere, I was in the process of gearing up for a last burst of "I'm gonna do it one more time dimmit!" and got flattened with this excellent source of everything I need.
Be sure to know that this is not just flattery, but also a simple recognition of unadulterated useful writing and knowledge sharing, something that is fast becoming unpopular with the "new world order" but that I want to jump into with both feet.
I am very thankful for its timeliness, and your willingness to share (and the other friends as well,) I feel at home here, or I would never be this open.

Ok, I'll stop now lol.
If you'll pardon the pun Lanny, I found my gold mine here, and can smell some Silver too, ( thank you Jim H for your contributions also, I'll be sampling that too,) this is my library.

I never knew there were so many folks into prospecting and beaming up nuggets with them thar newfangled lectromagnetic dètectors...the more, the merrier and the bigger the Bear Barbeques!

I still have a shipload of reading to catch up on, but I'm here to stay.

I'll be back! eyeball.

You know what? It's great you dropped in to say the kind and appreciative things you've said, many thanks indeed.

In the day of instant everything, it really has taken countless hours to put all of the posts together. Moreover, it might well be a dying enterprise for some people to read more than a few lines of anything as you've expressed, so thanks for investing the time you've taken to put together such a comprehensive, fun-to-read, and thoughtfully appreciative post on the content of the stories and tips on this thread.

I'm happy you're finding such useful information here as that really makes the building of this thread truly rewarding.

***Beav has stated he can't see any of the recent pictures, but I hope I can find a solution to that.*** (Is everyone having the same problem?)

You have a fun style of writing, and I'm happy you've dropped in. In addition, you've discovered the true golden bonanza of this thread and the T-Net site, and that's the wonderful people that are willing to share, and Jim is indeed the silver king. Others drop in or have dropped in from time to time to share excellent information, and that's what's made this thread so purposefully alive.

All the best, and thanks again for your kindness and appreciation,

Lanny

 

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[Terry Soloman]

No pics.

 

[63bkpkr]

Yup, no pictures here either!

 

[Eyeball]

Unfortunately, can't see pics Lanny.
Beav

Ditto.

 

[Jim Hemmingway]

Another confirmation Lanny, your pictures didn't show up. I'll attach something just to see if there's any issue associated with this thread................. Jim.

​

EDIT: My photo attachment worked just fine Lanny, at least I see it. I didn't do anything different from normal. Entered "manage attachments", chose appropriate file folder, selected photo file and uploaded it....... Jim.

​

 

[Eyeball]

I see yours too Jim, thx.

 

[Eyeball]

Thank you for your kind words Lanny,

I know that I go overboard sometimes with the praises, I get emotional around kindness and grace. ( Hen's teeth are more plentiful ), but this sassy thread, Jim's Silver thread, and Eagle's Merced river adventures, (The many lost treasures of Mariposa,CA.) are indeed quite remarkable for their in-depth content.

To Eagle;

O si yoh friend,
May you truly be roaming free, soaring over your beloved river of peace on the winds of time, beyond the shackles of misguided politics and control, to ever be with us in peace guiding, causing us to remember your wisdoms and being remembered as the "Golden Medicine man",
My heart knows I am at a loss for not having met you, fly in peace brother Eagle,
The friend you never knew.

If there could be a way to catalogue these fine threads and link them to a system that would allow one to merely mention a thing said or a picture posted in it in order to find your query, the world would be out of sassy Gold in one season and have pristine, clean rivers flowing, fish growing, driving the rule and law makers around the white-water bend with no floating, blinking, yellow and fluorescent orange thingy's to hold on to, (but still wearing hard hats, reflective underwear and emergency locating transmitters,) and so we would have to save them 'cause that's who we are and that's what we do!
That still wouldn't shame them.

Ok, I'll stop ranting now,
I'lll be back!
eyeball.

 

[Terry Soloman]

OMG! Those photos were worth the wait!!!! Drooling in New York!!!

 

[63bkpkr]

Absolutely spectacular images of the the country we love to have around us, superb historical artifacts, the mental high of fasting on specimens of the yellow metal and the pleasure of knowing all of this is out there for anyone willing to expend the energy and brave the risks of being "in the back country". Picture seven of the seeded grass along a bend in the highway of the wilderness especially touched me as I also frequent such a mountain river canyon. We enjoy your enjoying and thank you for taking time to share with all!................63bkpkr

 

[Eyeball]

OMG! Those photos were worth the wait!!!! Drooling in New York!!!

Thank you for saying that Terry,
I kind of thought they were pretty good for cell phone pics myself (it amazes me that people can't seem to get pics like these when spotting UFO's lol.)
I appreciate your comments,
eyeball

 

[Lanny in AB]

Thank you for your kind words Lanny,

I know that I go overboard sometimes with the praises, I get emotional around kindness and grace. ( Hen's teeth are more plentiful ), but this sassy thread, Jim's Silver thread, and Eagle's Merced river adventures, (The many lost treasures of Mariposa,CA.) are indeed quite remarkable for their in-depth content.

To Eagle;

O si yoh friend,
May you truly be roaming free, soaring over your beloved river of peace on the winds of time, beyond the shackles of misguided politics and control, to ever be with us in peace guiding, causing us to remember your wisdoms and being remembered as the "Golden Medicine man",
My heart knows I am at a loss for not having met you, fly in peace brother Eagle,
The friend you never knew.

If there could be a way to catalogue these fine threads and link them to a system that would allow one to merely mention a thing said or a picture posted in it in order to find your query, the world would be out of sassy Gold in one season and have pristine, clean rivers flowing, fish growing, driving the rule and law makers around the white-water bend with no floating, blinking, yellow and fluorescent orange thingy's to hold on to, (but still wearing hard hats, reflective underwear and emergency locating transmitters,) and so we would have to save them 'cause that's who we are and that's what we do!
That still wouldn't shame them.

Ok, I'll stop ranting now,
I'lll be back!
eyeball.

In life sometimes, there's nothing that scratches a mental or emotional itch that's hard to get at like a good rant.

All the best, and nice tribute to Eagle,

Lanny

 

[Eyeball]

Thanks Lanny, I just got to really like him and then he was gone, and with the lag in reading the thread, he was gone before I joined and it was a shock to realize that. Kind of like the terminator phenomena, but real.

 

[Eyeball]

Thank you for saying that Terry,
I kind of thought they were pretty good for cell phone pics myself (it amazes me that people can't seem to get pics like these when spotting UFO's lol.)
I appreciate your comments,
eyeball

Sigh...I just caught on that the pics you were referring to are Lanny's, boy, I need to be out in the fresh air looking for nuggets lol.

 

[Lanny in AB]

Here's a shot of some old bedrock, hand-worked in the 1860's, and you can clearly see my dig hole and the material filling the top right-hand portion of the photograph.

The key thing to notice in this picture is the clay (tan-coloured material).

Clay is a great grabber/holder of gold. It also creates a layer that when gold hits it, it sticks! (Clay is also a great robber of gold in sluice boxes, so it's a blessing and a curse, so beware.)

But, when it comes to clay holding the gold, I'm not sure I can overestimate the value of this bit of information.

I don't know how many times when either sniping or detecting I'll find a small amount of clay hidden in the bedrock that's still holding gold, especially small gold (sometimes the nuggets are fat and sassy too, don't get me wrong), but clay holds the gold.

Now, understanding this holding value of clay goes a long way when it comes to prospecting for the precious metal.

I recall many years ago hunting gold in a goldfield far to the north of where I currently live, and it was a major outing to get to that location (16 hours of solid driving), but the gold was indeed fat and sassy in that area, although the bugs were and are an ongoing deterrent; regardless, that's the place where I finally transitioned into a nugget shooter and started to actually find nuggets on a consistent basis (up to that point it was buckets and buckets of metallic trash). Moreover, the bonus of learning to find gold in that environment was due to the insane nature of the bedrock in that area: it annihilated the electronic capability of metal detectors! But I'd packed along a premier pulse induction machine as my secret weapon, and even then, it struggled to handle the bedrock, but in some locations it would at least see the gold in that nasty bedrock.

However, I digress, and I'm pretty good at doing that, so back to the importance of clay.

I was in the company of some large-scale placer miners, and they invited me to detect some virgin bedrock they'd uncovered. Nevertheless, the head miner told me the channel layer they'd removed (and I could see an intact slice of it off to the side) didn't have any clay in it (they called it "wash"). Well, at that time in my detecting experience, any mention of clay didn't mean much to me. So, I set up my machine and hit the bedrock, no gold! Afterward, back at camp, when I related my grim experience, the miners laughed as they said every miner understood that "clay holds the gold" and when there's no clay to hold the gold, it gets dropped somewhere else. (The learning curve of a rookie nugget hunter made me the butt of more than one joke I can tell you!)

Later on in that trip, they invited me to detect an area where the visible channel on the side of the cut held lots of clay (the stones were arranged like they were part of a mason's wall, every stone held firmly in place by the clay), and wow, did I hit some nice nuggets! So, lesson learned, clay holds the gold.

Now, too much clay, as in a solid clay layer in a channel will also stop the gold, and I've experienced that before by punching right through that "armour" layer of clay that stopped the gold to dig (by hand) four to six feet deeper beyond the layer to hit the bedrock and recover no gold whatsoever! Through trial and error, I learned that the gold was back up with that armour clay and not below.

To return to my photograph, the gold that day was in that previously worked bedrock where there were bits of clay still intact in the bedrock, but there was also gold in the throw-out piles the Old-timers had tossed aside in the 1860's as they didn't have the benefit of any electronic "eyes" to see what they were chucking away.

Clay holds the gold . . . .

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Eyeball]

"All the best, and I realize this is not a complete list, so feel free to add your "dirt dues" requirements,"

"Lanny"

My dirt due is Trust.......Like a compass I have learned to Trust my machine...

Yup, sounds true enough, like trusting your instruments when flying, it works!

 

[Eyeball]

Ah Lanny,
Your hints of "what's to come" in your prospecting journal are so tantalizing and keep us on the edge of our camp chairs waiting for the leather pouch full of your verbal nuggets to be opened before us! Can't Wait to hear about your further adventures, but then we will all need to wait for the right timing to come!!

Me, I'm still working hard at a city job though I've hopes for an August adventure into the hills of NorCal that I so love and miss.

Best Regards,................63bkpkr

Hello 63bkpkr,
That was so well said I had to agree with that and add (hoping you would't see that as a hijack, but rather as a compliment to your own comment.).

When Lanny "digresses", all our ears twitch like dog's ears at the sound of the "treat can" being opened, or the clunking and rattling of respective dishes, pots and pans that are sure as nuggets on bedrock to hold surprise treats!
If we had one, our tails would no doubt start to wag and likewise wouldn't be able to stop the instinctive wetting of the saliva glands lol...WOOF!!

When he says "but I digress, that's a story for another day," all of us now know that the popcorn and snack department needs to be stocked up, and more drinks need to be put in the fridge to cool, ready for the moment!

I had to laugh when that scenaro played through my withered mind. But YOU lanny, have created for us a true desire to read your excellent stories and we will quietly impatiently wait till they each surface so we can devour them, but not before disecting, categorizing and sorting the new info that is so rich in them, the info you disseminate is so important for successful prospecting/mining that it is almost like an online course.

One can only imagine the relentless effort and time you put in to writing, editing and making these stories pop out like they do, and some of us know how deep that goes from experience, I can't say it enough, thank you for your kind and giving spirit.

I have been mining and storing info through all of the thread all along, (and right there is a lesson in tenacity if you want to learn something), and it has changed me from an occasional swinging beach bum to a re-interested nugget hunter/gatherer, yet to find a nugget, so I am making good use of the winter season to be outfitted/studied up enough to get right at it in the spring, checking stuff/places/laws and rules out and possibly hunt up some color or whatever a new old rookie can find in the wild.

This went longer than I had planned 63bkpkr, I hope it's ok, thank you beforehand for the ride, eyeball.

 

[Eyeball]

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

I love it when I get to read "Father and Son" stories!

My two boys never showed any interest in " that boring country stuff" after we sold our homes (sounds like more than it was), and bought a farm "up North" to start country living and washing off the "City" dirt, for my sake as well as theirs, and at that time, the woman that gifted me with those wonderful kids.
Well the girls, two of them, loved it up here and are still up here, but the boys were city bound every time and long gone now, one to Korea, married and solidly rooted, and the other, gone south to pursue his own passions, and equally successful.

So just to cut it short, you have more than you can imagine with this little story of fun in the sun with your son.
As always, wonderful stories Lanny, thank you so much for sharing them,
Regards, eyeball.

 

[Lanny in AB]

I love it when I get to read "Father and Son" stories!

My two boys never showed any interest in " that boring country stuff" after we sold our homes (sounds like more than it was), and bought a farm "up North" to start country living and washing off the "City" dirt, for my sake as well as theirs, and at that time, the woman that gifted me with those wonderful kids.
Well the girls, two of them, loved it up here and are still up here, but the boys were city bound every time and long gone now, one to Korea, married and solidly rooted, and the other, gone south to pursue his own passions, and equally successful.

So just to cut it short, you have more than you can imagine with this little story of fun in the sun with your son.
As always, wonderful stories Lanny, thank you so much for sharing them,
Regards, eyeball.

A big hello to you, and once again, many thanks for your appreciation for the stories and tips.

I truly am glad that you're benefitting from them, as well as having some fun as you read along.

I can't think of a better way to spend time than time well spent with family, truly. So, I believe I understand the emotional connection you're speaking of, and I appreciate you taking the time to reflect on the significant importance of family time.

I think I'm a bit lucky that not only my sons, but also my wife, is completely in love with the pursuit of chasing the gold, so I am indeed grateful for being so lucky.

All the best, and once again, your comments are much appreciated,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

In the above picture, the bedrock is a black slate, with some of it being very hot to detect, but the beauty of working this bedrock that was hand-mined in the 1800's is that the bedrock is friable (no, not in a pan on high heat) meaning the bedrock is arranged in perpendicular sheets. You will see a reddish-orange colour centre-left of the photograph, and that piece of protruding bedrock is rounded from stream weathering many, many eons ago before it was buried to be preserved as an ancient channel. Slightly above it and to the left, you should be able to pick out plates (sheets, etc.) of bedrock leaning to the left. If you have any experience with this type of bedrock, there are spaces between each individual plate or sheet, and this is where the gold was trapped. The interesting thing is that sometimes the gold is down deep, and other times there's a heavy concentration on the surface and within the first three of four inches of the bedrock (depending on whether the plates continued deeper or were only arranged in a pattern over more solid underlying bedrock) with nothing farther down.

However, once I started to use Minelab PI's, I had an advantage over other VLF users that had detected and hammered the bedrock before me as my PI's could see much deeper into any deeper or larger gaps, and I was able to retrieve many sassy nuggets that hadn't seen the light of day since the dinosaurs stomped across the ancient stream placers.

Nevertheless, if you've never chased nuggets in such rock, it's a challenge as every time a sheet is pried open to get to the gold, it drops, then when you try to get to it again, it drops again . . . . Quite the exercise in patience by the time the nugget is finally corralled.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Terry Soloman]

Sigh...I just caught on that the pics you were referring to are Lanny's, boy, I need to be out in the fresh air looking for nuggets lol.

LOVE yours as well!!