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]

Lake Placers #1

(This story continues on after we heard the story of the giant nugget found on the rock pile just below the dam of the lake whose banks and mountain slopes host placer gold.)

So, after we’d jawed with the rock-pile owner some more, we decided we’d better head up the trail to check out the lake placers. The gold runs up both sides of the lake, so we picked a side and headed on up.

We weren’t in much of a hurry that day. My partner had a badly broken wrist, complete with a new cast plastered on just before we’d left home. So, we were taking it easy.

While we hiked along, we enjoyed one of those gorgeously long, northern summer days: the warm, calm ones perfect for bottling, only to be opened much later on a frosty, winter’s day. Moreover, as it was summer, the sunlight that far north would last well after eleven or so, and then a lengthy twilight would continue after that.

Enjoying that extended summer sun, we walked along the lake and saw the cutthroat, true ambush experts, rising in a feeding frenzy, hammering the various insects floating the surface of Nature’s fast food outlet. That healthy population of fish was likely why the locals had never un-dammed the creek at that place.

As we continued up the lakeshore, a breeze periodically stirred the surface of the water, yet calmed quickly, allowing the trout to continue their feeding.

Along the borders of the lake, the willows waited patiently for a new breeze to whisper up the shore the news of our coming.

At last we reached the claims we had permission to hunt. There was evidence everywhere of shallow surface mining that had exposed the bedrock in great sheets. That bedrock was mostly iron-hard, as the D-8 Cat that had just finished scraping was only able to cut into small sections of rotten bedrock. The rest of the bedrock was a hardened nightmare. Even the excavator had skipped and skidded across most of it as well. This had frustrated the placer miners as the area was known for its coarse gold.

To backtrack a bit, about a month earlier, I’d been on a gold-scouting expedition. I’d made the trip with an in-law of one of the miners. The bedrock spot I’ve just described was the first place he and I visited.

The placer miners, a couple of brothers, were then working on one of the lake claims, but when they saw us, they shut down to chew the fat. That’s the way of the remote north, any visitors or news from the outside is a welcome break. So, we yakked and caught them up on events.

As we talked, one of the brothers started to clean the header on the wash-plant's sluice. He lifted the screen off the box and scraped material into a pan.

All at once he stopped his scraping, reached into the header-box and tossed something straight at me. I was caught completely off guard by the toss, and the only thing that saved me was reflex.

Luckily, I caught what he chucked, and it was heavy! In my hand was an ugly black rock. And as I looked, I thought whatever that ugly was, it wasn’t gold, because who in their right mind would chuck a nugget to me while I was standing on a huge pile of cobbles, especially a stranger?

I told the brother that whatever he’d tossed me, it sure didn't look like gold. Pulling me up short, he told me it was a gold nugget. I was stunned.

He then took out a pocket-knife and very gently scratched away at one blackened corner. A gnarly black scale flaked off, and I was a believer! The glint of gold was unmistakeable. Furthermore, the nugget weighed in at over an ounce and a quarter, and it was solid gold, no quartz.

As to how they cleaned the black gold from that claim, they’d put it in a vinegar bath overnight. The next day, some slimy sludge was all that was left of the black coating. The resulting gold was a beautiful, buttery yellow.

In Lake Placers # 2, I’ll tell how we learned to hunt the nuggets on that claim.

All the best,

Lanny

 

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[Lanny in AB]

Lake Placers #2

To get back on track with my lake placers stories, we fired up our detectors and asked the miners where we could start hunting. They laughed, and they laughed--loudly! They told us to have at it, but we’d get nothing but grief. They'd seen too many people get skunked in that goldfield over the years while trying to even get their detectors to operate at all, or to have it “squeak” on some gold (as they put it). Anyone who’d ever tried to detect had always been shut down by their severe ground.

The reason for the failure of nugget shooters was the insanely hot bedrock. It ate detectors for lunch. (As they told us this, their comments were heavily dosed with colourful language. In fact there’s most likely a tapestry of profanity still floating over that lake!)

Knowing I had a premium PI with me, and that they’d likely never seen one in action, I thought of trying to explain the good points of the Minelab, but I stopped myself and went hunting gold instead.

In an earlier story in these placer tales, I mentioned the decomposed bedrock pockets peppering the big sheets. When I went to look at one closer, I found it was very wet. I wasn't sure how that would affect the detector, but I scanned a patch of it anyway, and right quick I got a nice mellow tone. One quick scoop and I had the target.

I quartered the sharp little chunks of bedrock out of the scoop and soon had a sassy, 1.5-gram nugget. That find got the claim owner's attention! They said, “Come over here with that machine.” They then walked me over to another similar area and told me to try that spot. So, I tried it and got a signal right away. However, this time I never found a nugget but only one maddening false signal after another. They soon tired of watching, and shaking their heads in a “we told you so way”, they started mining again. Their body language said that the first find was nothing but a fluke. To them, the rest of my time would be wasted digging, as their black graphite schist bedrock was, once again, too hot for detectors.

So, the miners left us to our detecting on the bedrock. Nonetheless, my mining buddy was frustrated with how useless his broken wrist was. It depressed him to be on virgin detecting ground while equipped with a machine that could handle the ground, but he could do almost nothing about it! Yes, he could swing the detector, but no digging, running the pick or sorting material in the scoop by himself.

So, we worked together, he worked the coil, and I did the rest. By working together, we could help each other have some fun.

We headed back to that loose bedrock where I’d found the gold. I’ve found through the years that if a trap worked well enough to grab and hold one piece of gold, some extra dedication on the same spot could produce another chunk as well.

To describe the spot a bit more, the excavator had left a crumbled rise of about two feet. I started detecting up and down that little hump. Pretty soon, right near the top, I got a nice signal! It was that telltale Minelab, low-high-low tone. Although not as strong as the first signal, it was nice and sweet. With the signal close to the surface, it made it easy to get the target in the scoop. A nice, bumpy one-gram nugget was in the scoop.

As I continue my lake placers series, I’ll reveal the beautiful things hidden in those solid sheets of red-hot bedrock, and later I’ll let you in on what we found in the miners’ test piles as well.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lisagioletti]

I had a friend years ago, that took me to Volcanoville. His brother and sister n law lived there, and they had no electricity or running water, but they did have a cute little house with one of those old wood burning stoves. My friend was building a house for himself on the property. He was a roofer, by trade, at the time. He told me that his family owned the town, but were in dispute with the county about ownership of the property. I lost touch with him, and have always wondered if things were finally settled. He moved to San Diego and I always have thought about that town.

 

[russau]

Well would that make your brother the Mayor ?? If so call for a vote from the "other resident's" to what suit's you and the "other's" needs / want's ! While your at it , make dredging a legal thing todo ! And you'll see the population of your town grow quickly !!

 

[perssonanna392]

Good stuff here!

 

[Lanny in AB]

With all of the virus lock-down issues, looks like maybe, just maybe I might get out to chase some gold with my detectors next week!

Keeping my fingers crossed.

Gold is sure on a terrific run right now!!

All the best,

Lanny

 

[OwenT]

Good luck! It’s been too long without a good story!

 

[oneguy]

With all of the virus lock-down issues, looks like maybe, just maybe I might get out to chase some gold with my detectors next week!

Keeping my fingers crossed.

Gold is sure on a terrific run right now!!

All the best,

Lanny

Why the problem of getting out Best place to be during all this crap is out in the brush by yourself? I've had no problem getting out this season but currently sidelined due to the friggin heat!!!!
Good luck when you do get out. I'll post up some finds at the end of the season (thanksgiving).....

 

[Lanny in AB]

Why the problem of getting out Best place to be during all this crap is out in the brush by yourself? I've had no problem getting out this season but currently sidelined due to the friggin heat!!!!
Good luck when you do get out. I'll post up some finds at the end of the season (thanksgiving).....

It's an issue of respecting people in the local community (small population) that don't have a lot of medical facilities in case of an outbreak. Things have changed enough now however that travel is recommended once again.

It's stinking hot here are well, so hope it cools down a bit or I'll be swinging the detector very early in the morning or late at night.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Good luck! It’s been too long without a good story!

Thanks Owen, hope to have something to write about at least by the end of the season.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

I had a friend years ago, that took me to Volcanoville. His brother and sister n law lived there, and they had no electricity or running water, but they did have a cute little house with one of those old wood burning stoves. My friend was building a house for himself on the property. He was a roofer, by trade, at the time. He told me that his family owned the town, but were in dispute with the county about ownership of the property. I lost touch with him, and have always wondered if things were finally settled. He moved to San Diego and I always have thought about that town.

If you ever get any follow-up details, I'd love to hear them sometime.

Thanks for dropping in, and all the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Good stuff here!

Thanks for stopping in and leaving such a nice comment.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Got back late last night, found some nice gold.

Will post a story when I get a chance.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Oilfieldsafety]

I look forward to it Lanny, wish that I had been there to share it first hand.

Cheers
Shane

 

[Lanny in AB]

I look forward to it Lanny, wish that I had been there to share it first hand.

Cheers
Shane

Shane, lots of fun, sure you would have enjoyed it.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Return to the Gold Fields.

It couldn't have been almost nine months since we'd hit the goldfields, but that's what it turned out to be. Yes, Co-Virus has made for one crazy year, with various places requesting outsiders not to travel due to health concerns and worries about hospital beds in small communities, so we respected those concerns.

Not long ago however, we got the green light to return, so we packed up the detectors (my wife and I), the gold pans, some grub and camping essentials, and headed off for the mountains.

It was an overcast day, with the threat of rain, and the closer we got to the mountains, the darker the clouds. The heavens opened briefly; it rained enough to use the windshield wipers, which turned out to be a great way to clean the bugs off the glass.

We went through the high mountain pass, and the rain stopped as we headed down the other side. The sun came out, the sky turned a welcome cobalt blue as a few puffy clouds floated across that clean ocean of air.

When we got to camp, I didn't know what condition I'd find our trailers in, but as it turned out, they were all tight and dry after our long absence, no insects or mice, no bears had broken any windows or flattened any tires, all was well. With the camp in great shape, and with the beautiful weather, it was shaping up to be a fine day.

We went to visit some friends that have a large mining concession (think of any of the large reality show mining operations you've watched on TV). After years of working with them, they call me their mining consultant. (I always get a laugh out of that.) They have me check the bedrock in their placer mining cuts with my detectors to see how effective their recovery methods are. However, we were told the previous week there wouldn't be any open bedrock to check, so we were planning on doing some general prospecting where there was a large gold rush in the 1860's.

We returned to camp that night after a great visit, but with no expectations of any gold chasing other than what I've described above.

Early the next morning, everything changed.

I looked at my messages, and there was one from the mine owner. He told us to get our butts out of camp quick and get to the mine site as soon as we could. He had some bedrock open, and he needed a test done to see if it would be worth using a new piece of equipment he'd recently bought.

My wife and I flew around camp gathering all of the items we'd need to check bedrock: pry-bars, sniping tools, buckets, gold pans, sucker bottles and metal detectors. We loaded up a lunch, as well as lots of liquids to stay hydrated in the summer sun.

We fired up the Cummins diesel, and we headed off for the seventy minute trip to the mine. We had to be careful on the road as the logging trucks have made quite a mess with several bad spots where the ground has turned to a soft mess that will drop the front of your truck deep and fast into a nose dive if you're not careful, so slow and careful driving got us through safely.

Summer here in the north is beautiful, with green growth everywhere, large forest animals in abundance, as well as a profusion of songbirds, hawks and eagles, with the whole scene punctuated with a riot of colourful wildflowers.

We got to gold camp, looked at their morning cleanup and saw a beautiful collection of nice nuggets, the largest two were both over an ounce and a half, with a 27 gram nugget being the next biggest. Lots of nuggets in the six to seven gram range, and a whole collection of meaty pickers as well.

We idled the diesel along the mining road down into the excavation, then parked in a deep ravine and unpacked our gear.

I set my wife up with the Gold Bug Pro which is an excellent detector for shallow gold on bedrock, and I set up my Equinox 800 with the small sniper coil.

I sent my wife to one end of the finished excavation, and I went to the other end.

A geologist was also there. He's retired now, but he'd just bought a shiny new Minelab 2300, and I helped him ground balance it and gave him a few solid detecting tips for how to work such a spot. However, he didn't have a super-magnet with him on a pick or a wand, and I knew that would be trouble as the bedrock was iron-hard, and there were bits of bucket and blade everywhere because of that.

He only detected for about half an hour, and then he quit as he'd had enough. The 2300 is supersensitive. Moreover, it doesn't have discrimination, so he was hearing every tiny sliver and piece of waste steel, and he had no way to remove them from his target zones.

My wife and I were detecting with discrimination, a necessity on the first sweeps of the bedrock due to the countless bits of steel, and not long after we started, my wife gave a shout and asked me to hurry up to her end of the cut.

She had two small nuggets she'd found with the Bug Pro, her first ever nuggets with that detector! I decided to poke around a bit in her area and soon I'd recovered seven small pieces in the half gram to gram range. My wife abandoned the detector and decided she'd do some panning as there were little gutters of dirt in the low spots where the excavator buckets could not scrape due to the hardness of the bedrock. From her first pan on, she had gold in every pan. It seemed impossible, but she just kept hitting the gold.

One of the miners came along then, grabbed a pan, and he joined her. He got the same results as she did. (He and several other mine workers had tried all of the bedrock up to where my wife was working with their pans, but they hadn't been able to find the gold.)

I went back to detecting the remainder of the bedrock away from my wife's lucky strike, but I could only find hot-rocks and countless slivers of steel, no gold whatsoever.

After three hours of careful scanning with the detectors, I went back to where my wife was working. The miner was still there panning as well. He wasn't quitting! They were still on the gold. There was a sticky, yellow clay that was holding the gold in small cracks in the bedrock, from the top of the cracks all the way to the bottom.

I took over the Gold Bug Pro and went to work. Steel, steel, gold. Steel, steel, gold. I soon had a nice rattle of nuggets in the bottle. My poor super-magnet kept growing a thick beard of steel shavings that I had to keep cleaning off, but once I'd quieted an area, I could hear the soft, sweet sounds of the gold underneath.

I hit a spot that had a broad sound, not the spiked signal of a single target. I've experienced this before as the detector is responding to a collection of flakes and small pickers all nestled together. So, I dug down into the V's in the bedrock where I hit those broad responses, and sure enough, when I panned the material, lots of small flakes and little pickers of sassy gold!!

We pulled out 13.7 grams, the miner panned out another 4 grams himself, so it was a fun day.

The next morning, the mine owner moved in a vacuum truck, a pressure washer, a 1.5 inch pump to create a slurry, and they went to work on that bedrock in all of those little gutters because of the test results we'd provided. We'd found the sweet spot for them, and they made a nice haul that they otherwise would have missed.

It was a great day, and we came home with some nice gold.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Bow]

Great write up Lanny I enjoyed it! Thank you

 

[Lanny in AB]

Great write up Lanny I enjoyed it! Thank you

Bow, thanks for dropping in, and thank for your kind note.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

A Few Hours To Hunt

On Saturday, my son and I headed to the mine in the mountains with only a few hours to hunt the gold.

We arrived at the placer cut, and we could hear an excavator working somewhere on the placer lease.

We looked over the bank and saw the mine owner working at stripping off the bottom fifteen or so feet of the sixty feet of overburden to get to the virgin bedrock underneath.

As soon as I looked at his machine, I noticed something was wrong, so I got the operator's attention, and he shut his machine down. He opened the door to see what was up, and I told him he'd thrown a track! He was just about to turn his machine which would have caused a lot more trouble. He thanked us for flagging him down, then he made the long walk up the haulage road to have a chat with us.

He was happy we'd come along when we did, and he yakked with us for a while. We learned that the motor on their largest excavator had seized the day before, and that they were busily searching for a replacement, but they were having a hard time as the diesel motor was a specific design with a special high horsepower build.

We asked how the vacuum truck had worked at suctioning the bedrock my wife and I had tested for them last week, and he said their test had worked out much better than they'd even expected. In fact, from now on whenever they hit super-hard bedrock, they'll use the suction retrieval system to clean the bedrock.

He told us we could go play in a spot they were no longer working where there was a small hump of bedrock protruding from an old haulage road.

My son and I only had several hours to play as my granddaughters were at our mining camp that weekend and we needed to get back for a family cookout, so we unlimbered the detectors as well as the panning and sniping equipment and headed for the bedrock hump.

My son took one end, and I took the other.

It was a typical August day, hot, hot with perfectly clear skies, the blazing sunshine pounding the bottom of the cut. A brown and orange butterfly gently pumped its body up and down in front of us as we started to snipe likely looking spots. The gentle chuckle of an ice-cold spring flowing from the side of the cut was the only natural sound on that calm day.

I tested a small area first with my gold pan; there was some friable rock exposed, but it held not gold. So, I dug around until I found a v-shaped crevice that held more material. The top part was gooey clay and rock hauled in to cover the bedrock to make the road; however, digging deeper, I soon uncovered intact ancient channel material that was instantly recognizable by its composition.

I blanked on the first pan, but prying apart some bedrock and exposing seams of orange-stained clay, the second pan produced a nice piece of gold half the size of an oatmeal flake. That got my son's attention!

He wasn't having any luck on his end of the hump, so I told him to hit my spot hard while I took out the detector to scan what I'd already cleaned. Sure enough, I found two nice pickers that were stuck to the clay on the sides of the crevice. I worked along behind him as he pulled out channel material, and when I'd get a broad signal, he'd pan the material out, and it usually held nice flakes of gold.

I had my hooked bedrock scraper (spoon-shaped on the other end), and I scraped all of the material from the crack at the bottom of the crevice.

My son headed off to pan it, and when he came back, he had two large flakes in the pan. Then I heard a whack and looked back at the pan, and he'd dropped a nugget in!

The two gram nugget made the flakes look small, but the smile on his face was huge.

We had to finish chasing the gold as it was time to start the seventy minute trip back to camp, but we'd rescued 3.62 grams of gold from an ancient channel, a stream bed that was last disturbed millions of years ago when the dinosaurs tip-toed through them.

All the best,

Lanny

P.S. My son also panned out 2.5 grams of gold from some virgin dirt we brought back from the outing my wife and I had last weekend.

 

[Terry Soloman]

You saved that guy a lot of time and sweat, and probably money! Another superb tale! Book! Put the Book Out! I'm in line right now!