Ha! Ha! So it would seem that detecting in the goldfields of the Southwest suits you right down to the ground Steve!!! No surprise there and the best part is that you ought to be able to hunt year-round.
My autumn prospecting turned out well… less silver than usual, but all good quality. Most of the best finds were made during the last week… this is getting to be a habit for me. A lot of small silver at one to fifteen oz range totaling maybe twenty lbs… haven’t weighed it yet, largest piece slightly over ten lbs, and a half-dozen keepers between two and five-and-a-half lbs.
The five-and-a-half lb chunk was my favorite find. I’d spent the entire day digging “good” Infinium hi-low signals to find all manner of trash… particularly flattened iron, some quite deep. Some might suggest a VLF was called for in such trashy environs, but I persisted with Infinium because of the diabase background, and just plain like using that unit for silver. With dusk approaching fast, the coil swept a wide, loud… obviously shallow… signal that couldn’t possibly have been overlooked by others… so it had to be iron. Digging away expecting iron trash any minute Steve… I rechecked the hole (with the 8” loop attached… all I could handle as I damaged my shoulder) and there was no signal. Whipping out my Propointer I swept it across the diggings and it sang out with a steady hum over a good-size, dirty rock. I briskly rubbed the surfaces with my leather glove, took a look… and was astonished. I held in my hand what was undoubtedly as rich and pure a moderately large native silver specimen as I’ve ever seen… a real tripmaker!! Just enough calcite to accent the massive silver… perfect!!
Some hunters become frustrated with digging endless iron trash but no silver… and leave such sites for supposed “better pickings” elsewhere. I hold that trashy sites are a good thing… otherwise the detectable silver would soon all be gone. It took many years of experience to learn persistence and build confidence that the silver is there… all you have got to do is use some imagination and elbow grease to find it. So I’ve learned to take the iron trash philosophically as all part of the day’s work… and never even consider becoming discouraged by it. What silver isn’t found today will be found another day.
Additionally… I finally managed to find a large, two-inch-thick heavy red erythrite encrusted-on-cobalt vein with scattered native silver throughout… attached to pink granite… slightly under 42 lbs. This is something I’ve wanted for many long years… definitely museum quality. Plus I finally got a good crystalline specimen of arsenopyrite without any silver, cobalt, or nickel mixed into the matrix… my brother let me have it. No photos available yet, hoping to clean some samples out in the patio over the next few weeks if the weather will cooperate… maybe do a quick non-technical write-up to post here sometime in the new year.
The weather was mostly warm and sunny right up to the last week… when it turned miserably wet and cold. Had blazing campfires every night... went through two cords of firewood this autumn, plenty of visitors, and altogether had a memorable time. Even got out with “
cryptic” here on the forum… and found some nice examples of very large crystalline garnet and many other interesting minerals.
I look forward to and enjoy every aspect of prospecting more than words can say… there is no doubt in my mind that we share that sentiment fully. All the very best moving forward...
Jim.
