Golden Grams of Goodness: Nugget Hunting Tales

[Joe S (AK)]

Me Too!

Joe

[Lanny]

Suction Eddy Gold, Part II

My brain at last connected that directly above me was the bedrock hump, and here was steeply rising bedrock trending in the same direction. Talk about a cross-wired brain (and one snapped shut, remember?)!

In hindsight, the eddy exposed a shelf that must have connected to the hump. Of course, there were tons and tons of overburden between me, the rest of that rising bedrock, and the hump. Anyway, my brain at last tuned in, and I scraped the exposed bedrock and sluiced the remaining material. (I had an aluminum river sluice in my vehicle up on the cat-trail. Freighting it down to the river, I had a near-death experience from the header I took while taking what I thought was a short-cut; however, I made it to the river in one piece.)

I started sluicing. The first shovel of dirt produced an instant nugget. It was around two grams, and L-shaped. It didn't even get into the first riffle. It just hit and sat in the header, sparking golden in the summer sunlight.

I sluiced the remaining dirt and recovered chunky gold throughout. It was getting dark, and I didn’t want to leave, but I’ve no love for mountain lions or grizzlies. So, I headed back to the safe, comfortable log cabin I called home in that northern land. (On a side note, I need to mention it had been raining for three days straight prior to my first find on the river. This helps explain upcoming details.)

When I floundered my way downslope through the much safer face-slapping route the next morning, I saw the river had dropped about four inches. Seeing a fresh, soft bedrock edge exposed by the lower waterline, I was suddenly stunned. There winking in the morning sun was a nugget! (A little sunbather taking advantage of the new beach so to speak.) My mind, now wide-open to prospecting lore, started calculating what had likely happened at the site.

I reflected that there was consistent gold right up to the boulder clay on the bank where the suction eddy had torn into it. Moreover, that gold was being drug down into the pool. So, I scraped with my shovel out into the pool as far as I could I could, but the bedrock dropped off quite sharply into that eight-feet of water. As well, for any that have scraped off river run, while fighting hydraulic pressure, it's tough-sledding indeed.

In spite of the challenge, the coarse gold that came up from the submerged river-run was spectacular! By the time I'd retrieved all the material I could, I had a quarter-ounce of nice rounded coarse gold, and several nice sassy nuggets to boot.

So, what’s the analysis of that suction eddy gold deposit? Well, those early square nail finds were everywhere because the suction eddy had plucked them from flood-level waters, and the bedrock held them fast. Cleary, the gold was yanked from the flood water along with the nails as well. But, the haunting reality to me now is that a whack of those “square nail signals” were feisty nuggets! This leaves me with the uncomfortable reality that what the heck did I throw into that eight-foot-deep pool as I cleared the overburden?

What the heck indeed. . . .


All the best,

Lanny in AB

[Author's note: I heard the next year that some dredgers went into that pool. One of the mine-workers had seen my truck parked on the trail, had walked down to the river to investigate after I'd left, had seen the suction eddy as well as my diggings, and he sent his buddies the next year to dredge the spot. Well, they had a field day in that hole and took out ounces of coarse gold! As I reflect now, It's clear to me that the suction eddy had cut into an old channel that trended up the river bank to that old drift mine. (Likely how the Oldtimers had found the higher deposit of gold in the 1800’s.) This gold tale is just one of my missed opportunities that still haunt me.]

[Jim_Alaska]

Another great story Lanny. Oh, for the wisdom and knowledge we have now, only to wish we had it back then.

I can also identify with "near death" experiences while taking a supposedly short cut. Funny how those short cuts almost never work out the way we thought they would.

[Lanny]

Another great story Lanny. Oh, for the wisdom and knowledge we have now, only to wish we had it back then.

I can also identify with "near death" experiences while taking a supposedly short cut. Funny how those short cuts almost never work out the way we thought they would.

Yes, completely agree--short cuts often equal near-death experiences in rugged terrain.

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

An explanation on the nature of boulder clay, and glacial gold action

People have asked me what boulder clay is. Well, the only explanation I have comes from local knowledge shared with me by the placer miners in the northlands.

When the glaciers were running many miles deep, and countless miles wide during the ice age, they dragged unsized rock and soil with them. They packed along serious boulders mixed within stubborn clay. While parked and melting, or when melting and retreating, they dumped this nasty mess all over the lower areas, as well as the mountains and valleys. To understand this, it’s necessary to remember those huge glaciers were miles thick, covering many mountains completely.

With such titanic forces moving these glaciers, and when they dropped their loads, they often left forty feet and more of this boulder clay which smothered the existing stream beds. This protected any golden stream deposits for untold eons. Over countless thousands of years, successive glaciers and post-glacial streams chewed away at the boulder clay in the canyons, erosion working its way down to those hidden deposits. When they cut into that former river-run (freshly exposed), they started re-concentrating the gold in those existing streams.

Sometimes, the early prospectors got lucky enough to find a bedrock outcrop that was the rim protecting an ancient channel from glacial gouging along a river, and then they’d tunnel in, drifting along the bedrock to mine out the deposit under the huge deposits of adjacent boulder clay bordering the streams.

So, boulder clay (sometimes called armour clay), is a solid deposit of boulders and heavy clay that overlies old stream deposits and ancient channels. It is the bane of modern miners, as it has to be stripped away to get at the channels underneath, and it often requires ripper teeth on the back of huge bulldozers to break it up sufficiently so it can be bladed out of the way. Clearly, it takes a lot of time and money to strip it off.

But, once that overburden is stripped away, and if the Oldtimer's haven't beaten the modern miners to the deposits underneath, it is sometimes a glorious bonanza to behold! The nuggets in the sidewalls of the channel are easily seen (a foot or two off the bedrock). I’ll never forget that incredible sight twice seen: multi-gram nuggets spaced eight to ten inches apart, making it easy to finger-flip the nuggets out of the channel material into a pan. Too bad those nuggets weren't mine to keep!

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

Local miners and exploration

Way up north where the wolverines roam, we were out one day cutting firewood, then took off to find drinking water. We found a local spring up the canyon with sweet water whose taste finished with a slight buzz on the tongue, strange, but great stuff.

The next morning, after starting a fire to kill the chill in the wall tent (water in the fire bucket covered in ice), and after a miners’ breakfast cooked on the wood-burning stove, we lathered up with bug-dope, hopped on the ATV, and bounced along the rough, twisting road through pines, fir, and stands of aspen and birch. Fresh yellow and purple mountain flowers grew thick along the road-side. Lazy bumblebees tumbled from flower to flower while butterflies and humming birds sipped nectar as the pleasing smell of new-growth pine filled the air.

The ATV climbed in elevation toward the active upstream placer claims. We stopped and introduced ourselves in every mining camp along the way. Two upstream operations bordered the main logging road, with a total of eight workers. Both operations had exposed old drift mines from the 1800’s and 1930’s.

Staring at those now open tunnels was fascinating, and one of the miners offered to lift me up in the bucket of the excavator if I wanted to poke around inside. But looking at the collapsed and rotting timbering, I passed on his generosity.

The larger of the two placer mines was working upper-strata dirt that ran six grams to the yard, but when they hit bedrock, it ran eight grams to the yard. The bedrock gold was coarse, with nuggets in the half-ounce to ounce-and-a-half range. That coarse gold had tons of character, bumpy and rough. The bedrock that held it was graphite schist and slate.

The other operation was smaller, their equipment much older, with lots of down-time to repair equipment. Moreover, both mines were located where several ancient channels intersected, and the smaller mine was getting the same gorgeous gold. At both locations, the friendly miners shut down their wash-plant and excavation machinery to chat with us.

Both groups of miners invited us to detect their claims whenever we wished. We just had to tell them what we found and where. Furthermore, they told us to keep all the gold we detected, great people! (We went home with some fantastic nuggets thanks to them.)

Leaving the two mines, we took a branch off the main logging road, exploring an inactive logging trail. Along the way, we noticed where old growth trees were cut long ago in the canyon, their massive, moss-covered stumps accompanying the new growth. To our surprise, we found a placer miner far up that trail, located downslope in an adjoining gulch. With an old WWII-era D-8 Cat, he was patiently working a small-scale operation with a pay layer that was six feet off the bedrock. Strangely, there was no gold on the bedrock (lots of pyrite though), yet the gold he was getting was magnificent—some of it was crystalline, and all of it was coarse.

He was a very trusting sort, and at the end of the day, when the cleanup was taken from the wash-plant, he gave us the concentrates and told us to pan them out! (They were loaded with coarse gold.) He left us to keep panning, then headed off to have a bath in his outdoor tub, heated by a clever invention he’d connected to the water-jacket of the engine block of his Gen-Set.

From him, we learned the gold deposits in that area required real detective work. The pay-layers had to found and worked wherever they were; they weren’t deposited in a normal way due to multiple glaciation events. It required forgetting former gold ideas, keeping the mind open so as to accept new techniques and strategies hard-earned by the locals. So, we threw out the idea that gold always concentrated on bedrock and accepted his new teachings.

We spent the entire day exploring, meeting people, and asking lots of questions. While cruising from mine to mine, we also oriented ourselves to our new surroundings. By the time we got back to camp, it was getting dusky (about 11:30 at night). We were both bone tired, not yet recovered from the sketchy trip in to our base camp.

So, back at camp, we were eager to drive the bugs out of the tent by firing up the wood-burning stove, as well as making sure the Winchester 30-30 was loaded for business and within easy reach, just in case an apex predator decided to call.

With the tent nice and warm, we crawled into our sleeping bags, and we drifted off accompanied by the solid heat, and lulling crackle of the logs burning in the stove.

We spent weeks in the area and had many adventures. It is a nugget-shooter’s paradise for sure, and I hope to return one day. But the trip is hard on vehicles and tires, and the air is filled with bugs. So, perhaps I’ll visit one year in the fall, after the frost has knocked the bugs down, and it has firmed the roads up a bit.

All the best,

Lanny

[Slatco]

Awesome stories Lanny! THanks for sharing. I love them as the locations you talk about remind me of where I mine and it gets me thinking about areas to explore and things I may have overlooked! Keep them coming!

[Lanny]

Many thanks for your kind words, truly appreciate them.

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

Bedrock Drain Gold

Back in March of 2011, I did some reading/research about a goldfield (rare, out-of-print book) that was worked in the 1890's, and found a couple of fascinating accounts.

In one of the references, a company of men was hired to cut a bedrock drain for a hydraulic operation; they cut a trench in solid rock to drain the water to stop the hydraulic wash from pooling, thus stopping the sluicing recovery.

(I've seen cuts like that before, anywhere from 3-4, all the way up to 8-9 feet deep. Deeper ones are rarer.) The cuts discussed in the book were in bedrock that was cleaned, with the pay shallow to bedrock (laying 3-4 feet above), with lots of coarse gold recovered.

The miners had to cut 300 feet of bedrock drain. While cutting the drain, they must have seen pay trapped deep in the bedrock (this has to be implied from the context of the narrative). Moreover, enough gold was found trapped in the bedrock to fund the entire project!

That fact is interesting enough, but later in the chapter, there’s a discussion about the Chinese claim holders and their workings. The Celestials (as they were called) were also working a bedrock area previously cleaned, and yet, with their bedrock drain completed, they recovered 625 ounces of gold!

While reading those stories, it struck me as odd how the Oldtimer's seemingly rushed to work bedrock yet left so much gold behind! That seemed to be the case. However, I reflected on bedrock I've broken and worked by hand, and unless there’s some surface indication of gold under solid bedrock (the Oldtimer's were limited to hand-tools, no electronic advantage), like an obvious crevice to break open, there’s no way I’d cut down into bedrock six to eight feet either!

After reading that out-of-print book, it really made me wonder what might still be buried under the stacked, washed rock and gravel that covers so many areas of bedrock once worked by hand.

Quite the thing to ponder, as the book really jarred me. (Some of you may have had success working such bedrock. I know I’ve chiseled nuggets from bedrock that had no indications of any crevices whatsoever—a perfectly smooth surface. The only indication of gold beneath was given by my metal detector, and the nuggets were sure there, multi-gram beauties to boot.)

All the best,

Lanny

[Joe S (AK)]

Lanny,

While the question you pose seems fairly complicated there is one simple circumstance that comes readily to mind.

Years ago I was doing some research on the area where I eventually staked a claim. As part of that reading I found some geological reports from before WWII that explained the source for the Gold in that (later) mountain claim of mine.

It seems that in the past Gold had weathered out of volcanic rock and that Gold, along with other bits 'n pieces of surface Gold were pretty much just laying around with nowhere to go. Along came some mighty big glaciers, scooped up any gravel and it's included Gold and then moved the entire bunch of stuff to a new home. Either that same glacier or a later one then came along and sat squarely on that pile of mish-mash and squeezed everything into what was now just called "conglomerate". Later on that conglomerate "weathered out" and broke down into it's components of round pebbles, clay, sand and Gold. Of course normal stream dynamics sorted out all those components in their new home by density and left all that Gold for the guys just before me.

Even today I am able to find some of that old, left over, conglomerate in the streams in the area.

So yes, just a breaking down of old altered sources of Gold could have produced the Gold you questioned if the bedrock was not volcanic in origin.

Joe