Gold hunting prospecting tips.

[Lanny in AB]

Tips and little stories for anyone that wants to learn a bit more about chasing the gold. Whether you're a rookie or a Sourdough (a Pro), you might find something to read. My main thread, http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html on the metal detecting for gold page has been up for many years, and it has some tips too along with many, many stories of me out chasing the gold, but it takes a long time to wade through all of the almost 80 pages now.

So, I thought I'd start a thread over here dedicated to more of the tips and techniques on how to find gold, and I may transfer some tips from my older thread over to here as well.

Essential gold fact.
(This fact is one that's often ignored, if not undervalued or forgotten in the rush to find the gold.)

Gold fact: Gold is heavy.

Rookie prospector fact: Most rookies forget this.

Prospecting reality: many "seasoned" prospectors forget this.

Prospecting mantra: never forget that gold is heavy.


(Yes, lead is heavy too, but gold is nearly twice as heavy as lead (19320 kg/cu.m VS 11340 kg/cu.m).



For example, if you want to look for gold in a stream, don't start digging in a sandbar. Don't start digging in clay or mud. While it's true that gold will stick to clay, usually if you dig a bunch of clay, you'll get a lot of clay in your pan. . . .

Look at the stream and see where the bigger stuff is collecting.



If you're in an area where there's flour gold (glaciated gold that's been hammered and ground to a powder consistency), look for gravel bars where the rocks are fist-sized and larger. Why? Specific gravity rules specify that if the stream was traveling with enough velocity to carry rocks fist-sized and larger, flour gold was also traveling with them (if there's gold in the stream). Remember? Gold is heavy, so it takes force from water velocity to move it during a flood or during high water. (This also applies to bench deposits and old channels.)

If you're in an area where there's flake and picker gold (or maybe even nuggets), look for a place in the stream where rocks the size of couch cushions or big round watermelons or trashcans were moving during high water. Then, get a vantage point where you can look downstream to see if there's any pattern to their disposition. (I'm referring where the stream is fairly shallow to bedrock or hardpan as the bigger rocks won't disappear as they sink themselves with the stratifying action of the stream. Big, wide, slow moving streams that are deep to bedrock sometimes won't follow the same rules.) Look downstream and if you can see the big rocks lined out (running in a consecutive line downstream from each other) in a linear pattern, each following the others downstream, I'd get in those rocks and start digging. Why? Gold is heavy. Just think about the energy involved in the stream velocity that moved those rocks: pickers and flakes and maybe nuggets were running with that big stuff. Dig, dig, dig. Test, test, test.



Flashback time: When I was working with a large placer operation and they'd hit large boulders (the size of your couch at least, not the cushions), and we were working ground where nuggets were common, everyone would get excited about the possibilities. (I say possibilities because sometimes Mother Nature plays tricks and only drops the big boulders because she shifted the gold run off somewhere else.) So, when those big boulders were moved out of the way, everyone would get down in the pit after the machines were shut down for the day to start panning. (I'd often be panning the material as we went down as well to keep the feedback going to the excavator operator to let him know what size of gold, or how much gold was showing in the pan at the various levels, or in the varying layers of materials as they changed from level to level.)

On one unforgettable day, the gold run was so heavy after the big rocks were moved that we walked along the face of the wall where it met the bedrock (from about two feet above and down to the bedrock that is), and we were able to see the nuggets packed in the gravel and then flick them out of the wall into a pan!

Now I know that some of you are going to think that I was smoking cheap crack, and that there's no way anything like that could ever be possible, but I was there and it happened anyway. Moreover, once you've seen pay with that much gold in it, and once you've experienced a sight like that, you can never forget it either. There was so much gold in the pay layer that because the boss was gone to town for supplies, the sluice crew messed up and fed the sluice at the wrong rate (they fed it as if they were running normal material). The boss arrived back in camp just as the run ended and the crew was just shutting down the wash-plant. To his horror when the water stopped flowing, there were nuggets all the way from the header boxes right to the end of the last riffle in both sluices, and this was a big wash-plant!

So, as you undoubtedly remember (by now in this post) that gold is heavy, what do you think was happening while the nuggets were being deposited all the way to the last riffle in the sluices?

That's right, the nuggets were going over the end of the sluice and heading down into the settling ponds too. What a fiasco! I'll not bore you with the colorful adjectives the boss launched at the sluice crew.



But, what an unimaginable sight regardless. Nuggets from the header boxes all the way to the last riffle!! I had my video camera with me and wanted so badly to shoot video of the sluices; moreover, I had my regular camera with me and wanted to shoot some stills as well, but the investor wouldn't let me do it. He was quite an uptight fellow, to say the least.

Some other miners were working their way down the mountain along our road on their way to cross the river with their equipment, so they could get started on running dirt at their claim. They stopped by to see how things were going. Their jaws hit the ground, hard. They'd never seen the like, and I certainly never have since. Pounds and pounds of beautiful nuggets, with pounds and pounds of galena in all different sizes left to be separated from the gold. (What a pain that was as you can't remove galena with magnets, so it's hard to speed up the cleanup process.)



So, when you're looking for gold, think heavy. Try to think heavy thoughts because gold certainly thinks that way. Moreover, if you're working a stream where it's shallow to bedrock, always, always check the bedrock very carefully. Why? As gold is heavy, and as the stream materials are constantly agitated by the water, the gold will continue to drop through the liquified, moving materials of the stream to eventually come to rest. Why does it stop? It hits something that won't move or give way, and in the case of bedrock, it meets all of the immovable object criteria.

While dredging, I've had to pry enough nuggets from cracks and crevices to know how well fractured or rough bedrock works when it comes to stopping gold.



(Note: I shot this picture with an underwater camera (the glacial melt water is crystal clear and bone-chilling cold). It's a nugget that's sitting on the bedrock, and the water is moving along at a really good clip. I'd just finished moving and then carefully sucking all of the surrounding material away from the nugget on the bedrock with the dredge nozzle kept far enough away to only move the lighter material. The natural velocity of the water was not a factor when it came to the specific gravity of that chunk of gold: that nugget would not move after it was uncovered! It sat right there. If you look around, you'll see other gold resting in the stream run as well.)

Fun fact: while dredging, I've disturbed gold on the bedrock, but because gold is so heavy, the velocity of the stream drags (and I do mean drags) it along the bedrock until it reaches a crevice, and the gold disappears right quick I can tell you! If it's a good sized nugget, once you uncover it, that sassy chunk of gold will sit there in the water right tight on the bedrock waiting for you to make a move. That's how well gold can resist the velocity of the water. That's why some writers say that gold is "lazy". It's so sluggish because due to its specific gravity that it takes the shortest route between two points. So, if you're in an area with coarse gold, always remember this weighty fact as you're plotting where to test your stream materials. In your head, draw some imaginary lines (straight lines) from point A to point B.





Go to bed tonight reviewing the fact that gold is heavy: almost twenty times as heavy as the water that's transporting it, and almost ten times heavier than the other materials the stream's water is moving along with the gold. Knowing this may just have you rethinking things the next time you're out working a stream where it's shallow to bedrock (or other stream deposits as well).

All the best,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html

By the way, it's far too cold here right now to chase the gold. So, since I'm snowbound, I'll kick out a few posts from time to time, and at other times I may get a chance to post a few more as well.

 

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[Lanny in AB]

Like TS said, those are great tips. I've tried some of Lanny's bedrock tips myself, I waved my GMT over ground that normally I would not have even thought of checking and sure enough I found gold, not staggering amounts or even a sassy nugget but pieces of gold just the same. Like Lanny says, "It all adds up". Or wait, maybe that was Hefty1. Either source is correct.....................63bkpkr Oh, I've found Texas Gold but will save that for another time.

It's great to know you've made the move, settled in, and are now back online!

Thanks for dropping in.

As far as the quote about gold adding up, I may be guilty of saying it as I've heard it from many, many old pros in the past, but it was probably Hefty1 that first dropped that wise saying on you as he's a bit of a treasure himself.

What's this little teaser about you finding Texas gold? I hope you drop back in to give up a few more tidbits.

All the best, and once again, it's great to hear from you again,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html

 

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[Lanny in AB]

How do you know when a crevice has given up all of its gold?

This is a great question, and in all honesty, I may have left gold in crevices.

It's a hard question to answer as some crevices drop down into bedrock that's iron hard and you just can't chase them anymore.

There's one in particular that was giving up sub-gram nuggets. It was in slate bedrock, just down from a large Galena outcrop. I'd chiseled out five nice, sassy sub-gram nuggets that I'd located with the detector. The crevice was getting bigger as it went down, and as I used different sizes of sniping tools to bring crevice contents to the surface, there was still gold in the material. However, the bedrock got so hard (it was in a contact zone area where there was some other kind of bedrock intruded into the slate) that I could no longer widen the crevice anymore to get down deeper. I don't know if I'll ever get back there again, but as I had hammers and chisels with me the last time, I'd need a Jackhammer this time, and a power source, to even hope to get to the bottom of things.

I clearly recall another crevice that gave up nuggets in the 1-4 gram range. I thought it was completely cleaned out, but I took a large bar and really worked on widening that crevice. I found broken bedrock bits in the material I brought out to pan, and more gold! There were lots of pickers down in that broken bedrock.

At another time, I was working a crevice that was jammed full of old rusted material. There were nice pickers in the contents, and lots of small river stones. I kept working the crevice until there were no more small river stones, and the pickers stopped. But I kept at the crevice and hit a layer of tightly packed clay with tiny stones throughout. In that material there was good flake gold. So I kept hammering until the material that came out was only gray and black rock that was barren of gold.

I've had other crevices that have been full of small iron trash, iron bars, steel dozer pins, etc. (these I worked while dredging), but as they all had that heavy iron in them, they also had nuggets and pickers in them as well.

All the best, and I'll see if I can post some more when I've got a bit more time,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html

 

[Lanny in AB]

"I'd really like to find a picker."

I was out prospecting, and I had a Cheechako along with me. He'd experimented with panning over the years, but all he'd ever found was tiny specks of gold.

We were in an area where the Oldtimers really worked a large section of bedrock. There were handstacks (stacked piles of rock, moved by hand) everywhere. In some places there were bare sections of bedrock that were terraced upward toward the shoulders of the mountains.

He'd been gathering dirt and panning it, and once again, all he had were specks.

He said to me, "I'd really like to find a picker." In other words, he was tired of all the panning he'd done over the years only to have a collection of sad looking little specks. So, I asked him if he had any sniping tools with him.

He had a screwdriver, a little brush, and a small plastic shovel.

So, I lent him a small sledgehammer, a rock chisel, and a couple of crevicing tools for cleaning out narrow spaces.

He asked me where he should go. I told him to try the terraced, bare bedrock that had been cleaned off by the Oldtimers. He looked at me like I'd been smoking or snorting the gold I'd found earlier, or some other mind-altering substance, like it had done something to mess up my prospecting brain. However, I assured him that if the Oldtimers had gone to all the hard work of completely clearing the bedrock in the area that there had been good gold there.

He was still very skeptical, as he wanted dirt to dig in and dirt to pan, but I took him over to the bedrock and taught him to work the cracks to get pieces to move, and I showed him the tiny amounts of material that were trapped in the uncovered spaces. Well, he decided to give it a try. Not long afterwards, he toddled off to the river to pan his material.

It wasn't long until I heard a whoop and a holler from the river. Soon after that, he showed up with his little bottle, and in the bottle was a nice, chunky picker.

Man, you should have seen the bedrock fly after that!

If the Oldtimers worked the buhjeepers out of a section of bedrock, there's still some gold there to be found. I've tested that theory numerous times and found some wonderful gold that way and have taught many others to do the same.

You have to realize that those early Argonauts were regular people after all. They got hot, tired, discouraged, etc., etc. Many of them had arrived too late at the diggin's, and they were forced to work for someone else. Their dream of holding their own rich claim was dead. So, they weren't as meticulous as they should have been, or they were just plain depressed, and they were only working long enough to have the money to outfit for a trip back to the real world.

Always check carefully where the Oldtimers worked, always.

All the best,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html

 

[Lanny in AB]

All the best,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html

 

[Bluefrontside]

Lanny your photos are great my son and I enjoy "digging" through on photo bucket pics.

 

[Lanny in AB]

Lanny your photos are great my son and I enjoy "digging" through on photo bucket pics.

Thanks for dropping in and taking the time to say some kind words--much appreciated.

Here's another picture for you:



All the best,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html

 

[Lanny in AB]

As I'm trying to keep the prospecting tips in one place, I'll repost this here. I wrote this in response to some comments about "Oldtimers" and the knowledge they have that's far too often not being passed on anymore:

What most beginners fail to realize, is that the real gold strike is when you meet someone like you (the person was lucky enough to have met an Oldtimer) just did. That's where the "golden" opportunity is, to listen to those Oldtimers tell you how it's done, where to look, what to watch for. I've learned so much more from Sourdoughs than I've ever learned from books.

Don't get me wrong; there's a lot of good information in books. But having a real live person show you how to find the gold is priceless. Having a person tell you secrets of how to prospect certain areas is priceless. Finding one willing to share is also priceless.

As John says, "Wisdom from the aged is a lost art now. Elders are ignored instead of mining their experiences and knowledge. I've found some of my nicest gold specimens utilizing info from a old mining gal, Deadwood Jane RIP ,a pistol packn' gal who lived in shasta county for years." And, John should know. I also know the value of those Argonauts that have blazed the trails before me, and I genuinely respect every tidbit they're willing to share with me.

For those that are always in a hurry when you're out chasing the gold, slow down whenever you meet someone that you know has been working the gold for many years and take the time to listen. That also is a lost art: taking the time to listen. Too many people are in far too much of a hurry to take the time to listen because they only have so much time to prospect. They'd rather rush off to the stream to pan, or swing that detector, but they may have just let a fantastic golden opportunity slip right through their fingers, an opportunity that might have led them to far more gold (in many ways) than the small amount of gold they found in the stream, or the specks they detected.

All the best,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html

 

[Lanny in AB]

I'll repost this here as well as I shot most of this off to another nugget hunter today:

To begin, for those of you that hunt for nuggets and have a VLF machine, the VLF’s limitations are that you'll always be dealing with hotrocks, and hotrocks are always, always in gold producing areas that I’ve ever visited. But, that doesn't mean you can't learn to deal with them. Find every article and youtube video you can on VLF’s, and find every article and youtube video you can on dealing with hotrocks while using a VLF. What you'll find is that there are positive and negative hotrocks, and that you deal with them in different manners.

Hotrocks will be one of your biggest challenges when you start out. So, you really need to do your research carefully.

Back to VLF generalizations: I've run into and know personally three VLF users that have found pounds of gold with their machines. They all told me the same thing. Read and reread your manual until you know it front to back without thinking. Put it on your bedside table and read it until you black out.

VLF's are great where the ground minerals are mild to moderately severe, but they are no good in extreme ground. They are the wrong platform for that. PI's excel at severe and extreme ground. So, if your ground is mild to moderately severe, you've got a chance with a VLF. If it's extreme ground, you'll need a PI.

Some of my stories on my main thread deal with finding nuggets in extreme ground with PI’s.

The VLF hunters that I know that have found pounds of gold have found it in areas that are not extreme or severe! They know exceptionally well how to handle hotrocks, and they are masters at it.

One of the big secrets to finding gold nuggets is proper ground balance, whether it's a VLF or a Pulse Induction machine. Even though I have the world's finest machine, the GPX 5000, if I don't watch my ground balance, I might as well be swinging a wooden stick. You really need to know everything you can about ground balance or you'll walk right over gold.

One of my buddies that has found many, many pounds of gold only uses the Gold Bug II which has no auto ground balance, but he loves to tell me of how, when he first started, he took his machine and hunted for two years without finding a single nugget!! But, he found pounds of trash (nails, brass, copper, cast iron, can-slaw, etc., etc.). So, how could he find all that trash but no gold? He was never properly ground balanced.

He ran into a pro one day out in the field while hunting and told the pro his woes. The pro asked to see his machine. He ground balanced it properly for my buddy, and the pro walked back over the exact ground my friend had just finished detecting (and had only gathered trash) and the Pro pulled three nuggets out of the ground right where my buddy had been! My buddy then detected the rest of the day paying precise attention to ground balance and found his first nuggets. (He just about went insane dealing with all of the hotrocks too, but he now knows how to deal with them.) He refuses to buy an auto balance machine, but that's just his preference. The other two VLF pros I know also refuse auto ground balance as you'll always run the chance of missing something when there’s a sudden transition, but that's only a personal preference and choice. Other pros use auto-ground balance and all of them are very successful.

Next is iron reject: you'll always lose gold. But, it saves you time. But, you'll always lose gold. So, every pro I know always digs everything. It's tiring, and it's boring, but I've dug nuggets that sounded exactly like trash or the machines I was using read them as trash, but I have the nuggets to prove they were not trash. Take that for what it's worth as it means you'll dig more trash, but you'll catch nuggets that you'd miss for sure too. It's a tradeoff you may not wish to tolerate. Some nugget shooters only dig targets that register as good, and they're very happy regardless.

The sound of gold: unless it's close to the surface or big, don't think you'll get a large sound or a solid sound. Gold usually registers as a very soft sound, or a tiny disturbance in your threshold, or it only registers as a mere "bump" in the threshold, especially in areas that have been worked hard. This is solid gold advice that many choose to ignore. Especially former amateur metal detectorists that hunt other targets than gold, like coin and relic hunters. They just can't fathom it. But, that one secret will lead you to many nuggets you'd just walk over.

Trust your machine's electronics, and if that threshold gets disturbed for any reason whatsoever, go back and move some dirt and investigate. Sometimes just scraping a little dirt off (a quarter of an inch, for instance) will get you an increased signal that may only be a lager disturbance (as opposed to a positive signal), but that means to get busy moving more dirt and to keep investigating until the signal either gets positive, or until it stops. I've found many nuggets that way.

Go slow: Go extremely slow when you're in a patch. Too many people are in a hurry and want to cover as much ground as possible regardless of where they are. That going faster tactic only applies with a big coil when you're looking for new ground. If you're detecting a pit that's produced good gold (an abandoned placer pit for example), creep across that bedrock and investigate every signal or disturbance.

Small coils are great for close to the surface gold, and for target separation (if trash is near, they'll let you hear the gold next to it). Big coils are for covering ground and going deep. But, with any coil, you need to overlap your sweeps, and you need to keep the coil parallel to the ground throughout your sweep. Memorize this. Go slow on highly mineralized bedrock, or on bedrock that's produced good gold. Memorize this too.

Mono coils hunt in a cone-shaped pattern and go deeper in milder soils. They require more overlapping of your sweep. DD coils hunt in a blade pattern, and you still need to overlap your sweep, but not as much. Monos are noisier and more susceptible to hotrocks and ground mineralization, but not as sensitive to electrical interfernce. DD coils ignore more hotrocks, but don't go as deep in milder soil, but do have more depth in extreme conditions. Once again, there are tradeoffs and benefits.

Never be a serious nugget hunter without monos and dd's. You need both, and you'll need different sizes of both.

All coils have a sweet spot, a place where they are most sensitive. To find that sweet spot, put a target on dead ground (no other signal) and learn where the sweet spot is on your coil as you go back and forth, front to back over the target. The spot will be different for different coils and for different manufacturers’ coils.

On a different topic related to pinpointing targets, test the nose, and the edge of your coils (edge perpendicular to the ground, and the nose sometimes too). They are often supersensitive and can really help you to pinpoint a target with ease.

Pulse machines ignore most hotrocks. If a pulse machine manufacturer says they ignore all hotrocks it's BS. But, they sure make life wonderful when you're in an area littered with hotrocks as you'll soon be able to quickly ID the hotrocks by sound or visually. That saves you a ton of time.

Pulse machines will also allow you to find nuggets in extreme ground where VLF’s just die.

I've rambled long enough, but always remember that you need an excellent set of headphones too; don't forget that. If you do, you'll flat out miss those disturbances and bumps that are so critical to investigate.

A big thanks to Jim for his input.


All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

All the best,

Lanny

 

[63bkpkr]

In California that is a nice 'fixer-upper'! Somebody went to a lot of trouble to build that place and haul in a bed frame. Either they just loved being "back in there" or they had a good reason for all that work. And thank you for the pictures and the ramble though it really was not rambling it was sharing more of your hard won knowledge...................63bkpkr

 

[Lanny in AB]

In California that is a nice 'fixer-upper'! Somebody went to a lot of trouble to build that place and haul in a bed frame. Either they just loved being "back in there" or they had a good reason for all that work. And thank you for the pictures and the ramble though it really was not rambling it was sharing more of your hard won knowledge...................63bkpkr

That bedspring has had a bunch of repairs if you look closely, and it's had at least one modification. I'll bet it was a doozy to pack in to where it is now. That's some awful tough country back in there. No roads at all. But, I guess if you were a miner that was going to be living there, it must have been worth the pack trip through the timber to get it in.

The cast iron stove must have been a real charmer to get in there too. I've got a picture of the rest of it somewhere too. Maybe they used pack mules that had some good tree smarts so they wouldn't get hung up in the timber on the trip in with that stove.

All the best, and thanks for dropping in my friend,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html

 

[Lanny in AB]

A note on crevices:

When I was way up north, many hours from anywhere, I noticed an old set of workings. Of course, I went over to investigate.

Someone quite a while back had most likely used a small cat (D-4?) to work the side of a bench as far in as they could go against the bank. There was bedrock at the bottom of the cut, but the boulder clay wall of the bench was just too high for them to work more of a cut than about forty feet long, for the boulder clay rose sharply on either end. There was a bit of a drop in the middle, and that's where they worked back into the bank until they could go no farther.

The width of the cut was only about fifteen feet, but the entire cut was bedrock based. I know this is hard to believe, but as I was to heck and gone that day, I didn't have my detector with me because I'd left it back in camp, but I did have my sniping tools with me in my backpack.

I have a good quality backpack that's wide enough to fit a couple of gold pans, my chisels and other sniping tools, a small sledge, some water, bug spray, snacks, first-aid kit, matches, small sewing kit, leather gloves, knife, small coil of wire, tape, rubber gloves, magnifying loupe, and knee pads.

Well, I started poking around and noticed that right back where the bedrock met the boulder clay, there was very irregular bedrock buried under a layer of clay. By irregular I mean that it had swirls and bumps that created pockets. So, I decided to clean some pockets out. I got zero gold, as the other miners had probably cleaned the bedrock carefully, and all that was in the pockets was garden variety clay. But I'd learned the year before to scrape hard along the bottom of all pockets and crevices to see if there was any softer material in the bottom. That technique had led to some nice pickers.

I was using an angled screwdriver at that time, and the flat part of the 90 degree bend dropped on one side on the return stroke of a hard scrape. I got a smaller sniping tool and scraped where the edge had dropped. The smaller tool went deeper. It was a very tight fit, but it kept going down and the material coming from the crack was a very different color from the tan color of the boulder clay I'd removed from the pocket earlier. It was much darker, and very dry.

I kept at it and all at once, I broke through and the sniping tool dropped several inches. I widened the crack as much as I could, but I was in some kind of iron hard rock, and the chisels I had with me (I have since bought a quality mason/concrete chisel) would not let me widen it any more. I opened it enough to get the angled crevicing screwdriver into the hole.

I could wiggle the angled driver around in the hole. There was a little pocket there, much wider in diameter than the small opening I'd been able to make. I used my crevicing tool like a little shovel and pulled up all of the material that I could. The material coming out of the pocket was a deep purple color, and some of it was right black. I'd never seen anything like it before (I've since found it in other old, virgin crevices). Furthermore, all of the material was wet and sticky. So, whatever was in that pocket had been sealed off long, long ago, as the top of the crack was tight and dry.

I took the material, which only amounted to about a third of a cup and put it in my pan. I made the short hike through the dense, tangled Alders to the creek (crashing through thick brush is never any fun). I put some water in the pan and started mashing and moving the material around. There were lots of little rounded stones under my fingers!

For those of you that know, those little rounded rocks are a good sign. For those of you that don't, it means that if the crevice, at whatever stage in its dim past, had allowed small stones in, it could also let chunks of gold in.

I kept mashing the material around on the bottom of the pan to release the stones and other pieces of material from the purple and black stained clay.

When I made my first cut with the water from the front to the back of the pan, I instantly saw chunks of gold! It was everywhere.

By the time I was finished cleaning that little pocket, I had a quarter of an ounce of coarse gold. Even the small bits were chunky.

That was my last day there as we left the far north the next day.

The following year when I went back to check on the spot, it had been opened up with big machinery and mined out! I made the mistake of telling one of the locals where I'd found the gold.

Oh well, lesson learned.

The tip here is to investigate pockets, crevices, and cracks to make sure they aren't just camouflaged and jammed shut with tightly packed materials. Work pockets and crevices hard until you know if there's any material that will yield and allow for further investigation. The other thing to keep in mind as a tip is that the opening was much, much smaller than the cavity below the opening. Don't be fooled by the size of the opening.

On a different note, in a different area, I learned that crevices can sometimes be cemented shut with material that is so hard, it's just as hard or harder than the mother rock! But, that's a different story altogether, yet something to keep in mind as I retrieved multi-gram nuggets from a bunch of cemented crevices like that. (The sniping tools were of no use on those occasions as it was the metal detector that led me to the cemented crevices, not scraping and scratching with sniping tools.)

If you ever have the opportunity to check bedrock that's been placer mined, always scrape the bedrock. You'll be amazed at the crevices and cracks that will turn up, especially when there's a thin coating of clay on what appears to be solid rock. Many times it is not solid; it just looks like it is. Moreover, the scraping technique may just lead you to a sassy little pocket with some sassy gold.

All the best,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html

 

[Lanny in AB]

All the best,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html

 

[KevinInColorado]

Great story, thanks for sharing!

 

[Lanny in AB]

Great story, thanks for sharing!

Thanks for dropping in Kevin! Always great to hear from you.

All the best,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html

 

[Lanny in AB]

I posted this in response to a fellow prospector that had some questions about detecting; moreover, he's still trying to find his first nugget.

Keep at it and the nugget will come. It seems like after you get that first one, the next one always seems to come easier for some reason.

I remember how long I went before I found my first nugget. I'd dug untold buckets of trash: canslaw, a wide variety of lead from bullets of various calibers, pieces of wire (iron and copper), boot tacks (steel and brass), casings (rifle and shotgun), BB's (from birdshot to buckshot), meat tin keys made of lead, electrical bits and pieces of fittings, blasting caps, and the list goes on and on. (I've cleaned lots of forest land too!)

The problem with some of the objects from the previous list of finds was that many items were highly conductive, so they made the right sounds, and they weren't magnetic either while I was in the recovery process. In other words, they behaved like a piece of gold would when you're hunting in all metal mode (with no discrimination), and they passed the proper early tests right up until I'd visually ID'd them.

On that "hundreds of useless items" journey, I'm not even sure why I kept at it except that I'd read so much about finding a nugget that I believed if I stuck to it long enough, I'd eventually overcome the odds and actually find a chunk of gold.

By the way, that's exactly what happened. I finally beat the odds. However, on the day I found my first nugget, I'd dug yet another bucket of trash with a high number of those finds passing the early tests (the right sounds, non-magnetic, being in an area where coarse gold and nuggets had already been found), but when I finally finished quartering the lump of dirt that passed the same early tests that day as I've already mentioned, instead of having the wrong item in my hand, there was a beautiful, sassy, thick nugget the size of my thumbnail resting in the palm of my hand.

I'll never forget that moment, that magical first moment, and neither will you.

As far as a detector goes, you don't need a pulse machine if you have a good, dedicated VLF gold machine. The research is on your side as the engineers have put together a machine with the right electronics to get the job done by "seeing" through the mineralization in gold bearing area by having the circuitry to balance the ground properly.

I have buddies with many pounds of nuggets each that hunt exclusively with VLF machines. For if the ground is cooperative enough to allow a gold-programmed VLF to hunt, the detector will find the nuggets and find them well. By way of clarification, you don't need a pulse machine unless you're hunting extreme ground. Even if there's a large number of hotrocks, you can still learn what the negative and positive ones sound like, and often, you can learn what more than a few of them look like as well.

In answer to the question, how often should you ground balance, it depends on how often or how quickly the ground minerals are changing. I hunt in transition areas (sometimes it's different types of bedrock, or different pockets of mineral concentrations) where the ground conditions change very quickly, and often, it requires frequent ground balancing. However, I hunt in areas where you can go for long periods that seldom require ground balance changes. It all depends.

As for your threshold, it should be a quiet hum in your ear. Many pros say it should sound like the soft buzz of a mosquito. You have to have a quiet, constant threshold or you can't hear when the threshold breaks with a subtle disruption. It's when you investigate those disruptions that you'll find whether it's ground mineralization or a real target.

If you have auto ground balance and you don't outpace your machine's electronics by moving too fast, the machine should keep up to the minerals so that they won't be falsing your threshold level. Often when you're hunting nuggets, the only tipoff you'll get will be that tiny break in the threshold. So, yes, you'll be investigating many of those breaks or bumps, but eventually one of them will be a nugget. Many beginners make the mistake of thinking they need a solid signal or they won't investigate. I'm convinced that's why I find nuggets in areas that are "worked out". I go slow where nuggets have been found, and I investigate those breaks.

By investigating that doesn't mean that I dig every bump or whisper. Many times I'll quickly scrape the surface with my boot and then scan again. Often, that's all it takes and the signal disappears. Other times, with the boot scrape, the signal will firm up. That requires another scrape, or I may use the pick to scrape a thicker layer of dirt off. All of these actions happen quickly or I'd never cover any ground, and if the signal continues to strengthen, I'll keep digging until I find out what's generating the positive response. Sometimes it's hotrocks. Sometimes it's concentrated pockets or lumps of mineralization. Other times it's strange things like burned items, or it's bedrock heavy in iron or lead. But, if you don't go, you'll never know.

The longer you're at the process, the faster your brain will help you filter the various small sounds you'll hear as well, until you've trained it to listen for subtle differences that matter. It's rather difficult to explain how you get to that point, but it requires a bit of advanced training and programming for the brain. Furthermore, it only comes after many hours of trial and error while out in the field.

One other thing to remember, if you're hunting with a mono, you'll need to overlap your swings more than with a DD. Don't be afraid you're not covering as much ground with a mono if you're in a known nugget area, be afraid you might miss a nugget instead.

By the way, don't worry about being as good as anyone else, just keep at it until you are good enough.

You'll find that first nugget by swinging that detector smarter, not necessarily by swinging it longer. But, you will have to put in the time, however long that detecting time may be.

Hang in there and one day you'll have your own nugget story to share with others.

All the best,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html

 

[Lanny in AB]

For the Rookies: Mine dumps.

If the you look up the thread a few pages, you'll see a Rocky Mountain Sheep sitting on top of a pile of dirt.

Something should stand out about that pile of dirt.

It's not the same color as the hill in the background. In fact, it's not the same color as any of the surrounding rock either. (That color shift is because the dirt the sheep is on came from within the mountain where the minerals had either not been weathered like the surrounding rocks, or they were taken from a series of veins within the mountain where there was a much higher concentration of mineralization.)

From way across the valley, at a lower elevation, that pile of dirt stands out.

So, when you're in a new area to do some prospecting, take a look at the mountainsides in any valley you're prospecting. As well, if you're in a hilly area, and you see piles of dirt that are a different color from the surrounding dirt, or piles of dirt that don't seem to fit, take notice.

What you may be seeing is dirt from a prospect hole (where the Oldtimers dug down several feet to perhaps depths factored by multiples of ten). The Sourdoughs would dig prospect holes in an area where they'd see signs that led them to believe there was good looking mineralization in the area.

If the piles you're seeing are prospect holes, and you're in an area where good gold was running, see if you can get permission to detect those piles. As the Oldtimers didn't have metal detectors, they sometimes threw out nuggets on their way down during their tests. And yes, I have found nuggets that way. It only makes sense if you think about it as they were all about visual inspection and either dry or wet panning was there only method to test the dirt they pulled from the prospect holes.

The large pile the Sheep is on is a huge tailings pile from a hardrock mine that produced galena and silver.

The only reason I made the trip up that mountain was because I knew the tailings pile very near the peak of that mountain indicated there'd been a mine there, and I'd noticed the spot while prospecting the opposite side of the valley one day.

If you're in an area where poor mining records were kept, as in this particular area, a tailings pile may be the only indicator you'll ever find to let you know there was a mine in the area, especially if recovery work was done to blast the portals closed and then reclaim them. In fact, that's exactly what happened with this site: poor records were kept for the area and the portals were reclaimed. Plus the fact that unless you were on one of the trails far on the other side of the valley, you'd never know the dump was there.

On the way up to this site, I discovered where the original mining camp was, and that area was full of very cool mining artifacts. (They are all still there, by the way. I'm not in to hauling home mining artifacts. I'd rather leave the area as a natural mining museum for others to discover the wonder of on their own.) The old buildings are all being reclaimed by the mountain, but a lot of ingenious, and inventive objects remain (up the mountain that far, any supplies were a terribly long ways away; moreover, it's a very long trip to any settlement of any size as well), objects the miners had to build to keep things operating.

Tailings piles also offer opportunities for specimen collection either by visually inspecting the cast away ore for less valuable minerals, or more importantly, by electronically testing the cast offs with a metal detector for valuable ores. Our 21st century metal detectors can easily ID ore that's rich in metal that was invisible to the Sourdoughs that could only tell what the surface of the sample was relaying to their eyes or what the weight of the stone in their hands was conveying to their senses.

So, keep those eyes open for unnatural piles of dirt when in mining company. Some of them may be very overgrown as well, but as you train your eyes to see things that are out of place or slightly different from the surrounding topography, you may get good enough to finally begin to recognize them. Furthermore, if they're not overgrown, you'll have an easier time of recognizing them, but at least now you'll know what you're looking at, or you'll know what to look for. Moreover, you may just be rewarded with a sassy nugget or two.

All the best,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html

 

[Professional Miner]

Lots of great insight and tips on this thread...while I didn't read each one, the several I did read showed me some good things for prospectors to remember and tools to use. So, if I am duplicating someone else's tip, sorry for that in advance...

One of my best prospecting tools, when working a current day river system verses a high dry channel, is visit the areas of the river you plan to explore...visit these areas during major storms of the winter...take a good video camera (not a phone cam) with good zoom capabilities....and video tape lots of the river when its angry and at high water....yes its inconvenient, yes you'll get wet...yes it a real pain....but make several winter trips during heavy storms....so when you come back in the summer, when the water is 10 ft lower now, and is no longer angry...you can compare your video from the winter trips during high angry water to what you see now...you'll be surprised with that video how well you'll be able to "read" the river...you will find more gold...you'll most likely dig in more productive areas.

Good luck to all,

Professional Miner...

 

[Lanny in AB]

Lots of great insight and tips on this thread...while I didn't read each one, the several I did read showed me some good things for prospectors to remember and tools to use. So, if I am duplicating someone else's tip, sorry for that in advance... One of my best prospecting tools, when working a current day river system verses a high dry channel, is visit the areas of the river you plan to explore...visit these areas during major storms of the winter...take a good video camera (not a phone cam) with good zoom capabilities....and video tape lots of the river when its angry and at high water....yes its inconvenient, yes you'll get wet...yes it a real pain....but make several winter trips during heavy storms....so when you come back in the summer, when the water is 10 ft lower now, and is no longer angry...you can compare your video from the winter trips during high angry water to what you see now...you'll be surprised with that video how well you'll be able to "read" the river...you will find more gold...you'll most likely dig in more productive areas. Good luck to all, Professional Miner...

That is a great tip, and it's one that every serious prospector that's going to be working a particular stretch of stream should use.

I've done this before, and one off season, I visited a place I'd always wanted to test. The river was running so high that large boulders were bouncing down the river pounding along the bedrock. You could feel the vibrations running up through the bedrock where we were standing on the dry side of the river. It was quite the experience.

Regardless, we took lots of still pictures and video of the event.

When we went back later to prospect, the river didn't remotely look like it had during the flood. By looking at the pictures we were able to identify where traps would have been at high water. One of those traps was directly across the river where all of that bedrock was exposed.

I had my wetsuit and snorkeling gear, so I went across to investigate.

The important thing to remember is that during regular stream flow, there was nothing remarkable about the place I was going to check. But during flood stage, there were trees smashing into that spot, then spinning away, and the water was really cutting back on itself in that spot. At regular stream flow, there was only a gentle little run of water dropping over the bedrock. It was not remarkable in any way whatsoever.

However, when I snorkeled over there, the sunlight was cutting down from directly overhead putting lots of light on that black bedrock. Two nuggets, about eight inches apart, were jammed into the bedrock cracks! All I had to do was to pry them out. It was some of the easiest gold I ever recovered, but without the offseason recon., I never would have thought to have looked in that spot as it was not on an inside bend, etc.

By the way, that just goes to show that gold really is where you find it. However, I'd have never found it without the extra work put in during flood stage.

All the best, and thanks for your input,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html

 

[Lanny in AB]

This is a bit of an add on to my post about mine dumps and test piles or throwout piles.

If you have a decent gold detector, always, always check throwout piles that you find, ones where the Sourdoughs were active. A test pit produces a test pile or a throwout pile: these piles were made when the Oldtimers were digging down through placer run or using a pick and bar to run a test in hardrock. Either way, the material they threw out was stacked in a pile.

Now, and this is a fact, as they were working by hand and testing their samples with either water or running them dry, there was no way they could know what was in every shovelful of dirt they were tossing out. As a result, and there's no way they ever intended this to happen, sometimes when testing placer, they would dig right through a pay layer on their way down to whatever test level they felt they needed to dig to. So, they sometimes threw nuggets right into those throwout piles!

When they were hardrocking, the same results occurred. They'd sometimes throw out a nice chunk of rock laced with gold, unknowingly of course.

Hey, they did what they could, and many of them were very good at it, but they didn't have the advantages we have today with top of the line metal detectors that can "see" into those throwout piles to discover what they chucked out.

Always remember that you can rake those piles down as well so that you can detect every bit of the pile. The same tactic works with drywash piles in the desert. My buddy Doc from Vegas showed me how to do that when he took me to the desert in Arizona to chase some gold. His efforts paid off with a gorgeous nugget that had gone right over the screens of an old drywasher.

There were drywash piles all over the place on those claims in Arizona. I couldn't believe how many of them there were. Some were low down close to the bottom of the washes, and many were up on the sides of the hills, and some were on the very crests of the hills as well.

The hardened miners running those drywashers weren't trying to throw gold out either, but they were trying to make their work efficient and easier, and that's why they used a screen to classify their dirt. (They knew they'd lose some bigger gold, but the majority of the gold was small, so it was worth the risk.) However, because they used the screen, nuggets that were larger than the holes went sliding off into a discard pile. If they'd had metal detectors, I'm sure they'd have checked those piles each and every time.

Nonetheless, here's an interesting fact. I know a gal that gets lots of nuggets metal detecting. She loves to go to workings where people have been highbanking, especially where they've been using buckets and screens to classify their material before they highbank it. Of course, you've probably figured out what she does. She asks permission to go through their throwout piles when they're done. She gets plenty of nice pieces of gold and nuggets this way, especially where people have been screening dirt that's a bit muddy. Moreover, she gets the nuggets that are too big for the holes in the classifiers too!

So, it's not just the Sourdoughs that were throwing out gold. Modern day prospectors are still doing the same thing.

I know a guy that always, always checks his classified piles with his detector when he's highbanking.

Everyone should.

All the best,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html