Golden Grams of Goodness: Nugget Hunting Tales

[Lanny]

Golden Grams of Goodness: Part 1

November is not usually a time of year that I get to chase the gold. By the time November rolls around, the ground usually requires some dynamite or something equally powerful to break through the frost to get to the gold. However, this year has been a year of exceptions. In September, we had early snow and frost that carried into October, and that doesn’t happen very often as usually the weather is rather mild. However, after the early blast of Arctic bad temper, the weather shook itself out until the first week of November with temperatures above average, so this allowed the chance to engage in some gold sleuthing when normally I’d be reduced to only dreaming of chasing the gold.

I have two sons, the eldest loves to chase the gold, while the other will chase the gold given the opportunity, but he doesn’t have the same level of passion. My eldest was with me on this trip, and he was with me on our epic gold adventure when we truly slew an army of nuggets early in the summer (I haven't posted that story yet), so he was eager to have a chance to hone his detecting and sniping skills.

The area we dropped into to work was full of bedrock pinnacles. These pinnacles were formed of an iron-hard bedrock, so hard that big equipment had negligible effect. Smoke was pouring off the bucket teeth and blade of the excavators as they tried to outmuscle the mother rock. As a result, there was a section of ground about the size of two school buses parked side-by-side, but just a bit longer. Looking down into the excavation, there were three pools of water as well as a small stream of clear seepage water running diagonally across the northern, more elevated end of the bedrock. The southern end was where the largest pool of water was, and the eastern side of the excavation had a culvert that was collecting the water from the stream to then divert it through a long series of interconnected culverts to a sump where a six-inch diesel powered pump was working night and day to keep that sump cleared.

Over the entire area of the bedrock, there were many buried, small gutters with high, then lower humps, and throughout the area, there were those pinnacles of super-hard bedrock, some of them rising up almost four feet resulting in an area that could not be cleaned out properly by the modern miners with their big equipment. The area was perfect for detector and sniping work, so that’s how we decided to tackle it.

Pinnacles Cut.jpg

To be continued . . .

All the best,

Lanny

[Jim_Alaska]

Sounds a lot like an old hydraulic pit I found last summer. These pinnacles were fractured as well as hard. Lots of work, no nuggets, but decent smaller gold in crevices.

[Lanny]

Sounds a lot like an old hydraulic pit I found last summer. These pinnacles were fractured as well as hard. Lots of work, no nuggets, but decent smaller gold in crevices.

Hi Jim, it's been too long. Nice to hear about your hydraulic site experience as I've found lots of interesting items in old hydraulic workings, and nice gold too, so I'm glad you got some.

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

Golden Grams of Goodness: Part 2

First, we set up the detectors, then started to ground balance our machines. The first thing I noticed was the iron bars were high! It didn’t seem to matter where I swung the detector, the background feedback was high in iron. I knew instantly that was going to affect the detection depth on the VLF, and the high concentration of iron in the bedrock was also going to cause problems for the Minelab PI as well, and that heavy mineralization did run interference on both machines. (After all, whether a VLF [very low frequency] or a PI [pulse induction] machine, they’re both wired to find metal, and iron is definitely a metal. For whatever reason, many rookies forget this fact, and they think there’s something wrong with their detector if their machine won’t ignore high concentrations of iron.) Moreover, when I’d get a signal, the numbers would jump around and would not pin dead on, which they do quite often in milder ground, necessitating that I dig down to the target, disturb the target, then scan again.

Of note, many times nuggets were over the top of big pieces of ironstone, or under or beside them, and sometimes chunks of gold were sited in intact material that overlay thick bands of high quality iron that was running in veins about two inches thick! With all of the natural metal everywhere, it was turning out to be a challenging day. In fact, several times I got the coil over such thick intrusions of iron that the detector overloaded; now, that really is hot material to try to find nuggets in for sure! Furthermore, depth was seriously limited, and the proof of this was that in any material around several inches thick, which was still tight on bedrock, I couldn’t even get a reading on half-gram pickers down in the bedrock cracks.

*** Prospecting tip: when your detector is finding good and juicy concentrations of nuggets in some sections of bedrock with milder conditions, yet the detector is so obviously struggling to handle the conditions in still other sections, break out the sniping tools! The detector has already proven to you that the gold is there in concentration on the bedrock, so you must be smarter than your detectors’ limitations (PI or VLF) due to mineralization. Instead of fighting a losing electronic battle, put the detectors down and test, test, test by sniping!! We were amazed at what we were missing due to the detectors’ blindness in those severe conditions. Yes, amazed really is the right word as we took home a lot of gold we’d have missed if we’d dumbed ourselves down and only relied on the detectors’ brains which had a serious case of iron flu. ***

To elaborate, we knew the sassy pickers were there because sometimes we’d get a broad signal over an area, something normally interpreted as ground noise, not as a positive target, yet by digging and panning, we gathered all kinds of pickers in the pan the little VLF would normally scream on. The proof of good gold certainly was in the pan! However, on this day, the symptoms of the iron flu offered only silence from the detector. The iron mineralization had clearly infected both machines as the PI wasn’t doing any better on the small stuff because a positive target to any detector is a positive target, whether ferrous or non-ferrous. 

Iron Stone Gold copy.jpg

Furthermore, with such a massive concentration of ironstone and banded iron in the bedrock, shallow depth was the rule of the day, and smaller targets that were normally a breeze to hear on average bedrock either didn’t make a peep or the broad disturbance in the threshold sounded like ground noise. To compound matters, many of the nuggets and bigger flakes were pancake flat. Now, for those of you that have done a lot of detecting, anything on edge is much harder to detect vs. a target lying flat and face-up or one which is resting at a fairly shallow angle while mostly face up. Moreover, with many of the larger flakes being so flat and on edge, going super slow while using small coils was a necessity to try to hear any tiny fluctuations in the threshold that day amongst all of the iron clatter. However, just try to imagine the concentration required to filter the genuine gold signals from the false signals generated by all of that iron, and you’ll have some picture of what we struggled with.

Boreal Forest.JPG

All the best,

Lanny

To be continued . . .

[Jim_Alaska]

This segmented post is turning out to be a great learning tool for inexperienced detectorists as well as probably many experienced ones. Thanks for the valuable insight Lanny.

[ProspectingAK]

Lanny sounds like some serious wear and tear on the old ears..!! Was this in California?

[Lanny]

Thanks for the question, and no, it was in the western goldfields of Canada, in British Columbia (the westernmost Canadian province that has a Pacific coastline just like California, and the same gold belt I believe that runs north all the way to Arctic.)

I have run into all different kinds of problems with mineralization in different parts of British Columbia (BC), some conditions so hot they'll defeat almost any detector made. However, recently I've been hunting areas where the ground has been much milder, that is until we decided to tackle the spot described in the story, and the hot-rocks, natural iron, bands of mineralization in the bedrock were something else, hard on the ears for sure.

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

Golden Grams of Goodness: Part 3

Even though the bedrock was super hard in that location, it did have some fractures, but it was a rare exception to find any breaks in the stone that had much depth due to the hardness of the rock. However, what that bedrock did have was lots of little gutters with bends indented into it, decorated with twists and dips, and those made for some great little gold traps for sassy pickers, lonely nuggets, and juicy flakes, and there was lots of gold to go around, and I do mean lots!

When conditions would allow, we scrubbed the coils right tight on the bedrock listening for faint breaks in the threshold or for those aforementioned broader signals, and every time we’d get a hit, we’d shut off the detectors and go to work with the sniping tools. After cleaning the twists and turns of the little gutters, we’d detect them again and find gold that could now be heard because we’d removed so many ironstone chunks with the sniping tools and the super-magnets.

However, the non-magnetic dark hot rocks (one less oxygen molecule from the magnetic ones I believe?) still caused trouble, but there were less of them compared to the the truly troublesome ones we’d got out of the way. (The iron bands couldn’t be dealt with by detecting though, and I’m sure we left gold behind along their edges when we finally ran out of time.) By continuing to scan the bedrock, we hit some nuggets in the 2-3 gram range as well, and a few bigger ones to boot—right sassy, beefy brawlers. Regardless of the bigger pieces, lots of flat nuggets were wedged down in any crack they’d been able to work their way into while travelling over that iron-hard bedrock, and we really had to work to liberate them.

In addition, we took our time to carefully scan any clay or channel material that was stuck to the sides of those bedrock pinnacles I mentioned early in the story, and by careful scraping after we got a positive detector response along those sides (when we could), we captured a lot of additional pickers from their slopes. Having already learned from our previous finds in hot ground, we’d shut down the detectors after finding any detectable gold on around or near the base of the pinnacles as well, and it sure paid off with lots of nice gold we would have missed electronically. In retrospect, it was somewhat ironic that we had to revert to age-old gold gathering techniques used thousands of years ago because our modern electronic wizardry was overwhelmed and outclassed, but that just goes to show why it’s good to be well-rounded in gold getting techniques, with a healthy collection of excellent tools as well to use for specialized purposes; because, does anyone really know what they’ll be up against when Mother Nature’s been scheming and plotting to hide her gold?

Double Rainbow.JPG

On a different note, we used the waterproof coils to search the bottom of the pools and we found some gold that way too, but not much as where the pools were, the bedrock had been softer which allowed the excavator buckets to dig deep. A Cheechako (greenhorn) and a Sourdough (seasoned miner) joined us in the excavation for a while, and they too found gold, with the lucky Cheechako hitting a nice multi-gram nugget (the size of my thumbnail) with his detector, a chunk that had been drug, with some larger rocks, off to the side of the bedrock drain that was channeling water into the culvert of the drain. We were happy for him, and happy for the Sourdough (a veteran of many a gold chase) too who sniped like a man possessed with the pure golden fever, a sight to behold! Well, he walked away with a nice catch of pickers and small nuggets in his bottle as he’d set up a little high-banker so he could process more material. However, neither of them came close to our tally in weight, but they sure had fun, and we did too.

Paper Gold.JPG

It was a great day, and I walked out with lots of growly golden rattlers in my gold bottle (that bottle had weight issues, good ones though) and my son did better than me as he went back the next day in the rain and rescued a third more gold than he’d gathered the previous day. As for me, I was content to just hunker down in my wet-weather gear and watch him have fun in the drizzle, and then I helped him haul his equipment out of the excavation up the boulder strewn slope back to the waiting 4X4 diesel. However, what should have been an easy exit from the site got highly sketchy in a hurry as the rain had caused a big slump right across the road by sliding muck down the north side of the excavation, with the mess beginning about seventy-five yards from where we were working. Moreover, it’s a good thing my diesel has lots of clearance or we’d still be glued there in the goo, but with the high clearance and the awesome torque of that diesel, it chewed us safely through. Now, if I’d have been in my gasoline-powered 4X4, which has lower clearance and not near the torque, it likely would have been a bad ending to a great gold trip.

Big Blue.JPG

All the best,

Lanny

[Jim_Alaska]

A great 3rd. installment of your "golden grams of goodness" series Lanny. Thank you for this, it makes for interesting and encouraging reading, as do all your adventures.

Isn't the Internet amazing? We can get stories like this free, that normally we would have to pay a magazine to get. A big thank you to Lanny and others like him who contribute so freely for the benefit of others.

[ProspectingAK]

Enjoyed the 3rd installment as well. Especially the sound of them beefy brawlers.!! Nice to hear the high riding diesel helped your egress from the gold bearing slop infested excavation..!! Now...!! I am interested to hear the story of the " ARMY OF NUGGETS"....!!!

CORY