Golden Grams of Goodness: Nugget Hunting Tales

[Lanny]

The Golden Rooster and His Corn

This is an unlikely sounding title for a gold tale; however, it really is a gold story, even with its puzzling name.

To back up some, twenty-four hours before any gold trip begins, the first eight hours are the usual tasks: organizing grub, bedding, tools, fuel, equipment, firearms, and other essentials to sustain life for several weeks in the unforgiving, deep northern woods.

After our supplies were packed, we loaded the mechanized equipment on the flat-deck trailer: a small wash plant, a variety of pumps, various lengths of hoses, and a small home-built backhoe.

As with any remote mining expedition, we'd packed a white canvas wall tent for living quarters. Furthermore, we packed the wood-burning stove with its lengths of stove pipe. For, even in summer, there’s ice on the water in the fire bucket some mornings.

In the back of the ¾-ton diesel, we stowed the pack boxes of food, the duffel bags of bedding and clothes, and the chainsaw and axe. All items were snugly arranged around the four-wheeler in the truck bed.

A bit more about our transportation, I have always loved the sound of that Cummins engine; its throaty song was comforting and reassuring; its performance and reliability, uncompromising; its very sound a symbol of summer gold hunts in the immense wilderness.

To elaborate, there are places where topping a mountain, there is nothing to see but deep-green soldiered ranks of pine, fir, and cedar in undulating waves of forest that march ever onward to rugged peak after endless ridge, until the distance melts all and blurs it into one surreal horizon.

This endless view contains no sign, no hint of human disturbance or occupation. No power-lines, no cat-trails or cut-lines, no excavation scars, nothing but the vastness of untamed nature. The sight always leaves me feeling insignificant, yet equally awed by its savage beauty and unspoiled majesty.

All packed, and after a sixteen-hour drive through the night and continuing well into the next day, we arrived at the gold fields of North Central British Columbia. The black flies, the No-Seeums, and the mosquitoes were having a banner year. So, before stepping from the 4X4, I grabbed the bug dope, ready to hose myself down as soon as I hit the ground.

I also tucked the bottom of my pant legs into my socks, then sprayed dope on my shirt cuffs, collar, and the hair on the back and top of my head. Next I sprayed my hat brim and put on a pair of gloves. It’s the only way to keep the bugs at bay.

After protecting myself, I grabbed the Minelab and fired it up. It gave a reassuring hum, telling me it had survived the brutal last leg of the trip. (The last leg takes five hours, all over unforgiving logging routes: roads wash-boarded, pocked with holes, and mined with obstacles. Said obstacles include moose, elk, deer, black bear, grizzly bear, wolverine, bits and pieces of lost freight, and of course, logging trucks.)

My detector was outfitted with the standard eleven-inch DD coil, and my headphones did nothing but annoy the bugs by denying them a taste of my tender ears! Furthermore, on an earlier trip, I’d learned to keep my mouth shut to avoid a meal of flying protein.

Making my way to an abandoned site, I discovered exposed bedrock. There was a small shelf that stepped down from a larger formation above. This was a minor site, one deliberately worked where the bedrock had faulted. Black graphite-schist met a harder iron-red formation, and the wall behind it was a combination of piles of slump, along with sheets of broken, black slate all tumbled from the canyon-wall above.

The sentinel pines topping the wall were oblivious to our efforts. The songbirds among the pines filled the air with their ageless melodies. Mountain flowers gently tossed their heads in the slight breeze at the foot of the pines as they scented the air. An iridescent humming bird zipped past my head to feed on the blossoms.

What a glorious place to look for gold.

I was eager to detect where the two bedrocks met. There was folding and faulting to create gold traps. This site, abandoned but a day earlier, was a small piece of a Tertiary channel, one composed of virgin bedrock from dim eons past. With slim hopes, due to its small size, I slid down some slump to start detecting the bedrock. The lower portion of it was already covered with water, seepage from an unseen spring slowly drowning the site.

I scrubbed the coil over the bedrock, and after only two sweeps, I had a signal. However, I've learned over the years that detecting old workings may promote madness, the madness from dealing with unwanted signals: bits of blade and track; the head, tip or entire body of a square nail; rusted bits of can, chunks of wire, brass from bushings, bits of lead, etc.

Regardless of past disappointment, I scanned again, still had a solid response. I scraped the bedrock, scanned again, and got a sweeter signal. I couldn’t see anything exciting, so I drug a super-magnet over the bedrock to check for ferrous, no friends. Swinging the coil again produced a nice, low-high-low sound. My pulse increased.

With sniping tools, I chipped carefully around the signal. I broke out a piece of cemented bedrock, baseball-sized. The signal was in the chunk of rock! Tapping it carefully with the flat side of a hammer, a golf-ball-sized piece broke free. A nice, steady signal hummed from it. By hammering carefully, out popped a nice nugget that looked like a rooster's head, complete with a comb and beak! It was a five-gram piece of Mother Nature's finest craft.

I scanned the area again while expanding my search. About a meter away, another nice signal, this one longer in its length. An old square nail? I scraped but found no such thing. Then a slightly stronger signal on the next scan, though not as strong as the Rooster nugget. This tone was softer, yet still mellow. I chipped along the bedrock and discovered a crevice. The compacted material was not cemented, but it was the exact colour of the black bedrock. I took out a bent sniping tool and drug it the length of the crevice to where that crevice connected with a drop in the bedrock. Out popped four quadruplets: four identical kernels of corn. They weighed in at almost a half a gram apiece, making two grams of corn for my Rooster nugget.

With not much bedrock left, I scanned on, but no response. I put on the 18-inch mono and slid it around the entire area. It was considerably noisier than the DD, and I had trouble balancing the detector. Yet, through all the noise, I heard a faint something, yet with no idea what I was hearing. I'd never heard such a whisper, nothing but a tiny break, a mere bump in the threshold amidst the clatter, and all because that big 18-inch mono was seriously hammering that graphite schist into submission to give up its secrets.

Intrigued, I took out the chisel and carved off about an inch of rock. I scanned again, but now a faint, repeatable signal. I worked off more rock, scanned again—this time a louder signal. Breaking out a piece of bedrock, I gently crushed it, and out slid a smooth golden slug—four grams of hammered gold, no character, no definition.

The take for the day? A golden rooster with four kernels of corn, and a lonely orphan of a slug.

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

Don’t Give Up; Chase Those Signals

T'was the summer of '05. The day was cloudy. The gold had been elusive.

To provide some background, we make our summer camp in the Boreal Forests of British Columbia, Canada's most western province. Its mountains dive steeply into the Pacific Ocean, and a chain of outer islands continue the province's seaward extension. B.C. is a magnificent province (we have provinces instead of states here in Canada), with all kinds of mountains, rivers, lakes and breath-taking, endless forests. Moreover, vast tracts of genuine wilderness remain. Nevertheless, while chasing the gold, I've seen lots of wilderness in the United States and in my home province of Alberta too. To elaborate, Alberta’s eastern neighbor is British Columbia, and the two provinces share the Rocky Mountains. Yet, the province that dips its toes in the ocean has the lion's share of the gold.

Now, onward with my gold tale.

I headed off to hunt a challenging spot, one pocked with dig marks. My chosen place had a bedrock base which was the foundation of an old hydraulic operation, and nugget shooters had recently worked over the bedrock. However, there were still crevices filled with rock-hard gumbo clay, and stones.

So, taking this as a good sign of some undisturbed material, I fired up the detector and worked the exposed bedrock only to find of bits of steel, lead bullets from the 1800's, as well as modern shotgun pellets, old square nails, etc.

I went and worked the previously mentioned crevices but found only more of the same, until I found a door hinge wedged into the bedrock under 15 feet of boulder clay! How it got there remains a puzzle I couldn’t decode. Perhaps it was driven into the bedrock by the Old-timers for some reason, only to be buried by the later hydraulic operation.

I continued detecting lower down in the strata and got into some very interesting bedrock formations, but no gold. (That happens quite frequently.) I even pounded the ground with my detector where my buddy found a nice nugget in some sharply rising bedrock, but, no luck.

Hours passed. The sun was out, beating a relentless tattoo on my head and shoulders. I was hot, tired, and getting jaded! However, I saw some broken bedrock where someone had raked down and up-welling of bedrock with the teeth of an excavator bucket. I detected it only to be rewarded with the usual trash. I reached above the excavation cut far over the bedrock to a place where some over-wash from the hydraulic operation merged with the bedrock.

I got a signal.

Nevertheless, it sounded like the end of a square nail (for those that don't know, square nail tips sound sweet, like nuggets). Moreover, as it was high and hard to reach, and as I had to overstretch to get my arm to the target, I almost didn't dig it. Not the best plan sometimes.

Clearly, not digging a target is nugget hunting blasphemy, but still, I’m guilty at times. To clarify, while depressed by digging nothing but trash all day, new targets simply seem to be more of the same. So, why bother, right? This is especially true when I’m hot, tired, or have overexerted myself.

Nevertheless, I resisted the urge to quit and dug the target. I dislodged it. It moved down the hill, yet I was in a sketchy fix as I barely clung to the wall by the tips of my toes. Ignoring my predicament, I reached up with my super-magnet and pushed that dirt around, fully expecting to see the tip of a square nail on the magnet.

No nail.

Ruling out ferrous always makes things interesting, but I didn't allow myself to get too pumped, having dug a lot of lead that day as well. Yet, somewhat juiced, I reached up with my plastic scoop, but missed the target. Next, I skidded down the broken bedrock, barking one of my already tender shins, prompting a tapestry of curses that must still be woven in that vast, blue northern sky.

Remaining determined, I climbed yet again, and this time captured the signal. I worked my way down to a level spot to sift and sort the signal in the scoop. I then trickled material onto the coil and, WHAP! I heard that electronic, metallic growl.

Everyone knows lead makes the same sound, but some sixth sense prompted me this was not lead. (Ever had that sensation?) I trickled material onto the coil and poked the bits and pieces around until an agitated growl responded.

I picked the target up. The weight was sure right. Yet, it was clay-covered, looking unremarkable. I used the only liquid I had, a shot of saliva, to remove the stubborn clay. There it was, a sassy nugget. Long, in the shape of the sole of a shoe, quite flattened, but almost two grams of golden goodness. Not the biggest nugget I've found, but one I found because I didn’t give up.

All the best,

Lanny

[Jim_Alaska]

I think many of us have a tendency to give up or at least get careless, assuming just more trash. I know I have this tendency especially in areas that I can see have been worked over with the resulting dig holes.

I, like some others tend to think others have got all the gold. Suffice to say that those unnamed others may have been beset by the same thinking and began to not dig targets. It makes one wonder just how many undug targets may have been gold left in the ground.

[Lanny]

Hi Jim, always great to hear from you.

I agree with what you're saying, and I have vivid flashbacks sometimes to a target I left un-dug, wondering later if I hadn't left a nugget behind.

I worked some pretty hammered areas that were super trashy, and it's easy indeed to start being convinced that a target is merely trash; however, I'm sure that's why I've gotten some nuggets others have missed, and I'm sure they've gotten ones I left behind for the same reasons of being discouraged.

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

Clay and Detecting For Gold

Well, here's the follow-up story to the last nugget find, the one found in the hydraulic wash, but this hunt presented a different challenge.

After finding the two gram nugget, and pumped by it, I decided to head for the level ground of the abandoned placer pit below the bedrock rise.

It was the late afternoon of a beautiful day. A cobalt bowl of blue sky roofed the mountains to my right and left. The air was still warm, and tiny butterflies sipped water from a fresh-water seep where vibrant green moss clung to life.

For those that have hunted abandoned placer operations, the challenges are familiar. Abandoned placer mines are mines indeed, mines that produce metal shavings, and each and every one of them sound off in the headphones.

For those that don’t know about placer cuts, they’re often large excavations into old, buried channels. To open a placer operation, where I hunt, the miners excavate down from ten to eighty feet into boulder clay or glacial castoff. For the uniformed, boulder clay was left behind by glaciers during the last ice age, all of it peppered with beefy boulders.

So, to mine the buried placer, the boulder clay/glacial castoff must be stripped. But while working with clay, it’s obnoxious, sticky, and it gets everywhere. It clings to everything, smears on everything, and if its wet, it will pull your boots off!

Nonetheless, the pit I’d chosen to hunt had been hammered hard by nugget shooters, yet a department store full of metal bits remained on its bedrock. As mute witness to this fact, my super-magnet looked like a hedgehog on steroids from checking my dig holes.

Nevertheless, I worked my way to a brownish-yellow formation of clay. Nothing but trash.

Detecting the small, clay area, I swung over a screamer of a signal. This in spite of the area having been heavily detected. The recovery however was a bust; it was a deep, square nail.

Pounding the area some more, I heard a slight break, a tiny bump in the threshold. I just about didn’t investigate, as the EMI in that area generated a lot of false signals (the newer detectors now are better at silencing EMI, but not back then). However, I carved off several inches of clay and swung once more. A sweet, repeatable signal, soft, yet distinct.

Scraping off several more inches of clay, the signal definitely grew. I dug around the signal and popped out a chunk of clay that held a signal. Checking the hole, there was still a signal there as well. I placed the chunk aside and kept digging. The sound got louder, but turned harsh, and I recovered a bent, rusted square nail.

Returning to the lump of clay, I scanned across the coil then started breaking off pieces, passing them under the coil until I isolated the signal. Sifting and sorting, I dropped bits onto the coil, and, "Whap!", the same happy sound for the second time that day.

It was nonferrous; the magnet had proven that in the early sorting. So, probing the dirt on the coil, one object finally growled back. I cleaned the clay off and had myself a sassy gram-and-a-half piece of gold, almost square in shape. I rattled it around in the bottle with its two-gram partner, and they gave off a lovely, golden rumble.

Clay is nasty stuff to work, but sometimes it holds the gold for that reason.

All the best,

Lanny

[Jim_Alaska]

The recovery experience in your story has a familiar ring to it Lanny. It makes me think back to my early days of not being sure of just what I was doing. In your story your gold came out first, then the nail. But how many times it could be just the reverse. Get a signal, recover the nail and move on. By not scanning the hole a final time you have effectively left a nugget for someone else to find that could have been yours.

But you can look at it another way; you have eliminated the trash for the next guy, so you did a good deed.

[Lanny]

Jim, I truly wish we could have met when you were stomping around Alaska. I could have learned so much from you, and I know you have lots of stories to tell as well.

As for checking the hole after a signal comes out, I've been surprised enough times by scanning the hole to know it pays to check it for sure.

To think I've done a good deed by removing the trash, I got a good chuckle out of that one Jim.

All the best, and thanks for your support,

Lanny

[Lanny]

Be Careful What You Say

Some years back, my mining buddy and I were working our off from a mountain side in a 4X4. We scraped bottom with the Dodge diesel a few times, that’s how deep the holes were in the road, but as we reached the river at last, we spotted a fat Black Bear hightailing it over a hump of brush and trees on the bank

To cross the river, we threw the truck into four-wheel drive and danced across the river; the river dance where the wheels slip, the truck bounces up, then jerks down, then squirts itself sideways off the bigger rocks in the river, over and over again.

Before I continue with this story, I’d like to flashback to a place I visited on this same river where there was a whack of exposed bedrock that was being reclaimed by the brush and forest.

During an earlier river crossing in the same area, a mining buddy of mine pulled his truck over when we reached the opposite bank, and when we got out, he told me to tag along as he hiked up to the previously mentioned bedrock. He strolled up a little gulch, took out a screwdriver and went to popping coarse gold right out of crevices in the bedrock! All he had was a screwdriver!! (On a return trip, I will detect that bedrock very, very carefully.)

To get back to my original story, having crossed the river, we crawled up a rough, winding logging road on our way tom some bedrock bench claims we had permission to hunt, claims that paralleled a little trout-filled lake. The lake was man-made where the Old-timer’s had dammed the creek at a pinch point so they could flume the water to various downstream sluicing operations. After the gold rush was over, the dam got left in place as it made a great little fishery.

Walking around a bit, we discovered that during the Great Depression many squatters camped beside the lake, and foundation pits are still visible, as well as some old plank-cabins.

In addition, we saw faint signs of cabins from the 1800’s, nothing but overgrown indentations in the ground. Sadly, I was too dumb to detect around them while I was there as I was in a rush to get chasing the gold. So, I've always wondered what artifacts or coins I could have found.

Just down the lake from the old cabin sites, there was a huge rock pile. As I walked over to eyeball that rock pile, one of the miners working the adjoining claim stepped out of the brush right in front of me! (Their outhouse was located inside that brush in a little clearing.)

He asked us what we were up to, and we told him we were heading to the lake claims to nugget shoot. Hearing that, he laughed. He didn’t think much of hunting for nuggets with metal detectors, having seen too many people get skunked. He told us the ground was far too hot for finding gold that way. But, I didn’t want to tip my hand about the super-technology I was packing that could handle such ground, so I let him keep talking.

Then, he told us a story about his rock pile. It was a dragline operation, many, many years past. The former owners had worked that dragline up the narrow canyon right through the stream bottom, all the while building a huge pile of river run and broken bedrock at the head of the works. The operation was successful, and they’d netted a lot of coarse gold.

He told us that some years back, a prospector had come along and begged permission to climb his rock pile to look for specimens. As dragline rock piles are home to some of the rarest and heaviest rocks torn from the bottom of old stream channels, he gave the prospector permission. The only condition, he had to return to show and tell about what rocks he was taking with him. The rock collector was free to keep anything he found.

Now just imagine the miner's surprise when around suppertime the rock hound showed up with a nugget! Furthermore, the claim owner’s jaw hit the ground because that nugget was huge! Grabbing it to take a look at it, the miner couldn’t believe what he was seeing, or the weight he was hefting. For, even though the nugget was only a ¼ to a 1/3rd of an inch thick, it covered the back of his hand from the base of the knuckles to his wrist joint!! And, it was solid gold, no quartz. Why was such a nugget sitting on the rock pile? Well, being flat, the nugget had made skipped over the punch-plates and screens of the dragline’s gold recovery system.

The miner went on to tell us what a tough day it was to follow the “You can keep whatever you find” promise, but he kept his word indeed.

The next couple of stories to follow talk about working the lake-shore bench placers, but those stories are for another day.

All the best,

Lanny

[Jim_Alaska]

Great story Lanny, oh to be young again. Dancing across the river brought back memories of youthful enthusiasm, exuberance, and yes a strong dose of foolishness too. Where I was in Alaska there were no logging roads, but that didn't stop us from some pretty hair raising adventures.

Crossing creeks and rivers was one of the more daring things we encountered. Actually driving up the creek or river was one of the more foolish and dangerous things. Firmly implanted in my memory is the feeling of almost helplessness when the truck starts becoming buoyant. In crossing you are never sure whether the sideways bumping along is going to carry you into deeper water. To say the east, it was a thrill, but not one I would care to repeat and 77 years old.

You know you are tempting fate when one guy has to ride on the hood as you foolishly roll upriver, he is looking for large boulders that could high center the truck, he is also looking for the shallowest parts. It was not uncommon to have water washing up over the hood. I never did understand how the truck kept running in water that deep, although it only happened for a very short time.

The most memorable time going upriver was when we had to do it for two miles so we could haul in some dredging and other equipment that was too much to just pack in on foot. Here you are, two miles off of any road, where a break down or other mishap would not be resulting in a tow truck being called.

[Lanny]

Jim, I love it when you get into memory mode about prospecting.

I can see you heading up the river with the guy on the hood for a lookout! Crazy, fun, exciting, and dangerous, a great mix of emotions, but emotions that I've grown out of as well.

I agree that when you achieve liftoff in the river in a truck, it's quite a panicky feeling, and it's always good when the wheels get on the bottom again to keep you moving.

I remember crossing a river north and west of Nome on a 4X4 quad, and it floated quite a ways before I got gravel and rocks under it again, just kept pouring the coals to the gas and the wheels churning the water must have helped, because I made it safely to the other side.

Always great to have you share some of your stories.

Oh, the things you must have seen, and the adventures you must have had, wonderful!

All the best,

Lanny