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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[EagleDown]

There's an old saying; "It's worth as much as you're willing to pay for it".

The 3 pounder that was found in Bear Creek in 1982 was not near as impressive visually, nor was gold priced near as high, but the finder was offered $12,000 for it on the spot. Jack later told me that the only reason he didn't offer more was, that was all of the cash he had on hand.

Eagle

 

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[SushiDog]

Well....it's gonna be interesting.....SushiDog

 

[Hefty1]

Hey Lanny
Where you hiding at

Hefty

 

[Lanny in AB]

Hey Hefty and all--been exceptionally busy during and since the holidays, and will be for a bit yet. When I get a chance I'll post again. Thanks for your concern, and all the best,

Lanny

 

[SushiDog]

Hi Lanny......I am glad you dropped us a short note.....everyone worried about you.....Hefty and I will be going back to the claim tomorrow morning.....will shoot better video this time, and will send you a copy when we get back....Hefty is going to have his GoldBug out in the field for the very first time....I am really excited for him, and can't wait to see it perform....SushiDog

 

[Lanny in AB]

A big hello to everyone. I've finally got a chance to post something.

So, I thought I'd post a little story about one of my infamous missed opportunities--a chance gone by--a glorious opportunity to metal detect for nuggets that turned into a misadventure. But, what else is new when it comes to so many of my stories, right?

Well, at the time, I was pretty green, although I had (the previous summer) broken the rookie metal detector's curse (You know, when you swing that thing a buzillion times and only get the coil over trash, and so all you dig is trash day, after day, after day . . . You get the picture. But then I broke the aforementioned curse and found that first nugget "The Icon of Africa", which find was quickly followed by a dozen or so nuggets all the size of your fingernails. On a different note, it's quite funny how that works out when you're nugget hunting--all that comes your way is an absolute dearth of nuggets, and then once you've broken the curse, those sassy nuggets seem attracted to you in bumper crop proportions!)

But, I'm digressing again--I'm far too good at that. So, back to the story. As I was pretty green, I'd been detecting around a huge excavation that had been worked around a massive boulder--without exaggeration, the boulder itself was the size of a small house. In fact, it was so huge, you could look under it where the Chinese had tunneled (a lot of silt and debris had washed in closing most spaces up) and see where they'd left their stout, round, portly posts to ensure the boulder didn't sink to the bedrock to crush them. It was quite the sight--I can't even imagine the work they did to excavate down to bedrock all around it, let alone tunnel under it! Anyway, I was detecting around the basin the boulder sat in and I was getting all kinds of trash. I was having flashbacks to the previous year's "Rookie Curse" mode, and my enjoyment level was dropping fast.

Moreover, because I'd hit so many nuggets the previous summer, I was in a bit of a hurry to start hearing that "low-high-low" golden tone again. Well, it didn't happen at all in that spot, and the bugs were exceptionally blood-thirsty down there out of the breeze, so I moved on to windier realms.

I happened upon some long rows of hand-stacked cobbles and small boulders, and then I came to some sheets of bare bedrock, but I couldn't get a peep out of that mother rock--it was completely smooth and superbly hard--in fact, the wrong type of rock to trap gold altogether, so, highly discouraging too.

I walked down closer to the river and detected along a bench, but all I found were more heavily rusted pieces of tin can, bits of lead, snips of small gauge iron wire, broken chunks of cable, boot tacks, and meat-tin keys. It was dé-jà vu all over again!!

Well, by this time I was hot, sweaty, tired and about four times dumber than when I'd hiked in there. I say I was much dumber because of what happened next.

I decided I'd hike out through the pines and aspens in a different direction from the way I'd bush-whacked my way in. I got partway through, heading uphill about a block and a half from the previously mentioned excavations, and all at once, the trees opened up, and I was in a clearing. Well, that should have been my first tip-off, but like I said, I was a bit grumpy, and I was getting hungry for cooking up some grub on the wood-burning stove in the wall-tent back at camp about half a mile away. However, my little prospector brain (the one that never sleeps night or day--the one that lives inside the big, dumb exterior prospector brain that wants nothing but food, comfort and easy, spectacular finds; well, that little brain lit up and started sending lively electrical shocks of recognition along my neural pathways to my dumb, path of least resistance brain, until it finally took notice.

This area was clearly not natural. (I know it's hard to believe that this seems so transparent to anyone that's ever hiked the far-flung Boreal forests, but you have to remember that I was pretty much a sausage of a rookie, and my brain had not yet been seasoned by experience and pithy wisdom and logic. I mean--why else would there all of a sudden be a clearing in the middle of a forest? Duh?? But, happily, these days, I know better, and I'm alert to such little discrepancies. This does not help me bear the misery of knowing what I may have left behind, however.) Anyway, my two opposing brains somehow generated a unopposed connection and made me do a double take; my hunger was briefly forgotten, and I started paying attention to what I was walking through.

Off to my right I spotted what looked like disturbed rows of forest floor. So, I had to go take a look. And, sure enough, it was row upon row of forest floor that had been trenched! (Now, any prospector worth his salt, his bacon, or his beans would have been profoundly impressed and spent a long period of time carefully checking this entire area out--but it was not to be for me, largely due to my already described condition.) There were pieces of broken bedrock, tree roots, cobbles (clearly indicating the existence of channel or glacial run underneath) and smaller rounded stones cast up throughout these primitive excavations. Furthermore, some had been trenched wider than others and you could still see down to the bedrock in places. (It was about two to three feet to bedrock.) Others were slumping back in, and many were covered right over. This was old work, done by the Argonauts around 1870, no doubt about it.

So, what did I do? I followed those trenches around in the forest, peering down into them from time to time like a sappy tourist. Towards the end I thought to fire up my detector (No one this dumb could make something up that dumb!) and detect around a bit. There were old mainstream square nails, bits of decomposing tin can, and quite out of the ordinary tiny square nails. What did this mean to me at the time? Well, I figured someone had been digging around, had left some trash behind, and had moved on to bigger and better things, of course.

What does it mean to me now? Someone did a ton of back-breaking work trenching for gold, and because of the existence of the differing sizes of square nails, they were there a while, and most likely had some kind of recovery system set up to get the gold. Moreover, as they were following the bedrock, they were probably finding enough to make it interesting. (Have you ever trenched in the forest two to three feet to bedrock! It's zero fun--zero.) However, as the clearing had not been worked to bedrock, it probably wasn't rich enough to warrant a massive excavation of the entire area. Or, they had water problems (no way to get enough water to the area to work it with sluices--probably only some rocker work for sampling). Regardless, what I should have done was taken some time to open some of those trenches back up, or to at least have gotten my detector down to that ancient bedrock that was still visible! Did I do it? Nope. Do I look back on it and think how smart I was? Hardly--I look back on it and think of all the untested possibilities I walked over that day, and how I ultimately overruled my tiny prospector's brain that had tipped me off in the first place.

The location of that trenching is a grueling eighteen hour drive north and west of here, and I doubt I'll ever get back there again (thick with bears and bugs, and the road severely, relentlessly, and expensively punishes your vehicle). But, I've learned from my misadventure, as now I understand what I didn't explore and exploit--a fantastic opportunity to detect virgin bedrock and lots of throw-out excavation virgin dirt.

I've since found beautiful gold in areas like that one, as the prospectors a hundred and forty years previous had no way of knowing what they were digging through and throwing out during their testing. Indeed, they had no way of knowing what they were leaving in the cracks and crevices of the bedrock either, but a premier gold detector, put to good use that day, most likely would have done the job very well indeed.

So, rats! Life sucks sometimes. But at least I know what to do now when I find disturbed ground in the middle of nowhere. And I've put that misadventure into my tiny prospecting brain's memory bank of what not to do now that I know what to do, and it's payed off with some beautiful gold.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[strickman]

hind sight is always 20/20.....

 

[Lanny in AB]

Good to see you again strickman, and yup, that's sure the way it is.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Hefty1]

Hey Lanny
Glad to see you back telling us your amazing adventures or miss adventures,
It doesnt matter, they are all good reading.
I wish I had a nickel for all my pea brain adventures
I surely wouldnt have to hunt for gold

Hefty

 

[EagleDown]

As usual, a great (teaching) story my Brother. Since I'm old enough to at least be your Dad, if not your Grandad, you can only imagine the many lost opportunities I have inside this old pea-brain. A few of them never even occurred to me until I started writing my "memoirs".

Like crevasses in an ancient channel that the "old timers" cleaned out that took writing about it to make me realise, they only scraped the bed-rock and got what they could see!! They didn't have metal detectors to find what was possibly buried IN THE BED-ROCK!!

Fortunately, I have the opportunity to go back and check them out.

Hey, great seeing and reading your post. Sorry I missed it earlier. I believe my computer is working correctly now, so hopefully, I won't be posting so late after you.

Thanks!!

Eagle

 

[SushiDog]

Lanny....another great story!....This got me to thinking.....Your library of books on gold mining, prospecting, dredging, etc., probably LQQKs like mine, albeit, yours being much more extensive than mine by a long shot! Well.....I bet most of these books are in the "How To" genre, and that is what is being published.....so....thinking outside the box, why doesn't someone (Lanny or EagleDown) write a book about "what not to do?" I have learned so much from you and EagleDown that I could never get out of any book, and speaking for myself, I learn more quickly, and remember more, when a person tells me about a mishap, or an experiment that went haywire because of their imagination, or lack thereof....I guess a book entitled "What NOT To Do While Dredging" would be more beneficial, and I think both books would give the same lessons....my money would be that I could remember more through the book I suggested, rather than the "How To" book....well....I believe everyone gets the message, or what I am trying to say here....but, as always, this is just me.....it was great to come back to your stories Lanny!.....SushiDog

 

[Lanny in AB]

Hey Lanny
Glad to see you back telling us your amazing adventures or miss adventures,
It doesnt matter, they are all good reading.
I wish I had a nickel for all my pea brain adventures
I surely wouldnt have to hunt for gold

Hefty

Hefty--you're the man! And, it's probably a good thing that I don't have a nickel for all of my adventures-gone-awry or I'd have so much money I'd probably turn stick lazy and be a grade A couch potato!

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

As usual, a great (teaching) story my Brother. Since I'm old enough to at least be your Dad, if not your Grandad, you can only imagine the many lost opportunities I have inside this old pea-brain. A few of them never even occurred to me until I started writing my "memoirs".

Like crevasses in an ancient channel that the "old timers" cleaned out that took writing about it to make me realise, they only scraped the bed-rock and got what they could see!! They didn't have metal detectors to find what was possibly buried IN THE BED-ROCK!!

Fortunately, I have the opportunity to go back and check them out.

Hey, great seeing and reading your post. Sorry I missed it earlier. I believe my computer is working correctly now, so hopefully, I won't be posting so late after you.

Thanks!!

Eagle

Eagle--thanks for your post. It's good to hear from you again. And, don't bang your head too hard or you'll just loosen up all of that incredible gold-getting knowledge you've got stored there. You'll get a chance to check to check out some of those special places you've stored away for re-visits and re-scanning.

By the way--it's nice to have you share your wisdom here--you're one of the true golden sages.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Lanny....another great story!....This got me to thinking.....Your library of books on gold mining, prospecting, dredging, etc., probably LQQKs like mine, albeit, yours being much more extensive than mine by a long shot! Well.....I bet most of these books are in the "How To" genre, and that is what is being published.....so....thinking outside the box, why doesn't someone (Lanny or EagleDown) write a book about "what not to do?" I have learned so much from you and EagleDown that I could never get out of any book, and speaking for myself, I learn more quickly, and remember more, when a person tells me about a mishap, or an experiment that went haywire because of their imagination, or lack thereof....I guess a book entitled "What NOT To Do While Dredging" would be more beneficial, and I think both books would give the same lessons....my money would be that I could remember more through the book I suggested, rather than the "How To" book....well....I believe everyone gets the message, or what I am trying to say here....but, as always, this is just me.....it was great to come back to your stories Lanny!.....SushiDog

Sushi--you always have such great ideas--what a fantastic suggestion. I surely could write quite a bit about "what not to do", and as far as brain research goes, a negative impression in the brain lasts much longer/is much more difficult to remove than a positive one--so you're on the money with that line of thinking.

It was so great to catch up with you the other day--you have such a keen, solution and application oriented mind, and such a fascinating work history, that once you get a chance to chase the gold in earnest, I have no doubt that you'll be a first-class, dedicated gold seeker and gold getter.

All the best my friend,

Lanny

 

[SushiDog]

How can any of us go wrong with you guys making these awesome posts!.....Thanks so much for your kind words Lanny.....and yeah.....you really made my day! (Big Smile).....also....EagleDown has that gift of story telling as well....perhaps you guys can collaborate on something to keep us other guys out of trouble! Ha!.....It's a pleasure to be part of this, and to read all of the posts no matter where they come from in the world!....SushiDog

 

[Gaijun1]

Awsome Post

 

[Lanny in AB]

Awsome Post

Thanks so much Gaijun!

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Gold in the bedrock tip: When working in friable rock (I believe this is how Chris Ralph describes the bedrock I'll refer to), that is bedrock that has lots of standing (jammed close together and located perpendicular to the ground/bedrock) plates/sheets, it has been my experience that the flake gold and pickers (and, every once in a while, nuggets too) are generally found in the first several inches of that unstable/movable rock--until they hit the solid bedrock beneath.

Finding the vast majority of the gold in the relatively shallow surface materials is usually the case, because below those few top inches of standing, plate-like/sheet-like rock, the bedrock is far more solid underneath--the friable aspect disappears.

In fact, and this is important, as you dig deeper, you will often no longer find little river stones and coarser sand in whatever cracks and crevices remain. Moreover, the material that is almost exclusively there is usually very sticky clay--that's what tends to be in the deeper cracks and crevices--and those crevices are few and far between (as compared to the surface).

For whatever reason, the fine clay seems to sift down very deep, but very rarely is it carrying any values. Furthermore, that heavy clay is horrible stuff to wash--it's exceptionally sticky and it does not want to go back into suspension--you can basically spend forever washing it and almost always get the same results--nada!

However, the exception (as far as crevices/deeper crevices go) to this, of course, is when a deep crack or crevice beneath a cap of friable rock has sticky clay, yet it also has lots of little river stones and coarser sand accompanying that gooey clay--this is the crevice material to get yourselves excited about people.

Generally, what this means is that some time in the dim past, the crack was opened wide enough to allow entry of the coarser material, and naturally, this would allow sassy gold to drop in for a permanent visit as well. In crevices like the aforementioned, I have found some beautiful flake gold, pickers and nuggets. However, you just don't find them very often on great gold producing streams in the conditions I've described. (So as not to confuse you, I'm not talking about a generic river crevice that is jammed with rocks at its surface, and is summarily packed with progressively smaller stones as the crack narrows to depth at its bottom. I'm speaking of a closed crevice that resides beneath the movable cap of friable rock--a crevice that is located much deeper down in the bedrock substructure far below that cap of friable rock.)

I hope this helps someone find some nice, sassy gold--either in the little perpendicular plates and sheets on the surface, or if you're lucky enough, in a tightly closed crevice that was once open for business. I also hope that it will help you save some time by not working barren clay deposits.

***I just remembered something--always carefully examine the surface of any gooey, clay-jammed crevice material--sometimes if there's little stones and coarse sand jammed in that surface material--there's a good chance there's gold as well. Take the material down to where there's no more granular particles stuck in it (you can tell by squishing the material between your fingers)--go through the hassle of liquifying it (it's going to take a bunch of time--but, just stick with it), and then pan it very carefully. As well, be sure to wash everything off in clear water so you know what you're looking at before you discard anything--clay is a master of disguise, and if there's enough of it around a particle of gold--the gold's specific gravity won't allow it to behave like gold at all. In addition, that clay will also roll gold out in a ball (as it encases the gold) right over your pan's riffles! So, to be safe, squish and smear everything around under the water in your pan until it's well liquified.

All the best, and good luck,

Lanny

 

[SushiDog]

Lanny....you ARE the Master Teacher!!!! You are always so elegant with your words, and your anecdotes are as smooth as silk! Thanks for the lesson.....(you really have to write that "book"!) - Smile - Sushidog

 

[Lanny in AB]

Thanks so much Sushi for you genuine and sincere compliments--I really appreciate them.

All the best,

Lanny