What works and what don't

[Mitch Dickson]

So you get a detector and go out to sling it a bit. Mostly they are useless You will bring home much more gold detecting black sand pockets and panning those. You need no fancy detector to do that. Almost any old analog, manual ground balance will do just fine. I prefer an old metal box ElDorado.

I do have a fancy Gold Strike that will find a pin head under a hot rock!!! But the engineer should be shot. He put in this low tone that goes off constantly in mineralized ground. It will however way outpace a gold bug any day. Now if you going up a wash or creek, in other words in aluvial your fine. Checking out veins your fine. Where you get into trouble is if you come across a nugget out on open ground!!! Most will hurry and hunt out the patch, maybe going home with an ounce or two. If so you destroy forever the clues that would lead you to the opening of a pocket. Gold in a weathered stringer pocket is measured in pounds not ounces!!!!! Most of them are not more than 6 feet deep. This is where the pros eat steak while you dine at McDonalds You must throw that detector down and go get the tools to find the entrance to that pocket!!!

Me and my partner in our lives dug out two. The first bought me a brand new pickup and the second a 5 inch dredge!!!! Most people don't even know pocket gold exists, much less how to mine it. The Dutch were the experts at this. They wouldn't even come into a gold field till it was abandoned. Then take out a few rich pockets and move on. This was family secrets and no one outside was taught how. I alway wondered if the Lost Dutchman mine was really a mine or if he just took out a very rich pocket. Only book I ever knew that told you how was written by S.J. Cash in Australia in the 30s and 40s. He took out over 150 pockets in the down under in his lifetime making him a very very rich man!!!! The title is "Loaming for gold". Hey, they talk funny down there LOL! It's probably been out of print for 50 years

So watch that detector and don't let it cost you a new house LOL!

 

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[firebird]

You will bring home much more gold detecting black sand pockets and panning those.

How do I find nuggets in this creek then, is there a specific metal detector I'd need for this area? It's pretty weird, the gravel on the creek itself has lots of black sand but almost no gold aside from an occasional microspec. The side of the creek here on the other hand has lots of nice flaky gold but far, far less black sand than the creek.

 

[Mitch Dickson]

Don't see any evidence of bedrock in the pic. There may be several feet of overburden so your detector won't work except for occasional accidents. Lots of black sand and an occasional spec is fine. Look for gravel bars and punch holes across it and pan till you hit a place where lot of colors show up. That should be in the gold line. Define it by panning on each side till you know where the outer limits of the line is. Then the work starts!!! You got to pan the whole thing but not pan it off. Just till you are down to the black sand and take that home to work it. Work it till it plays out. Every bar is different. A sluice is totally useless to work microgold. Even the mighty gold cube is useless. Only a gold pan will catch 100% of it. This is extremely hard work!!! But pays quite well! A good bar in a creek saturated with fine gold will pay you 4 grams a day while your in it. Then you get to hunt another one LOL! A metal detector is not magic. There are very few places where course gold is close enough to the top of the ground to pay. But hey, God put millions of ounces of fine and microfine gold on top of the ground!!! You just gotta find it and figure out how to work it Start with 100 pans a day in a supersluice pan and take home the black sand. I said it was hard backbreaking work!!! There are 70 shovels in a ton or cubic yard. 100 pans will insure your going through at least a yard a day. In a good bar that you have outlined the gold line, you should turn a $1000 a week. You may be too tired to spend it LOL! Now you can refuse to believe this old man and try it with a sluice and you will do the same amount of work for $50 a week. Go ahead, don't let me stop you HEHEHE! Another real good place to pan gold is in dredge tailings and sluice tailings. They will classify it for you and pile it up None of that junk will catch gold smaller than about 50 mesh. And my friend, 80% of gold in that creek is less than 100 mesh!!!!

 

[IMAUDIGGER]

Mitch, there is some truth to what you have said.
A nugget here and there can be the only clue to the buried gold.
Pick them up and walk off and you have erased the evidence.

When I first started detecting, I did that very thing. Found a nugget laying on a very small piece of exposed bedrock. Hiked on up the draw and found nothing. Spent the next month roaming the hills with not much to show but an occasional picker.

Finally started thinking about that nugget I found on the bedrock..why was it there? Went back and studied the area.
Got the shovel out and exposed some more bedrock...another nugget found...more digging....and so on.

What part of the world do you pocket hunt?

 

[Terry Soloman]

In Arizona, I've always referred to "pocket" hunting, as "patch" hunting. I've been lucky enough to hit three patches in my life. My good friend Rusty Henry, immigrated to Australia after the first gold nugget was found at Cue, Australia, and found a 55-Troy Pound patch (pocket), during his time there. Pockets are real, however the black sand is almost never associated with the ones I've found.

 

[IMAUDIGGER]

In Arizona, I've always referred to "pocket" hunting, as "patch" hunting. I've been lucky enough to hit three patches in my life. My good friend Rusty Henry, immigrated to Australia after the first gold nugget was found at Cue, Australia, and found a 55-Troy Pound patch (pocket), during his time there. Pockets are real, however the black sand is almost never associated with the ones I've found.

I may have misunderstood his information. I was understanding the first post to be talking about “weathered stringer pockets” , not panning for placer gold.

 

[Goldwasher]

There are about 150 -160 heaped shovels to a cubic yard of smallish gravel.

Anyone whose put in wooden fence posts knows this

two yards a day panned for ..four grams

That is a video tutorial I would love to see..times five days a week...

sounds like the slow way to go really.

 

[firebird]

Don't see any evidence of bedrock in the pic. There may be several feet of overburden so your detector won't work except for occasional accidents.

Thanks for the info. That creek is actually on bedrock, three months ago I was standing in the middle of it because it was almost completely empty of water, now even that area I had my bucket in the first picture is completely underwater. Unfortunately this is Commiefornia so dredging or highbanking illegal so I'm just stuck with panning. In this hole I already dug two feet into it and still haven't hit the bedrock layer on the creek because it's full of very large, heavy rounded river rocks that are hard to remove and takes hours to get out by hand. I found a 3mm picker on top of that large rock by the pickaxe in the 2nd picture. Before it completely went underwater I wasn't just finding flakes anymore. They were actual pickers that I could just pick up with my fingers measuring about 3mm long.

Is this a sign that there might actually be even larger nuggets in this hole? I'm guessing there might be up to four feet of overburden to the bedrock. I only have a cheap $50 "Bounty Hunter" metal detector that's not really powerful and was wondering if it was worth finally buying a better metal detector instead.

 

[Lanny in AB]

Thanks for the info. That creek is actually on bedrock, three months ago I was standing in the middle of it because it was almost completely empty of water, now even that area I had my bucket in the first picture is completely underwater. Unfortunately this is Commiefornia so dredging or highbanking illegal so I'm just stuck with panning. In this hole I already dug two feet into it and still haven't hit the bedrock layer on the creek because it's full of very large, heavy rounded river rocks that are hard to remove and takes hours to get out by hand. I found a 3mm picker on top of that large rock by the pickaxe in the 2nd picture. Before it completely went underwater I wasn't just finding flakes anymore. They were actual pickers that I could just pick up with my fingers measuring about 3mm long.

Is this a sign that there might actually be even larger nuggets in this hole? I'm guessing there might be up to four feet of overburden to the bedrock. I only have a cheap $50 "Bounty Hunter" metal detector that's not really powerful and was wondering if it was worth finally buying a better metal detector instead.

Mitch, hope you don't mind me jumping in here, but if you Firebird are going to go to all of the trouble to dig to bedrock in a stream that's known for coarse gold?, I'd have a detector that would do the job for sure. So, you'll have to check to see what kind of mineralization you'll be dealing with on the bedrock, and if for some strange reason it's very mild, you may get by with the detector you've got (if it will ground balance?), if not, you'd need something better.

Having said that, I'm assuming this creek has been worked before? If so, the gold you're finding will have been deposited back in the upper layers of stream material (replenishing the gold somewhat that was once there), but the only way to know what's on bedrock is to get down there, and that's what requires the work. However, if the stream has not redeposited (if the stream was cleared by the old-timers) the gold deeply enough to re-enrich the bedrock, you may find little gold to be taken. If the stream is in an area that's been hit by some big-time flooding events, you may find some nuggets on the bedrock for sure. This is why the whole effort of digging down to bedrock is a bit of a crapshoot, and why sometimes it pays and others it doesn't. The wildcard is if the underlying bedrock was already cleaned or if a rich layer of re-deposit has been slapped back down on the bedrock by some major hydraulic event.

Regardless, the only way you'll know is to go . . .

Mitch has given some solid advice, and it sounds like you've found yourself a sourdough for a mentor.

Good luck, and all the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

So you get a detector and go out to sling it a bit. Mostly they are useless You will bring home much more gold detecting black sand pockets and panning those. You need no fancy detector to do that. Almost any old analog, manual ground balance will do just fine. I prefer an old metal box ElDorado.

I do have a fancy Gold Strike that will find a pin head under a hot rock!!! But the engineer should be shot. He put in this low tone that goes off constantly in mineralized ground. It will however way outpace a gold bug any day. Now if you going up a wash or creek, in other words in aluvial your fine. Checking out veins your fine. Where you get into trouble is if you come across a nugget out on open ground!!! Most will hurry and hunt out the patch, maybe going home with an ounce or two. If so you destroy forever the clues that would lead you to the opening of a pocket. Gold in a weathered stringer pocket is measured in pounds not ounces!!!!! Most of them are not more than 6 feet deep. This is where the pros eat steak while you dine at McDonalds You must throw that detector down and go get the tools to find the entrance to that pocket!!!

Me and my partner in our lives dug out two. The first bought me a brand new pickup and the second a 5 inch dredge!!!! Most people don't even know pocket gold exists, much less how to mine it. The Dutch were the experts at this. They wouldn't even come into a gold field till it was abandoned. Then take out a few rich pockets and move on. This was family secrets and no one outside was taught how. I alway wondered if the Lost Dutchman mine was really a mine or if he just took out a very rich pocket. Only book I ever knew that told you how was written by S.J. Cash in Australia in the 30s and 40s. He took out over 150 pockets in the down under in his lifetime making him a very very rich man!!!! The title is "Loaming for gold". Hey, they talk funny down there LOL! It's probably been out of print for 50 years

So watch that detector and don't let it cost you a new house LOL!

Mitch, I've really enjoyed your posts so far, and you have an enjoyable writing style that's light and breezy.

Thanks for being on the thread, a big welcome, and thanks for being willing to share your hard-earned lessons of how to chase the gold, much appreciated.

All the best,

Lanny

 

[tinpan]

So you get a detector and go out to sling it a bit. Mostly they are useless You will bring home much more gold detecting black sand pockets and panning those. You need no fancy detector to do that. Almost any old analog, manual ground balance will do just fine. I prefer an old metal box ElDorado.

I do have a fancy Gold Strike that will find a pin head under a hot rock!!! But the engineer should be shot. He put in this low tone that goes off constantly in mineralized ground. It will however way outpace a gold bug any day. Now if you going up a wash or creek, in other words in aluvial your fine. Checking out veins your fine. Where you get into trouble is if you come across a nugget out on open ground!!! Most will hurry and hunt out the patch, maybe going home with an ounce or two. If so you destroy forever the clues that would lead you to the opening of a pocket. Gold in a weathered stringer pocket is measured in pounds not ounces!!!!! Most of them are not more than 6 feet deep. This is where the pros eat steak while you dine at McDonalds You must throw that detector down and go get the tools to find the entrance to that pocket!!!

Me and my partner in our lives dug out two. The first bought me a brand new pickup and the second a 5 inch dredge!!!! Most people don't even know pocket gold exists, much less how to mine it. The Dutch were the experts at this. They wouldn't even come into a gold field till it was abandoned. Then take out a few rich pockets and move on. This was family secrets and no one outside was taught how. I alway wondered if the Lost Dutchman mine was really a mine or if he just took out a very rich pocket. Only book I ever knew that told you how was written by S.J. Cash in Australia in the 30s and 40s. He took out over 150 pockets in the down under in his lifetime making him a very very rich man!!!! The title is "Loaming for gold". Hey, they talk funny down there LOL! It's probably been out of print for 50 years

So watch that detector and don't let it cost you a new house LOL!

Hi , You can buy that book on line for 20 dollars and the book has been reprinted 4 times. TP

 

[tinpan]

Hi , I have seen a GPX pick up a missed auriferous primary deposit in reef form in a fault channel just a few yards from a major monchiquite dyke deposit Just above a creek in rock open cut TP

 

[firebird]

Having said that, I'm assuming this creek has been worked before? If so, the gold you're finding will have been deposited back in the upper layers of stream material (replenishing the gold somewhat that was once there), but the only way to know what's on bedrock is to get down there, and that's what requires the work. However, if the stream has not redeposited (if the stream was cleared by the old-timers) the gold deeply enough to re-enrich the bedrock, you may find little gold to be taken. If the stream is in an area that's been hit by some big-time flooding events, you may find some nuggets on the bedrock for sure. This is why the whole effort of digging down to bedrock is a bit of a crapshoot, and why sometimes it pays and others it doesn't. The wildcard is if the underlying bedrock was already cleaned or if a rich layer of re-deposit has been slapped back down on the bedrock by some major hydraulic event.

I'm not sure, I only know the area was hit hard by the 1964 California Christmas flood, that's for sure. I also found odd pieces of really rusted metal, antique square nails and about 6 feet above the hole I'm digging in I found this odd, ornate piece of metal that looks like it was made in the 19th century. Down the bottom of the hole though two feet down the rocks aren't just larger, they're really dark and show signs of having been in a fire.

 

[Goldwasher]

I'm not sure, I only know the area was hit hard by the 1964 California Christmas flood, that's for sure. I also found odd pieces of really rusted metal, antique square nails and about 6 feet above the hole I'm digging in I found this odd, ornate piece of metal that looks like it was made in the 19th century. Down the bottom of the hole though two feet down the rocks aren't just larger, they're really dark and show signs of having been in a fire.

View attachment 1681305View attachment 1681306

if your getting that sort of gold while digging to bedrock.

You should work a wider area, move all those rocks out of the way.

Makes it easier to dislode them and the material that ralls into the water is getting pre washed and broken up.

Looks like part of an old stove

 

[beekbuster]

So you get a detector and go out to sling it a bit. Mostly they are useless You will bring home much more gold detecting black sand pockets and panning those. You need no fancy detector to do that. Almost any old analog, manual ground balance will do just fine. I prefer an old metal box ElDorado.

I do have a fancy Gold Strike that will find a pin head under a hot rock!!! But the engineer should be shot. He put in this low tone that goes off constantly in mineralized ground. It will however way outpace a gold bug any day. Now if you going up a wash or creek, in other words in aluvial your fine. Checking out veins your fine. Where you get into trouble is if you come across a nugget out on open ground!!! Most will hurry and hunt out the patch, maybe going home with an ounce or two. If so you destroy forever the clues that would lead you to the opening of a pocket. Gold in a weathered stringer pocket is measured in pounds not ounces!!!!! Most of them are not more than 6 feet deep. This is where the pros eat steak while you dine at McDonalds You must throw that detector down and go get the tools to find the entrance to that pocket!!!

Me and my partner in our lives dug out two. The first bought me a brand new pickup and the second a 5 inch dredge!!!! Most people don't even know pocket gold exists, much less how to mine it. The Dutch were the experts at this. They wouldn't even come into a gold field till it was abandoned. Then take out a few rich pockets and move on. This was family secrets and no one outside was taught how. I alway wondered if the Lost Dutchman mine was really a mine or if he just took out a very rich pocket. Only book I ever knew that told you how was written by S.J. Cash in Australia in the 30s and 40s. He took out over 150 pockets in the down under in his lifetime making him a very very rich man!!!! The title is "Loaming for gold". Hey, they talk funny down there LOL! It's probably been out of print for 50 years

So watch that detector and don't let it cost you a new house LOL!

just when i thought i had my secret spot worked out, now you go and give me new doubt about my gold seeking abilities. im still trying to figure out what kind of deposit i found. might have to do some digging to finally lay my anxiety to rest.

 

[beekbuster]

Thanks for the info. That creek is actually on bedrock, three months ago I was standing in the middle of it because it was almost completely empty of water, now even that area I had my bucket in the first picture is completely underwater. Unfortunately this is Commiefornia so dredging or highbanking illegal so I'm just stuck with panning. In this hole I already dug two feet into it and still haven't hit the bedrock layer on the creek because it's full of very large, heavy rounded river rocks that are hard to remove and takes hours to get out by hand. I found a 3mm picker on top of that large rock by the pickaxe in the 2nd picture. Before it completely went underwater I wasn't just finding flakes anymore. They were actual pickers that I could just pick up with my fingers measuring about 3mm long.

Is this a sign that there might actually be even larger nuggets in this hole? I'm guessing there might be up to four feet of overburden to the bedrock. I only have a cheap $50 "Bounty Hunter" metal detector that's not really powerful and was wondering if it was worth finally buying a better metal detector instead.

View attachment 1681059View attachment 1681060View attachment 1681061

yes....the answer is yes. that is some fine looking territory

 

[RTR]

Back breaking work, works.