Prospecting Tales

[Lanny in AB]

Prospecting stories, tips, a few poems on gold hunting, and all are about chasing the gold. Just fly past the poems if you'd rather read stories.

The Tale of Sourdough Sue

It’s time for the tale of Sourdough Sue,
A right salty gal she was, through and through.
She’d followed the strikes all over the west,
And chasin’ the gold was what Sue liked best.

As summer was fadin’ there came word to her
A rush was a hapnin’, for certain, for sure
Yes, gold had been found, big nuggets, coarse flakes
“I’m goin’”, said Sue, “Whatever it takes.”



It seems in Montanny they had them a strike
And word of a rush, them gold diggers like.
So Sue grabbed her gear and loaded her mules
With beans, bacon, flour and stout minin’ tools

At last she was ready to head on up north
Sue knew t’would be tough, but still she set forth.
Why, week after week it was lonely and cold,
But Sue couldn’t shake the lure of that gold.

The weather degraded the farther she went
The storms she encountered seemed not heaven sent
The trek was slow, the wind howled in the trees
The snow was so deep Sue wished she’d brung skis.



Them passes was chokin’ with oodles of snow
The air in them mountains was forty below
Now Sue weren’t no Pilgrim, but this here was tough
The sun had skedaddled, and things were plumb rough.



Sue needed a spot to ride out that storm
A shelter and fire to get herself warm
Well, off in the spindrift she spied her a light
To Sue there weren't never a more welcome sight.

A cabin it was, for certain, for sure
The warmth that it offered was likely a cure
For cold toes and fingers with needle-like pains
(Escape from that storm didn’t take many brains.)

The cabin was home to one Hook-Nosed Bob Brown
His spirits was up, for they never was down.
As looks weren’t his strong suit, Bob’d loaded his mind
With right clever sayin’s from book quotes he’d find.



Now Sue came a stumblin’ from out of that storm
And Hook-Nosed old Bobby just turned on the charm
He sat Suzie down, right close to the heat
Then went to his stable—those mules got a treat,

Bob stripped off their harness, their cold heavy packs
He rubbed them right down with dry gunnysacks
He broke out some oats, some sweet meadow hay
Then forked them some bedding where both mules could lay.

Then back to the cabin he flew off to check
How Sue was a doin’, but she’d hit the deck
A buffalo hide, she’d found near the bed
And close to the fire, she lay like the dead

Well Bob had read somewheres to let such things lie
(T’was somethin’ on canines, to wake them you’d die?)
So Bob settled in for the last of that night
While the storm shook the cabin with all of its might.

The mornin’ it came with a hushed quiet chill
The wind had died out, but the cold was there still.
Bob built up the fire, then snuck off outside
To check on those mules, who thanked him bright-eyed.

Then back to his cabin he sped to his guest
For Sue was a stirrin’, so Bob did his best.
He threw on some bacon, them beans got a stir
Whatever Bob did, he did it for her.

For up on the wall, on a peg near the fire,
A stockin' was hung! For what you enquire?
T’was Christmas of course, and Bob had desired
A gift from old Santa, just like he’d enquired.

Right here lay a woman, fresh in from the storm
And on Christmas eve, he’d made his place warm.
He’d trusted in Santa to grant him his wish
This Sourdough Sue was a right purty dish.

Well Sue and Bob bonded. His nose wasn’t right,
But Bob was so witty, it fled from Sue’s sight;
She saw there, instead of what others had seen,
The solid-gold-Bob that'd always there been.


So, this is the tale of Sourdough Sue
Who went in a rush to find gold, it’s true.
But Sue wasn't savvy to Nick’s crafty plan
To scoot her off northward to find there a man.

And just so you’re certain, so there's not a doubt
(I’m sure in your mind you’ve figured it out)
In Bob’s Christmas stocking, hung there on his wall
Was a note from old Santa explaining it all.


All the best,

Lanny

 

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[rivets]

Lanny ... good day to you ... being brand new to metal detecting which it would be fair to say I know nothing apart from switching my machine on and off and digging at bleeps ... I would most appreciate it if you could refer me to a "condensed" tutorial with regard to "How to find a pay streak in a river/placer with ones detector" ... as in fine flood gold + pickers


About a month back I read several hours of your eloquent writings ( a treasure in itself ) but of late bean concentrating on my hi banker/2" sniper dredge build ... so little time ... anyway not to go on ... just to say thanks as I have learned heaps from your posts ... and so if you could point me in the direction I should travel

Thanx ... yours humbly rivets

 

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[Lanny in AB]

Lanny ... good day to you ... being brand new to metal detecting which it would be fair to say I know nothing apart from switching my machine on and off and digging at bleeps ... I would most appreciate it if you could refer me to a "condensed" tutorial with regard to "How to find a pay streak in a river/placer with ones detector" ... as in fine flood gold + pickers


About a month back I read several hours of your eloquent writings ( a treasure in itself ) but of late bean concentrating on my hi banker/2" sniper dredge build ... so little time ... anyway not to go on ... just to say thanks as I have learned heaps from your posts ... and so if you could point me in the direction I should travel

Thanx ... yours humbly rivets

Hi there. First, thanks for dropping in, and thanks for your generous compliments! I really appreciate you taking the time to let me know you enjoy them.

As for a condensed version on how to find a pay streak in a river/placer with one's detector, I'm not sure I'm aware of one.

There are other great people here on this site that might know of one, and they're certainly welcome to jump in here to provide you with the information you seek.

With fine gold, your best bet would be to have a detector that can accurately detect pockets or streaks of black sands as if it's the fine stuff you're after, it will likely be closer to the surface in a stream and it will be traveling with the usual suspects (black sands or larger pieces of magnetite), and if you've got a detector that likes to find deposits of black sands, you might save a whack of time through locating hot spots.

Other than that, I hope someone else jumps in with a handy guide.

All the best, and thanks again,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

The Island.

Well, this story doesn't have anything to do with a traditional island, at least not in the sense of one with a sandy beach fringed by palm trees surrounded by ocean. This story of the island is about a flooded section of bedrock that was once placered for gold, an area within a highly restricted claim that required hard-to-come-by permission to nugget shoot.

I'd passed by the spot on that claim before while hunting adjacent ground and thought about wading out to try my luck, but the flooded ground had deeper, dark pockets, boulders, and lots of uneven ground that made for dicy wading in the muddy waters of the earlier summer rains. But, a lack of rain later in the hotter months had cleared up the visibility allowing me to see and map the bottom much easier.

The island itself consisted of one small section of bedrock that stood a couple of feet higher than the surrounding bedrock I've mentioned all drowned in icy water issuing from springs somewhere deep in the mountain.

However, before I could start detecting, I had to get out to the island. This required some delicate wading with my mining boots, careful the whole time that I didn't set my foot wrong on a loose rock or step into one of those dark holes to fill my boots. Nevertheless, I made it with socks dry to the elevated bedrock, the highest point being on the south end. The bedrock was slate, red and tan mostly, not that the color particularly tells a person anything about its ability to hold or trap the gold, but what I really liked about it when I looked around was that there were lots of natural traps in the bedrock, with cracks surrounding, underlying, and spidering off from those traps.

I'd packed with me the usual sniping tools, two gold pans, a sucker bottle, my blue Estwing mining pick,my little Falcon MD-20 for sniffing gold from tiny traps, and the Gold Bug Pro to scan the larger, lower section that sat just above the water running all the way to the north end where the island pinched out. (If you're thinking this island was big enough for development, don't waste your imagination's energy. The whole chunk was only about twice the size of an average garden shed, but I always remind myself that when it comes to finding gold, the size of the ground to be searched isn't always an indicator of possibility. What the detectors tell me is much more valuable as is what my eyes tell me about the ability of the mother rock to capture the gold.)

I pulled out the Falcon first and set to checking the multitude of little pockets that ran down the slope from the highest point trending toward the flatter, lowest section. Almost instantly I got a positive signal. Now, the Falcon is not a complicated detector. On most hot rocks it blanks as you approach a hot rock and "boings" as you move away. If it's metal (iron or otherwise), the machine emits a signal that gets louder as you approach a target then holds steady as you keep the head of the probe over the object. I couldn't see anything, but there was definitely a positive signal. So, I dug in my carrying bag and got out a pry bar that's great for working open cracks, prying up loose pieces of bedrock, and prying off parallel sections. As I've mentioned, there were lots of cracks around those pockets and a nice piece the size of a couple of silver dollars popped right out. I scanned again and this time got multiple signals.

I scooped out the clay and small particles with a sturdy spoon from the carry bag and plopped the contents into a pan. A quick pan later, three nice pickers appeared. I decided I'd do a rapid scan of that entire descending piece of pockety bedrock, and I got signals on and off all the way to where the bedrock started to flatten out. I had no idea if they were gold or bits of steel, but I went to work with the pick and bar and worked off any loose bedrock I could then scoop and scrape all of the residual material into my pan. Booyah!! Stars in the heavens all over in that black universe of magnetite! Lots of small pickers running with all kinds of flake gold, lots.

I kept at that scan, pop and crack system until I could no longer get any positive response. By the way, this involved lots of rescanning after I'd pop out the loose chunks of bedrocks or after I'd pry off a section of bedrock that was weakened by a crack. And, on the rescans, I'd often find targets down too deep to ID on the first pass, but that's because the Falcon is not a depth machine by any stretch of the imagination. As to why I wasn't using the Bug Pro, I couldn't get the coil into the little pockets! But, I did scan the entire slope (much like a mini-downhill ski run made of bedrock) with the Gold Bug after I'd finished with the Falcon to ensure I'd left no targets behind, and I did find a couple of laggers that were down deeper yet, but the take with the bigger detector was thin. The Falcon was the one that shone for that specialized purpose!

With the gold collected in the bottle, I went to work on the flat. The Gold Bug Pro got immediate hits, but there was metal (the wrong kind) everywhere! So, I pulled out the wand magnet and went to work. Hedgehog time! And again, more hedgehog decoration on the end of the magnet. After that, I went back to detecting. I'd like to say that I didn't dig any trash, but the clay clinging to the bedrock is a master at holding tiny bits of steel away from the draw of the magnet.


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I stared scanning again and got a hit right away that popped up in the 40 range! It was a great little nugget of just over two grams. I worked the bedrock until it went silent and by the time I was done, I had a nice collection of gold in the bottle, flakes, pickers, and nuggets. The biggest was only five grams, but the total weight back at camp was almost 16.5 grams! What a day, and the gold ranged from pancake flat to real character pieces. Man, did that fire me up!!


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That experience led me to a very similar location a couple of days later that exceeded this story's take, and once again, I had to make my way through a water hazard to get there.

All the best until then,

Lanny

 

[Terry Soloman]

I look forward to you putting all these stories in a book! I'll be first on line to get mine.

 

[Lanny in AB]

I look forward to you putting all these stories in a book! I'll be first on line to get mine.

Thanks for the encouragement Terry. When the day comes that I have the time to put a book together, I'll remember your kind words.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Ancient Troughs:

The day was warm, but the sizzling, dog-days of summer were long gone. It had taken until around eleven in the morning to get rid of the chill in the shade of the pine-covered slopes. The butterflies were long gone, the songbirds too, and only a solitary crow or the occasional hawk drifted across the cobalt blue sky of the mountain fastness that framed my view.

This late in the mining year, I finally had the green light to work some bedrock I’d wanted to get at all season. A lot of the bedrock was now covered in water, but there was one pie-shaped piece that was mostly dry. But before I relate the main part of my story, I need to back up a bit and say that I’d already had a shot at the surrounding area. The bedrock sat down in a sort of oblong bowl with steep walls on two sides. As seepage from the mountainside was steadily adding more water to drown the bedrock, I was eager to get detecting before the entire area turned into a duck pond, but I’d only got permission to detect around the rim of the bowl, not the base. Well, I’d found a few small nuggets on the rim, nothing over two grams in size, and the rest of the targets were the usual suspects: sharp shavings from excavator buckets. Oh, and I did find the tip of an old pick where an old working from the 1800’s intersected the modern-day dig. Those old boys had sunk a shaft down to bedrock through some nasty boulders, then tunneled about thirty feet along the bedrock before quitting. Moreover, as there was no evidence of a bedrock drain in the exposed excavation, they must have quit due to water problems, the same problem that was threatening to deny me a chance at working the bedrock I wanted to get at.

Well, as I’ve said, I finally had permission to detect the pie-shaped piece of bedrock. Most of it was a reddish color, with some tan to whitish colored bands running through it, and man was that bedrock hard. The bedrock was really torn up in some places where it would break, but in other spots, the bucket’s teeth had just skipped over and scraped the mother rock the best they could.

In spots like this you either get lucky, or you get almost nothing it seems. So, not knowing what to expect, I fired-up the Gold Bug Pro. I’d also packed in my Minelab 5000, but I left it in the bag to check the bedrock later after I’d worked it with the pro.

Off to side of the bedrock pie, I saw a little pocket that was half filled with water and thought I’d try that first. Immediately I got a signal. The pocket was about twice the size of my boot sole, so I was shocked to have got a tone so soon. The meter read iron, but that bedrock had ironstone all over the place, so that wasn’t out of the ordinary. I fished around in the hole with my wand-magnet, and it came out looking like a steel porcupine! I scanned again, but there was still a signal. I hit it again with the wand and this time some chunks of magnetite were on the magnet, but no more steel. So, I scanned again, and the signal still rang.

Well, I don’t know if you’ve chased targets in the water or not, but anything heavy drops as soon as you disturb it, so I decided that I’d build myself a little dam of sticky, heavy clay to stop the seepage from getting into that little pocket, and finding clay for that purpose was no problem. I got some nice gooey stuff and packed it all around the pocket, then I went to work with my scoop bailing out the water. I got the tip of the coil in the pocket and the meter jumped straight up in the 40 range. Well, it was something conductive, with a good chance of being gold. I scanned again and the reading on the meter held rock solid, no movement at all. Now, some hot rocks will ring up in that range, but they’ll often bounce around a bit when you scan back and forth or across the target from a different angle, but this target pinned that meter steady. I rooted around with the scoop and scanned the contents under the coil. There was a nice, solid sound and the meter still loved it too. It didn’t take long to isolate the target, a nugget that was just over a gram.

Because of that early success, I kept at that same spot for a while. It was where the bedrock had been broken, but it had left lots of little pockets that water was working its way into. I’d scan the pockets and if I got a signal, I’d build my clay dams and go to work bailing out the water so I wouldn’t have to worry about a target dropping deeper when I tried to dig it out. I spent close to an hour doing this and wound up with a nice catch of small nuggets in my bottle. I swirled the bottle close to my ear and heard the golden rumble of coarse gold.

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I worked some places that were under about six inches of water as well and found a few more small ones that I added to the bottle. Next, I went to work the part that was above water that ran back in a pie shape to the rim of the cut. This part was different from the broken bedrock. This bedrock was iron hard and there were bits of steel everywhere left as the bucket had scraped and skipped its way across the bedrock.

However, what interested me were the places where I could still see some clay. In most of these spots where the clay was visible, there were little troughs running anywhere from a foot to three feet in length. They were cupped and rounded, and some of them still had river stones in them. The top run of boulders and river run had been ripped off with as much bedrock as would fracture and sluff, but the troughs (from two to three inches deep, maybe three to four inches wide at maximum, with a maximum of five inches of depth in one spot) had escaped the efforts of the excavator buckets. (Maybe an ancient run under the looser, later-era bedrock?) I started to run my detector along one good looking trough but got nothing but bucket shavings that had been worked or transported into the mix.

I spotted another trough that ran at close to a 45-degree angle across one spot and decided I’d try it next. The first pass produced a broad signal. Now if you’ve read my earlier stories involving broad signals on bedrock, this detector effect got my interest mighty quick. I took out my light pick and carefully started to loosen every bit of material in the trough where the broad signal was. I scraped up every bit of material and put it in my gold pan. I scanned the pan and got a nice signal, so off I went to pan it out. What a great sight! Sassy, coarse gold in the pan!! The broad signal came from a family of pickers with several gram nuggets thrown in for fun. I couldn’t believe it. I scanned the trough where I’d removed the material and got a faint signal. I took my pick and bar and worked my way down. I scanned again and the signal was louder. I was finally able to break off a chunk of bedrock and it exposed a little pocket filled with clay and small river stones. I put everything in the pan and headed for water. Once again, coarse gold in the pan! I kept working the troughs, finding broad signals from time to time until the sun dropped behind the mountain. By that time, I could no longer get any signals with the Gold Bug Pro.

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So, before it got too dark to see, I fired up the GPX 5000 with a small sniper coil and went to work. Booyahh! Deeper gold in some troughs that the Gold Bug couldn’t see. My little bottle was heavy! I’ve got the data stripped from the pictures of that gold (that's why I can post them now), and it was the best day I’ve had in a long time, but the deal I made with the miners had me promise not to tell the weight of the gold, and I am happily living with that publication ban. Well, when I reported to the miners what I’d found, they put on a ripper tooth and took another three feet of bedrock, and they did very well indeed. Let’s just say it was worth it to them to tear their equipment up some . . .

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Hoser John]

Gold miners make it on bedrock. Just amazes me when folks leave it alone and stop. Just time for experienced miners to get r' done-looks great Lanny John

 

[Lanny in AB]

Gold miners make it on bedrock. Just amazes me when folks leave it alone and stop. Just time for experienced miners to get r' done-looks great Lanny John

I hear you all the way John. The top four feet of bedrock had already been taken, but obviously it just wasn't enough. They've learned more about the area now and will probably not make that mistake again, but those troughs were very unusual: they're still a bit of a mystery to me, being down that deep in the bedrock. I guess no one ever knows all of things Mother Nature was up to in the dim past.

I remember a spot I worked once where everything was flopped upside down! The coarse gold (with chunks of galena and magnetite) was on the top of a layer of sand with a thick layer of rock above it, that's right, above it. The sand went down for six feet with no pay under it.

As for that piece of bedrock I worked last season, I feel lucky to have had a shot to hunt a spot like that, plus I've made some new friends in the mining sector now as well. Who knows where that could lead . . .

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Jeff95531]

They want ounces and we want grams. Can't think of a more perfect union.

 

[Lanny in AB]

They want ounces and we want grams. Can't think of a more perfect union.

Say Jeff, good to hear from you again; it's been a while.

Thanks for dropping in, and all the best as you chase that west-coast gold,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Return to The Gold Fields, 2020

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. (My son also panned out just over 2.5 grams of gold from some virgin dirt we took back for him, so over 16 grams from that spot.)

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

 

[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

 

[Lanny in AB]

​Catch and Release Gold

Did something the end of the summer season I haven't done before.

I went to visit a friend of mine that runs a large placer operation.They had made a cut 70 feet deep to bedrock, and they'd piled the dirt up near their huge washplant to be processed. After the large run was finished, there was a small pile of pay left on the big area they'd scraped to push up the remainder of the piled paydirt.

My friend told me to take my detector over to the pile to have a bit of fun. I was shocked by his offer, but of course, I giddy-upped to the site and started swinging my detector. Within minutes I had my first repeatable good signal that was pinning at 40 on the Bug Pro. Using my Garrett Carrot, I'd soon pinpointed a nice, flat nugget in the pile.

I kept working my way around the pile, up and over the pile, and worked my way carefully all the way around the bottom of the pay-pile. In this way, I recovered 5 sassy nuggets, which was much like shooting fish in a barrel, but way more fun.

However, my gold fever brain kept nudging me to try to the scraped area around the pile, a much larger undertaking, so I headed out into the wilderness of flatness . . .

About ten feet out from the pile, I got a good signal under a rock about twice the size of my fist. At least, that's what I thought. But, when I levered the rock out (which was a hot rock), the signal was more to the front of the rock (as it faced the direction of the pay pile). The hot rock had been distorting the signal.

I scanned the hole again where the rock had been, and sure enough, the signal was coming from the area described above, and its signal was pinning in the 60 range on the digital display of the Bug Pro. I used the Garrett Carrot to pinpoint the signal, and it sure came back nice and loud! Moreover, I could see the edge of the nugget.

I reached down at the tip of the Carrot and pulled out a flat and sassy nugget of just under six grams! (The flatness was likely why it read so high on the digital meter.)

I kept working the scraped area and recovered another three nuggets, so by the time the rain hit to stop the party, I'd pulled out nine sweet nuggets in total, weighing in at over a third of an ounce.

It was a fun way to spend a couple of hours.

Of course there were lots of bits of steel blade and track shavings, but the gold was consistent due to the loaded nature of the area I was working.

I made my way over to my friend's truck to show him what I'd found, and he was surprised that I'd found the biggest nuggets in the scraped area, and he assured me they would sure scrape deep before they were finished with the pay-pile area.

I decided to give him all nine of the nuggets, even though he wanted me to keep some of them, as he's been great to me over the years to let me detect on his claims wherever and whenever.

Fun, fun catch and release day.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Gold Monster Outing

Went to the gold camp in the Rocky Mountains last week (summer, 2019). The weather was gorgeous, all kinds of songbirds back, plus the flowers of the mountain meadows are in full bloom, purple crocus and shooting stars, yellow buttercups, multi-coloured Johnny Jump-ups, etc., etc.

At the camp as I was checking over the living quarters (camper and two travel trailers), a humming bird buzzed straight past my right ear! That snappy racket from those wings going a million miles an hour is unmistakable. So, we set out the humming bird feeders hoping to catch a glimpse of the beautiful and dazzling red to orange coloured throat of the Roufus variety before they head farther north, and we’ll keep an eye out for the beautiful iridescent green of the more common ones that stick around all season.

My wife unpacked her shiny new Minelab Gold Monster, and for those of you familiar with the machine, there’s not much reading to do, but I watched a whack of user videos before we hit the mountains so I could give my little darlin’ some tips and guidelines as she set out to learn how to use it.

I picked a spot for her to try her luck on, an old fairly level place in a valley where some placer miners once had their wash-plant. The claim is now abandoned, last worked by some modern-day Chinese miners, but they left the area under a gloomy cloud, and I doubt they’ll ever be back.

I gave my June Bride some general instructions on how to run the Gold Monster (I’d never used one before, but the YouTube and other user-posted videos were a great help. Furthermore, I’d like to give a shout-out to Bill Southern for his wonderful educational efforts.). But, we figured the Monster out quite quickly, and that’s why I’m grateful to Steve Herschbach for recommending I get my sweetheart one due to its ease of use, and kudos to Steve and Jonathan Porter for their write-ups on the machine which helped me quickly get a handle on the basics; their input was invaluable.

By eye-balling the old site, I could tell pretty close to where the Chinese had pulled out their wash-plant, so I used that information to gauge where I’d have my wife start to detect as there are always some “spill” areas that offer a better shot at finding a nugget or two. Having said that, it was easy to see they had bladed and bucketed the area carefully after they were done to gather any spilled material; those miners were no greenhorns.

I blocked off in a rough rectangle an area I thought might pay, and right away, my wife was hitting targets, but they were almost all ferrous, so she kept experimenting toggling back and forth between discriminate and all iron, learning the different sounds, learning how to make it easier to ID targets (to get them to sound off louder), learning how to read the little bar graph when it gave its indication of non-ferrous more than ferrous, as well as getting used to the sounds of shallow vs. deeper targets, and learning how to use the magnet wand to save time while sorting trash signals. (To elaborate, she’s a great panner, but a green, green rookie when it comes to nugget shooting.)

The thing about detecting an old wash-plant set-up is that it gets very easy to quickly tell where the repairs (welds, patches, etc.) took place, and the numerous bits of welding rod sure make for some interesting sounds, and curious readings on the graph! Having said that, the Monster’s discriminator sure came in handy, and yes, depth was lost, but by using the small round coil, target separation was much better, and I was impressed at how my wife was able to move slowly from target to target, separating their locations, as she dug out signals.

While she was test-driving the Monster, I was going for a comfortable cruise with my Gold Bug Pro. That is one hot machine, at least mine is. (I’ve heard detecting folklore that some machines leave the factory “hotter” than others, and I have no idea it that’s true or not, but the one I have is a firecracker for sure, super sensitive, and a true gold hound for sniffing out gold from tiny flakes to meaty nuggets.)

I started to hit non-ferrous targets in one slice of her search area, so I marked a few so she could check them out. Well, those miners had liked their cigarettes, and there were plenty of crumpled bits of foil from the wrappers as well as some other kind of lead foil with a gold-coloured outer covering that made for some increased heartbeat, but only turned out to be a bust.

After having dug some of those duds, she called me over. “Hey, what do you think of this signal?”. She was getting a great reading on the Monster, and it sounded sweet too. She worked the ground for a bit chasing the target around with her scoop (when a target runs from the scoop, it’s usually something heavy, as most ferrous trash seems to hop quickly into the scoop). Dropping the dirt from the scoop onto the coil, she moved things around and there sat a pretty little picker, about a quarter of a gram! Man, was she pumped!!

So, she kept on working that rectangle while I ranged farther afield with the Bug Pro, and I too found all kinds of cigarette foil, and that maddening, thick lead foil with gold coloring--craziest stuff I’ve ever seen, and I have no idea what it originally contained. I recovered a small aluminum parts tag, several electrical connectors, bits of lead, and pieces of broken brass likely from a bushing of some kind.

My wife gave another shout, and over I went. Her meter was pinning consistently in the sweet zone, the signal sound nice and crisp. Capturing the target, she threw the dirt in a gold pan. Next, she then used the Garret Carrot to chase the signal around the pan. She moved some dirt then cried out, “Look at this. Is this gold?” At first, it was hard to tell what it was due to a covering of grey clay, but using a bit of water soon revealed a sassy nugget! If I’d thought she was excited about her first find, it was nothing compared to her reaction on that one!

I can only come to this conclusion: The Minelab Gold Monster is a sweet machine that sure produces sweet results, because it’s so easy to use, and it makes my sweetheart happy (couldn’t resist punning on sweet, forgive me).

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clay holds the gold . . . .

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Some recent finds.




A hand-made wooden wheel with an iron rim, pulled out of an old drift mine.

This wheel came out of a deep drift mine, one worked in the 1800's when they had to pack in all of their iron, thus the rim of the wheel only covered in iron.

 

[Lanny in AB]

Some of the summer of 2018's gold that started to add up.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[KevinInColorado]

Great to see you posting again sir!

 

[Lanny in AB]

A New Learning Curve

My son and I loaded up our blue mule (Dodge 3/4 ton diesel) and headed for the mountains this past Friday evening.

That meant we'd be doing part of the drive in the dark, and setting up camp in the dark, but when we're out chasing the gold, that's no hardship at all.

Early the next morning, we did an equipment check: gold pans, a bucket full of sniping equipment, a couple of picks, as well as several detectors. On our way to check freshly uncovered bedrock, we wanted to make sure we had what we needed.

My son had his Minelab X-Terra 705, a machine he's got about 600 hours on detecting for coins and jewelry (and he's done very well!), a machine I gave him a few years ago, but he's never used it to look for nuggets, so this trip would be a new learning curve for him.

The 705 is a machine that Minelab put a lot of extra technology inside for the price-point at the time, and it had sniffed out nuggets in the past, so I knew it would do the job on shallow to gold bedrock that wasn't super hot.

To leave camp that Saturday morning, we ignited the throaty roar of the diesel and left camp slowly, as in August the super-dry roads in camp are blanketed with fine clay dust that mushrooms a cloud of dust that goes everywhere.

When we hit the main forest service track, we opened it up a bit more, but the washboard condition of the gravel roads wouldn't let us go too fast without shaking the truck to its core.

Next, we hit the paved highway and made excellent time.

It was a glorious, windless day. The sky was completely cloudless, the ceiling of air a perfect cobalt blue, the pines and firs a deep green that contrasted beautifully with the flawless blue sky.

After seventy minutes, we finally arrived at the mine, this after leaving the highway then slowly navigating a logging road, one heavily rutted from recent haulage. The road included what the locals call "punchouts", places where the roadbed has been pounded through by logging trucks that leave dangerous soft sections. If you hit those sections at speed, the front end of your truck dives down deep and fast and you experience the "punch"! Then you come flying out. If you enter too slowly, and not in 4-wheel drive, you get stuck, so it's an ongoing challenge.

At the mine site, the owner was chatting with the vacuum truck crew, the group cleaning the bedrock for the next couple of days. After his meeting, he told us where we could work away from the vacuum crew, but he also wanted us to check their progress to see if any gold was being left behind. We did from time to time, and we directed them to spots where they'd left some gold.

To work the bedrock effectively, I made sure my son had a magnetic wand to deal with the never-ending bits of steel from the excavation. Moreover, with the bedrock super-hard once again (like last week), the magnet would clear the surface signals so the softer sounds of gold could be heard.

We fired up our detectors. I chose the Gold Bug Pro as I love the digital meter on shallow bedrock as an aid to ID'ing the gold. Moreover, for any iffy signal, a quick swipe with the magnet usually solves the puzzle, or some quick pick and magnet work either tells the tale or requires more investigation. Furthermore, in several cases where the meter read lower than gold, the nuggets were sitting among pieces of magnetite (ironstone) that skewed the digital reading, but once the magnet had removed the ironstone, the gold signal was nice and clear.

While I was collecting a nice catch of nuggets, my son was having some frustration with his detector due to all of the bits of steel, but he kept at it and at last he found two nuggets with the 705! Well, the dam burst after that, and he showed some innovation as well. When he'd get a signal that was strange, he'd quickly switch to discrimination, and if he got any positive response, he knew it might be a nugget. He kept toggling back and forth over the next couple of days to verify signals, and it worked out very well for him.

The bedrock we worked was often broken in sharp slabs, so we had to be very careful while walking over and through those troughs of iron-hard bedrock as the footing was bad. To slip would be to get a nasty cut, and luckily, we avoided any injury until the second day my son did a nice circular slice around his finger when he reached too quickly into a crevice to check out a signal.

In the bedrock, there were slabs of clay stuck to the sides of the troughs either where the excavator had broken chunks of bedrock out or where we used bars to pry apart sections. That sticky clay held the gold! Sometimes, after locating a target, we could see the gold stuck to the clay and only had to pry it out.

I scanned a section of bedrock where there was a deeper hole. The excavator had hit a soft spot within that super-hard bedrock, and at the end a bedrock rise, there was a small pile of channel stones. I got a cracking response that turned out to be a six gram nugget! We kept at it until it started to get dark, and by the time we headed up to the mine boss's trailer, we'd caught just over an ounce of nuggety gold.

The next day, I let my son go solo, and I only hung around to give him tips if needed. However, he did well fine tuning his own system of ID'ing targets by toggling back and forth from prospecting mode to discrimination. He kept gathering a nice collection of targets in the little orange bucket he threw his signals into. (Rather than take the time to visually ID each target, he'd throw them in the bucket so he could pan them all out at the end of the day.) As well, when he'd get a broad signal under the coil (which often indicates a concentration of flake gold), he'd scoop that dirt into the bucket as well.

As darkness closed on that last day, he panned out the dirt in his bucket. He'd caught half an ounce of sassy gold! That included a three gram nugget he'd found through determination. He was detecting a flat chunk of bedrock that held lots of steel signals, but he kept swiping them off with the magnet. Then he got a good sound right on the edge of the flat bedrock where it dropped off into a pocket of water. He worked the signal with his pick until he popped it out, and that was how he found his nice nugget! Without removing the steel shavings that produce such a nasty racket in the headphones, he'd likely have missed the nugget.

So, we got a 1.5 ounce bounce for those two days, but golden memories of a hunt together that will last a lifetime.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[delnorter]

Nice telling of a great outing with your son Lanny. What cherished moments these will be for both of you.

Mike