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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[Lanny in AB]

I'm sure I'm not the only guy to run into a meth lab or pot grow while prospecting in the hills. I've heard it's way less common these days but when your out by yourself in the forests or away from the normal paths watch your backs. Carry a gun if you can and a very good communication device. If I was not trained in being calm in a tough situation then it could have got ugly. Please guys if you don't have special training NEVER EVER APPROACH A METH LAB OR POT GROW they booby trap them and you could lose your life. Just walk out the way you came and as soon as your safe RUN. CALL THE POLICE OR WHOEVER AND DONT APPROACH ANYONE IN THE FOREST YOU FEEL WEIRD ABOUT.

Very solid, straight-shootin' advice.

Whenever we come across what even remotely looks like a pot-grow-op, we always give it a wide berth.

No gold is worth hitting a booby trap or getting shot.

Thanks so very much for your service, and I'm proud that the sacrifices you made to get your training helped get you through a very, very ugly situation safely.

All the best,

Lanny

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[Lanny in AB]

Drift Mine Part IV

Did I mention the bugs? I would be doing every would-be northern prospector a great disservice if I didn’t mention the bugs. The bugs are absolutely horrific, and that’s not hyperbole or over exaggeration for effect! The flying bloodsuckers have only one goal, to liberate your body of its blood supply. Moreover, the bugs come in an array of sizes too. Take horseflies, for instance. People say it’s an exaggeration that up north the horseflies are the size of cats or small dogs. That’s ridiculous. Anyone that’s ever tramped through the northern woods knows that the horseflies are way bigger than cats and dogs. Otherwise, how could two of them carry off a full-grown bull moose? Or, how could they flip a D-8 Cat over to drag out the operator that’s hiding underneath? The size of cats and dogs? What nonsense. Regardless of any myths you’ve heard, I just thought I should give you a heads-up about the real size of the bugs, just in case book learning had filled your heads with nonsense.

The next day when I went back to the pit where they’d broken through and hit the old drift tunnels, the boys had pulled all of their equipment and vacated the dig. They’d moved downstream about 300 yards, and they were busy stripping boulder clay to get at the rest of the Tertiary channel they’d tapped where I was now standing. Moreover, the ground was so rich in that particular area that the boulder clay was honeycombed with tunnels driven up from the river by the Old-Timers, following the contours of the rising bedrock, back in the 1800’s. As well, the area saw a resurgence of activity in the 1930’s as miners could make enough working in the summers to feed their families through the long winters. Even though it was backbreaking work, the effort not only kept them from starving, but it required no reliance on government handouts.

Those Sourdoughs were a tough, tough breed.

So, there I was with the entire pit to myself, and permission to do whatever I pleased. However, in sad retrospect, what I didn’t have with me at that time was a metal detector, and because of that, the place haunts me to this day. Moreover, as I move along with my tale, you’ll see why.

The blue sky was a welcome sight after the three days of overcast conditions. The sun was warm on my back and was already removing the chill from the morning air. A couple of humming birds fought each other as they squabbled for the rights to a stand of mountain flowers. Pines and firs had scented the air with their perfect aroma of alpine magic.

Breaking the spell, I dropped down into the pit carrying my pick, a couple of pans, my shovel, and of course, my gold bottle. Due to some great panning around those pillars and posts, I already had a nice collection of nuggets and pickers in my bottle, and the gold made a nice growl as I spun the bottle’s contents around. To me, there’s nothing better than the sound of sassy nuggets and chunky gold, captured in the bottle.

I strolled through the pit, examining what material was left. On the south end, they’d excavated several feet into the bedrock because it was highly fractured, so there was no material left there to pan. While I walked the length of the cut, rocks were sluffing from the loose glacial till far above the boulder clay, for the wall above the excavation rose steeply up the canyon side about eighty feet. Therefore, those tumbling rocks had a lot of time to pick up speed. Sadly, panning the margins of the cut where the excavation met the boulder clay would be far too dangerous; however, the memory was with me still of the visitor three days earlier, an uncle to one of the miners, that had plucked a four-gram nugget from the seam after he’d eyeballed it. Reluctantly, regardless of the lure of the gold in that ancient channel capped by the huge wall of boulder clay, I let reason rule and worked my way back to the north end where the big equipment had broken open the old drifts.

Furthermore, the north end was dramatically different from the southern portion. There was a layer of clay covering the last third of the cut. The miners had stripped down into the clay with their excavator until there was no more sign of any river run. The clay was smooth and slick where the bucket had done its excellent work, and what remained was nothing more than an ancient armor layer, as everyone knows that gold can’t get through clay. Nonetheless, I remembered reading in a book once about a prospector that had dug through the armor clay to see what was underneath, and what he’d found was worth his dig. So, I had nothing to lose, and I decided I’d give it a try.

It was easy digging with the shovel, as the metal cut smoothly into the clay. I lifted the contents out of the hole (I’d gone down about six inches), and I saw something out of the ordinary. There were thin bands of small pebbles and different colored sand and other materials that stood out in sharp contrast to the rest of the clay! I broke the clay off and scraped the material from the little lenses into my pan. There was a good stand of water in the cut already as the many springs from the hillside were busy filling the excavation, because the pumps had been moved downstream to the new site.

As I mixed the material in the pan with my fingers, I could not only feel little rounded pebbles, but gritty pieces of rougher stuff. This can be a good sign. So, I worked the material in the pan until the clay cloud rising from the dirt had mostly stopped. Then, I set to panning.

It didn’t take long to pan the material down, as there wasn’t very much of it to work. But on this day, I realized that a small amount of material doesn’t always mean a small catch of gold. The center of the crease of the pan was lined with pickers! Of course, I couldn’t believe it. It had to be a fluke, right? So, I carved off some more clay from the hole I’d started, scraped all the material I could find from the lenses into my pan and started panning again. More pickers! These weren’t flakes. These were beefy, rounded chunks of gold.

Fired up now, I decided I’d dig down to see how deep the lenses ran in the clay. Below about eight inches, there was nothing but solid clay of a much harder variety. In the upper layer, the little pockets of pay were indeed irregular, composed of little lenses randomly salted within the top eight inches of the clay. Some deposits were three inches long, with the longest being about six inches long. They varied from a quarter to a half an inch in thickness. Moreover, I have no idea what Mother Nature was up those untold eons ago, but there had to have been some massive, mixing occurrence that churned down through that bedrock canyon to generate enough force to pack those gold carrying lenses inside inside that clay.

I started skimming the clay hoping to find runs of material that were a bit longer, but try as I did, all I could find were those small pockets, irregularly deposited in the upper portion of the clay.

However, after I’d exhausted what I could find through my hit and miss tactics, my gold bottle had a much deeper growl and it had that wonderful dense heft that only gold can provide.

The next year I went back with my metal detector, the Minelab 2100, as I wanted to run the coil over that clay to detect for pockets I’d missed with my haphazard dig and discover method, but Mother Nature had reclaimed the workings. For instead of an open pit excavation on a high bench placer, the area was now a duck pond, running about fifty yards long, filled with eight to ten feet of sparkling blue spring water.

Whatever rests in those strange deposits in the clay, waits there still.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Bejay]

You .might give thought to something that has been on my agenda for quite some time:

Take your hooka/dredge pump and put it on a floating device....large inner tube...rubber raft.....pontoon set up. anything that will float it and be stable.
From the pump run some fire hose to a on/off jet nozzle.
Get your air line/regulator/tank canister hooked up.
Take a full underwater metal detector ( I have a Garret).
If needed suit up and add some weight.
Go down and metal detect while underwater.
Use the jet to flush out areas....and detect further.

Bejay

 

[Lanny in AB]

You .might give thought to something that has been on my agenda for quite some time:

Take your hooka/dredge pump and put it on a floating device....large inner tube...rubber raft.....pontoon set up. anything that will float it and be stable.
From the pump run some fire hose to a on/off jet nozzle.
Get your air line/regulator/tank canister hooked up.
Take a full underwater metal detector ( I have a Garret).
If needed suit up and add some weight.
Go down and metal detect while underwater.
Use the jet to flush out areas....and detect further.

Bejay

If I get back up there, those are great ideas and very innovative! Unless there's been a massive landslide, that duck pond will still be there waiting, and with your ideas, I'll have a better chance of getting the gold.

I also have several other spots I'd hit with the GPX 5000.

Knowing what I know now, compared to what I knew then, I'd do a lot of things differently on a return trip.

For instance, I know I left a lot of gold behind in other areas because I was quite new to metal detecting then and didn't know nearly enough about how to listen to signals. I was still learning, and I wasn't paying attention to the same things I pay attention to these days.

Plus, the coils are better now, more specialized, and the electronics on my 5000 would allow me to filter out a lot of unwanted noise as the bedrock in that area is unimaginably hot, and the 2100 would only function on one side (there weren't any salt coils then either). So, with the 5000, I know I'd find gold I walked right over on my earlier trips.

Thanks for your suggestions as they're great ideas to use to get more gold.

All the best,

Lanny

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[Lanny in AB]

The Mouse Barber

I posted this in response to a query about unexplained events in the great outdoors. So, I thought I'd post it here as well:

Other than my partner making all kinds of strange sounds when he's first waking up in the morning as he staggers through the tent flaps, nope.

Wait a minute, there was something quite strange that I saw late one night: I woke up in the tent, and I couldn't explain why I was alert. I could hear a faint rustling noise, so I flipped on my flashlight and took a look around. My partner was gently snoring across the wall tent from me (he usually snores at the decibel level strong enough to shatter plexiglass), and, without a word of a lie, there was a mouse right behind his head. But mice in a wall tent is nothing unusual, nor are packrats, or ugly spiders, or squirrels. . . .

What was freakin' unusual about this particular mouse is that he was standing on his hind legs. Well, I'm sure everyone has seen that too. But it's what he was doing with his front paws, his little mouse hands so to speak, that was exceptionally strange. And, I swear, in all the years I've been out prospecting I've never ever seen this before. That mouse was pulling hairs from the back of my partner's head! I could not look away. I was transfixed.

It was a first for me.

He'd gather a hair, then stuff it in his little mouse cheek, then harvest another hair.

All the while my partner was sound asleep, oblivious to the burglar in our midst. Finally the little rascal had stolen enough of what he'd come for, and he scurried out the corner of the tent.

When I told my partner about it the next morning, he would not believe me. It was just too unbelievable, but it happened, and I only wish I'd have had my video camera to document the event.

Strange, yes. Unexplained? I think not.

The little robber was only gathering soft hairs for a nest I believe.

Curious, yes. Once in a lifetime? Absolutely.

What you're looking for? Probably not.

On a different note, I've seen meteor showers that would take your breath away, way out in the wilds where there's absolutely zero light pollution, and I've heard lots of things go bump in the night, but I have a low-light device, and it's fairly easy to pick out the wildlife that's disturbing the peace.

I hope you find what you're looking for, because I do know what you're really looking for, and there are phenomenon that truly are unexplained, and I admire your courage for trying to get to explain the unexplained.

All the best,

Lanny

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[Lanny in AB]

Hot-rock Insanity, Part IV

So, I now had a nice nugget in the poke.

And, as usually happens when I’m out on a nugget hunt, I start to believe that I should be able to find another nugget. (It’s that nugget herd mentality, or nugget pack affinity, or something.)

As a result, I worked my way up the ramp, getting signal after signal, and finding piece after piece of trash. Sometimes it was a bit of bucket blade from the excavator, other times it was razor-sharp pieces from the rollers of the track, and yet at other times, it was round nails of the same size.

The rounds came from the 1930’s when someone was doing something to try to get the gold out from among those massive boulders. Moreover, they were burning a lot of those wooden structures that had round nails in them as well, and from time to time I’d find pockets of charcoal containing rusted, fire-discolored nails. What they were up to I have no idea, but it required a lot of digging to clear the ramp of their experimental trash.

At last, I was at the top of the ramp. The excavator sat there still, on its pad, the area they’d built so they could excavate the loose material from in between the rows of boulders.

I remember there were raspberry bushes growing off to the sides by the boulders, and the berries were nice and ripe. I don’t know about you, but every chance I get to feast on some wild berries (that I like), I’m always up for it. (That is with the exception of Salmon berries in Alaska. Forget that! Those things are nasty. Someone was probably playing a joke on me by getting me to eat those disgusting things in the first place, as I can’t imagine anyone eating them out of any kind of like.)

After scouring the bushes for zippy raspberries for a bit, and after getting a nice shot of cool water in me, I put my feet up for a while to contemplate life. The sky that day was a perfect blue. Every cloud had fled, and the sun was packing a lot of that heavy summer heat. Once again, the boulders were acting like a reflector oven, bouncing all of those sizzling waves back and forth between them, making the entire detecting zone much hotter than the far off cool areas of the green pines and firs that sheltered the slopes of the mountains that protected the boulder bowl I was hunting in.

As I was now quite rested and ready to have at it again, I flipped on the GPX 5000, ran the EMI check, tested the ground balance once more, verified to make sure the connections were tight on the little round sniper coil I was using, adjusted my headphones, and off I went to see what might be on the pad.

I decided on detecting the pad as my buddy and his friends had detected the excavation very meticulously, but when I asked him about the pad, he admitted he hadn’t thought about checking the pad, as there was so much trash on it. And, he was right: there was a lot of trash. Because of that, I was very happy to have the super-magnet on my pick. That magnet saves a crazy amount of time when ID’ing targets.

Moreover, the pad had all of the garden-variety trash of the ramp, with the addition of bits of wire, and instead of the same nail sizes as the ramp, there had been seeded a large variety of nail sizes, just to keep things interesting.

After I’d cleared the trash and tossed away umpteen hot-rocks, I slowed down and listened carefully. I got a whisper, scraped the surface, the whisper was now a faint tone, scraped again, now there was a definite signal. I did the dig and sift technique thing to get the target in the scoop, and then I shook what material remained in the scoop onto the coil. Whap! Growl!!

I moved the dirt around and the target growled again. I could see it now, but everything was the same color, that unremarkable tan clay color which coats everything in that particular deposit. Continuing, I isolated the target and dropped it into my cupped hand.

It was heavy, but it had what appeared to be a fold line running across the one side of it. I immediately thought of an electrical connection. The one thing I had not yet found that day.

By this time, I was hot and tired again. I’d dug a lot of worthless trash. I dropped my fist over my shoulder and was ready to toss the target into the boulders, but I stopped just before I committed, and instead decided I’d use a little water just to make sure.

I’m glad I did.

It was not an old electrical fitting that had been smashed flat. (The heat had warped my brain a bit, I think.) It was a nugget with a natural crease line in it.

Well, that fired me up, and you can’t make this up, but six inches over from that nugget in just a few swings, I got another break in the threshold. I did the same scrape and detect, scrape and detect routine as before and soon had another nugget almost the same size as the one I’d almost thrown away.

They were about half the size of my fingernails, all three of them, and they were all flat, (but still with thickness) which is understandable, as that giant boulder-mill would flatten any gold that was brave enough to run with it.

When I dropped into camp to show my buddy the three nuggets, he was quite surprised. He asked me where in the excavations I’d found them. When I told him I didn’t find them in the excavations, he wondered if I’d found some virgin dirt among the boulders (which still happens). But, when I told him I’d found them on the ramp and on the pad, he just shook his head, as he knew how much trash there must have been in either of those areas.

Well, truth be told, there was a lot of trash on that ramp and pad, and far too many hot-rocks were gathered in that hot-rock insanity zone, but once I’d gotten the area quieted down, that’s when I was able to hear the soft sound of the gold.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

I can't remember if I mentioned this or not in conjunction with the hot-rock insane environment I was working in: my buddy and his friends with their VLF's were constantly having to adjust for hot-rocks, constantly!

With my pulse machine, I would get only some of the hot-rocks. I know that Pulse makers like or even want you to believe that you won't ever be bothered by hot-rocks again, but that's a bunch of nonsense, and they know it's nonsense. So, I'm not quite sure why they don't go more out of their way to advertise that fact when pushing their product.

However, you will be bothered by far fewer hot-rocks while using a gold-prospecting-dedicated pulse machine; that much is true. The unique problem with the boulder field in my story is that there's one hot-rock that's full of iron, so full of iron that they (the tiny rocks) all jump right to the super-magnet! Therefore, I imagine the machine sees them as pieces of iron, but it sees them much like the tips of old square nails, and that means they also have the sweet sounds of gold!

Regardless, they are a problem that must be silenced in order to hear the gold that accompanies them.

All the best,

Lanny

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[Lanny in AB]

Red Devil Bedrock

I remember the time I first opened an ancient crevice.

I was working on a claim that had been placered by large equipment.

It had been reclaimed, and I had permission from the owner to detect it for nuggets. I had my Tesoro Sand Shark with me. If you don't know, the Shark is a pulse machine that's completely waterproof, headphones and all, and I wanted to give it a land trial as the claim had some red-devil bedrock that was insanely hot and nasty stuff indeed. That rock was so stinkin' hot that the three VLF's we tried all died. (Well, they didn't actually die, but they were completely overloaded and would not produce coherent signals. So, it was like those little stinks just gave up and died. Point of information: this was not the same bedrock that I have written about in other posts that was the black graphite schist which is red-hot, the rotten stuff where the other VLF detectors wouldn't run. This was a completely different area, with different bedrock yet again, and it was equally far too hot for VLF's.) As I'd found out about the temperature of that bedrock the season before, I decided I had nothing to lose by hauling my Sand Shark along to give it a try, as it's a pulse machine.

However, I was soon to rediscover that the Sand Shark was equipped with a hardwired coil, and it's not sensitive to small gold at all. Nope. Forget about it. Moreover, as the coil is hard-wired to the machine (to make it completely waterproof), there was no way to change coils to get one that was in a little package so as to be more sensitive to smaller gold. I even contacted the company directly about the issue during the off season, but they weren't concerned about my concerns, and they informed me that the configuration I had was the only one they supported or cared to support! (That whole conversation was revealing and informative, in a disturbing kind of way, as I rather wished they'd at least have listened to my concerns so as to try to modify their product or at least to try to accommodate me as a client.)

As I tested the machine, I found out that the gold had to be over a gram for the machine to "see" it. Regardless, I knew the VLF's were useless, so I made up my mind that I'd just have to be satisfied with nuggets that were a gram and up. Which, I guess, isn't that bad of a thing, as I knew all of the gold I found would be bigger than a gram, but that's not all that good either. On the other hand, I had no chance at all of getting any gold with the other detectors, so any chance was better than no chance, but it was far from a perfect solution, and I was far from satisfied.

Regardless, I set out to detect that awful bedrock. However, as I moved along, I was stunned. That Shark ran dead quiet over the bedrock. I mean quiet like Grants Tomb quiet! Now, it's not a machine with all of the fancy tuning and ground-balancing that the Minelab PI's have, as it's a pretty basic unit, but because it was a pulse machine, it did not care about that bedrock, or its temperature, or about any of its obnoxious qualities. It ignored them all flat out.

Well, I took that as a great sign. I kept running it over the bedrock hoping to get a target, and finally I got three targets, all pieces of square nails, but they were all metallic, of course, so I knew the machine was working at a level where it could still see the metal in spite of the hot mineralization of the mother rock. I was working in what looked like an old trench where the Old-Timers had cut down along a small stream and mined whatever material they could find on the bedrock. However, their square nails from the 1800's were still there, and I took that as another good sign because it meant the area hadn't been cleared by nugget shooters yet.

The little stream cut through some willows and aspens. The aspens were what we call Quaky Aspens. If you know what I'm talking about, they're the trees where it only takes the ghost of a breath of wind to get those little leaves stirring. That's the aspens I'm referring to. In addition, a couple of loud Ravens stalked me for a bit, croaking out their raven tunes, but they soon tired of their game of tag along, and of a sudden beat their huge wings and took themselves off to some unknown place that must have been more interesting to them. Furthermore, there was a lot of tall grass along the margins of the creek, with some little yellow buttercups dotted here and there. However, as I continued my detecting, I soon hit a transition zone where there were a few big, older poplars. And not long after encountering them, the pines and firs started taking over as the ground rose. Of course, the creek, ruled by gravity, stayed on its lower course and its clear waters were soon left behind as I found myself scratching and clawing my way up a big hump of that red bedrock.

On the other side of the hump, there was a leveled area of reclaimed placer ground, and off to the sides, there were the typical remains of any placer operation: bits of steel and rubber pipe, screen, wire, aluminum scrap, etc.; you get the picture. However, right on the corner of that reclaimed ground, there was a little outcrop of that red bedrock again. It was like a signpost or something to me. So, I walked right over and started detecting again.

All was quiet in the headphones. Well, that just would't do, so my buddy and I scooted back to our mule (the Honda), grabbed some shovels and a pick, and we got busy digging down to uncover some more of that bedrock. The digging wasn't too bad, as they couldn't pack the material tightly in there because it was too close to that bedrock outcrop.

What I saw as I dug down looked promising. There were all kinds of dips and folds and pockets in that bedrock. Moreover, I could see places where there was concreted material, very rust-stained, all stuck tightly in place in those little folds and pockets. So, after we'd dug down several feet, I broke out the detector and had at it again.

Almost immediately as I swung the coil over a pocket of that rusted, concreted material, I got a good solid tone. That made me pay attention. I approached the signal at a 90 degrees to my former swing. The signal was still crisp and clear. I opened my prospecting pack which I always wear when I'm engaged in such activities, and I pulled out a compact sledge hammer, and a rock chisel. I dug into the pocket in the mother rock, and the concreted material popped out, intact, in a big chunk. I detected the chunk. Dead silent. I checked it from several angles. Silence reigned supreme in the headphones.

So, at that moment, a bit of panic set in. Had I also popped the signal out and launched it off to some new, mysterious resting place? I poked the coil down into the pocket and was rewarded with a nice mellow tone. So, that told me the detector had been seeing right through the concreted, rust-stained garbage, and kept looking as it saw down into a crevice beneath! I got busy with the chisel. The bedrock was iron hard, but there was definitely a crevice sandwiched in there for little stones were popping out. I kept at it and finally a chunk of the bedrock cracked off to reveal that the crevice was widening.

I mean, the material coming out of this crevice was old, as in ancient old, as in the dinosaurs were probably walking around when this crevice was being filled. There were pieces of magnetite coming out that were stained a bright reddish orange. There were lots of little river rocks, flat ones, round ones, rough ones, smooth ones and every one of them was stained the same color. This material was not only ancient, it had remained undisturbed ever since it had been sealed up those untold eons ago. I was the only being to disturb its rest.

This was my first experience with an ancient crevice, and it's an experience I'll never forget, nor will any of you once you experience it, as everything looks so dramatically different from any other crevice material experienced to that point. I'd cleaned crevices out before, but the material was a black or gray color, or it was stained with a bit of purple, but this crevice material was obviously running with a lot of black sand that had been in there for so stinkin' long that any part that wanted to oxidize had taken advantage of the unhindered time to rust itself to the full extent allowed by Mother Nature or the time police.

I scanned the small pile of material I'd removed, and there was zip, nada, no sound at all. I scanned the crevice again and the signal was stronger this time. Well, to make a long story short, by the time I was done, I had two nuggets that were multi-gram nuggets: the one came in at just over four grams, and the other was just a shade under three. I didn't stop there though, I slowed down and carefully covered every inch of that red-devil bedrock.

I got a soft sound, broke out the chisel again, for the sound was coming from where two pieces of bedrock folded into each other. The sun was going down, and that was about 11:00 at night! I kept at it, and by the time it was really getting dark, I'd opened another crevice and had the material in a small pile in my plastic gold pan, the one that always travels in my pack as well. The signal was in that pile of rusted river run. The signal revealed itself to be a sassy nugget, one that only rang in at a bit over two grams, but it had lots of character, and all three nuggets were round and chunky. No flat gold rested in that deposit. Those nuggets had dropped in when they were fresh, so they'd kept their character.

Well, the Sand Shark had done its job, even if that wasn't what its original design was; it had done a fantastic job of outsmarting that red-devil bedrock to reveal its ancient secrets.

All the best,

Lanny

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

 

[KevinInColorado]

Great story telling Lanny...and great gold too! Thanks for taking the time to really tell the story

 

[Hoser John]

Great tag along Lanny,thanx much. Getting into cracks & crevices of the ancient kind is gettn' much harder to find for sure. Sure wish the sand shark was good on smaller nuggets(under a gram) but just like all pulse units that's still a pipe dream. I've never seen a smaller coil on one but Rusty at Tesoro just might be able to do something about that Great read as always-tons a au 2 u2 -John

 

[Lanny in AB]

Great story telling Lanny...and great gold too! Thanks for taking the time to really tell the story

Thanks Kevin for taking the time to post your kind words and thanks for expressing your appreciation for the story.

It takes a long time to put the stories together, and you and others that stop in to post messages of thanks make it worth the effort.

All the best,

Lanny

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

 

[Lanny in AB]

Great tag along Lanny,thanx much. Getting into cracks & crevices of the ancient kind is gettn' much harder to find for sure. Sure wish the sand shark was good on smaller nuggets(under a gram) but just like all pulse units that's still a pipe dream. I've never seen a smaller coil on one but Rusty at Tesoro just might be able to do something about that Great read as always-tons a au 2 u2 -John

Thanks John for dropping in! I appreciate you taking the time to let me know that you enjoyed the story. By the way, I'd love to read some of yours one day John, as you've really walked the gold mining walk from one end to the other, and I can only imagine what great stories you have to tell!

You sure are right that those virgin crevices are getting harder and harder to find. But when they finally do show up, they sure can be a lot of fun.

With the little coils they've got for the Minelab PI's now, I can really find some tiny gold with them, so needing my Sand Shark to find the small stuff now is not a priority wish any more, but for people that want a lower priced buy-in on a PI, it would be helpful.

Thanks for the heads-up on Rusty: that's one I wouldn't have known about.

All the best,

Lanny

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

 

[Lanny in AB]

If you haven't visited my main thread, here's some eye candy that shows what I've been finding in the last little while.

What's interesting about these finds is that they're both patch findings, and they were both located with my little Minelab X-Terra 705!

I had never gotten serious about chasing the gold with it as I've always been using my GPX 5000 recently.

But, I decided to give the X-Terra a serious run in the goldfields, and it's done very well indeed.







That makes 10 nuggets in total (the first five are around the quarter) from two separate days of detecting. (The nuggets range from the biggest, weighing in at 2.5 grams, all the way down in size and weight to the smallest.)

All the best,

Lanny

 

[KevinInColorado]

Looking good Lanny, thanks for sharing! (And yes, I was starting to wonder whether you were getting out there!)

 

[Army of 1]

Nice collection of Nuggets Lanny , would like to see what you find if you swing the GPX over those patch's , may be something Bigger and Deeper lurking , congrats ..cheers Mick

 

[Lanny in AB]

Looking good Lanny, thanks for sharing! (And yes, I was starting to wonder whether you were getting out there!)

Kevin,

Thanks for dropping in, and I imagine that you've been getting some nice gold in Colorado now that you're having a run of nice weather (at least, I hope you are) at this time of year.

Post some pictures on here once in a while of some of that gorgeous Colorado scenery! Oh, and some of that Colorado gold as well.

All the best,

Lanny

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

 

[Lanny in AB]

Nice collection of Nuggets Lanny , would like to see what you find if you swing the GPX over those patch's , may be something Bigger and Deeper lurking , congrats ..cheers Mick

Mick,

How are things in Dundee? I have a friend that lives in Darwin, but other than that, I'm not very knowledgable about your neck of the woods.

Thanks for the advice on the GPX as I was thinking along the same lines that something bigger might lie underneath. It's a great tip, and I appreciate you dropping in to say a few words.

By the way, the same invitation goes to you that I offered Kevin. If you've got some pictures of where you go to hunt the gold, feel free to post a few, so I can see what your goldfield looks like, if you don't mind that is. And of course, if you'd like to stick up a photo or two of Australian gold, that would be most welcome too.

All the best,

Lanny

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

 

[KevinInColorado]

Here's a panoramic shot of the South Platte river where I dug yesterday. That whole expansive cobble bar is gold bearing! This guy was prospecting for crayfish More sign of the season

 

[H&F909ORO]

<img src="http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=1009127"/> Here's a panoramic shot of the South Platte river where I dug yesterday. That whole expansive cobble bar is gold bearing! <img src="http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=1009128"/> This guy was prospecting for crayfish <img src="http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=1009129"/> More sign of the season

Beautiful scenery Kevin. I love those flowers and the open space you get to work in. For those who mine the North Fork American they know to well of the walls that enclose them. It's not too bad, but sometimes it would be nice to work without these huge walls of rock on either side of you. Nonetheless it's for the gold. Nice to see wild life as well. Give us some more pictures it's amazing over there.

 

[Army of 1]

Mick,

How are things in Dundee? I have a friend that lives in Darwin, but other than that, I'm not very knowledgable about your neck of the woods.

Thanks for the advice on the GPX as I was thinking along the same lines that something bigger might lie underneath. It's a great tip, and I appreciate you dropping in to say a few words.

By the way, the same invitation goes to you that I offered Kevin. If you've got some pictures of where you go to hunt the gold, feel free to post a few, so I can see what your goldfield looks like, if you don't mind that is. And of course, if you'd like to stick up a photo or two of Australian gold, that would be most welcome too.

All the best,

Lanny

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

Thanks for the kind words Lanny , things are good at Dundee , the dry season has arrived and as soon as the burn off finishes I will be heading out to the Goldfields .
Would love to post some pics of Gold , but gotta find some first . Good luck to you ..cheers Mick