Golden Grams of Goodness: Nugget Hunting Tales

[Jim_Alaska]

Lanny, to address that clay post you made a few posts back; there is another amazing aspect of that nasty clay that we don't see addressed much. It has the amazing tendency to make anyone walking through it taller with each step.

[Lanny]

Yes it does, but it sure packs on the weight to boot.

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

The Stretch Nugget

Now, this is a nugget story that’s a bit different from the average hunt. It took place in a steep canyon with a black slate bedrock rim. The top of the rim was about eighty feet above the cold, glacial river.

As for nugget hunting in that location, the pitch of the canyon walls is about sixty-five to seventy degrees. In contrast, trying to climb rock walls of forty-five degrees is risky, but when an even steeper slope is littered with loose, jagged bedrock slabs and cobbles, it’s worse. So, if I had to climb that 65-70-degree slope, it would be mighty sketchy.

A bit earlier in the day, I’d been detecting a bench above the rim and had found a pile of square nails, along with some rarer targets: big bore black powder rifle slugs with grease grooves; and round, rifled, black-powder pistol balls. But, no gold.

However, even without any gold, the day had been exciting. I’d been spooked twice by the loud snapping of twigs close behind me: the first time, two mule deer, and the second, a cow moose.

The day was hot and sunny. It was a glorious summer day with a gentle mountain breeze that let the pines and firs gossip lightly back and forth in the deep greens of the forest. Breaking the spell of calm, an angry squirrel scolded me for being too close to his tree.

Refocusing on my detecting, I took another look at the ground I was working. Stretching before me was a massive area of hand-stacks left by the Old-timer’s from the 1800’s. Piles of cobbles and boulders littered the bedrock in every direction. The bedrock itself was heavily fractured in places, but in others, it was smooth and iron hard.

Having already worked some of that fractured bedrock next to the lip of the canyon, I knew those traps held things very well, like the trash I’d found earlier. So, hoping to find some gold, I poked along the rim detecting some more. As I worked, I noticed areas where the old-timers had pushed overburden off the canyon edge, probably while setting up sluice runs. Suddenly, it struck me that stray gold might have either been pushed or washed over the edge as well.

However, I couldn’t detect my way down that steep slope to look for targets. That slope was a minefield of loose material and razor-edged slabs of black slate. So, I walked along the rim to where I knew an abandoned road would take me down to the river.

Hitting the river bottom, I strolled along inspecting the cliff face. I noticed high up a patch of river-run clinging to an out-thrust of bedrock, not far below the rim, directly below where I’d worked earlier.

Detecting my way upslope, I came up with the usual trash as I tried to get to the out-thrust. I constantly slipped and slid in that loose, steep material. At one point, after losing my footing, I reached out with my free hand as I rocketed downslope, only to get a quick gash in the meaty part of my palm.

However, I kept at it and cut some steps into the slump below the bedrock out-thrust, and at last I had a toehold. Taking advantage of it, I arced the detector around as far as I could from side to side. I hit a couple of targets, but they were junk: the head of a large square nail, and the tip of a smaller one.

Hacking more steps, I moved ever higher. Then, to help me reach the rest of the way to my chosen spot, I extended the detector shaft to the max to get my little mono coil as high above me as possible.

At the top of that stretched out swing, I got a scream that sounded a lot like iron close to the surface. But, to see what it really was, I hacked some new footholds and moved up a bit more.

Stretching carefully, I soon had the signal in my scoop (only several tablespoons of material were in it), the dirt taken from some crumbled bedrock hanging onto that out-thrust.

After a bit of shaking, quartering, and sifting, I had a sassy 2.25gram nugget in my hand. It was quite flat, yet curved and crinkled all along one edge (likely why it made such a racket). That piece of gold, my stretch nugget, was just the right shape to get itself flipped up and over the riffles of a sluice.

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

Prospectors One and Two

Hello to all, just a quick little story from a past prospecting adventure.

Two budding prospectors visited the claim one sunny day. (Both show quite a bit of promise as they both have a knack for finding gold.) They were working a patch of fractured bedrock that had produced consistent flake-gold and pickers the previous summer. Moreover, they had spent time with me on previous trips at that spot, and they'd learned a few tricks about how to find the gold.

Well (I’ll refer to them as number one and number two), number one really went to town cleaning off the overburden on that bedrock: the cobbles, the clay, the boulders, the gravel; he went hard at it, working a couple of feet right down to the bedrock. It was a lot of sweaty work with chunky boulders jammed tight into bedrock pockets. After he'd removed all the bigger stuff, and had scraped the bedrock down, he ran his dirt through a little sluice. He had a nice catch of bright-yellow flake gold, with a few chunky pickers.

Not long after that, prospector number two came along with his detector, and he asked number one if he could detect the bedrock he'd just cleaned off. Number one said he had no problem with that, as he'd carefully cleared the cracks and scraped everything clean. He told number two to go ahead. So, number two ran his detector along the bedrock and got a nice signal that really screamed! It was a sassy nugget, right on the bedrock’s surface, covered in some muddy clay.

Well, number one really worked the bedrock hard after that. He cleared off another four feet of bedrock, really making the dirt and rocks fly! He took his time to make sure the bedrock was super clean, as well as removing any clinging clay. As he’d done before, he had a nice take of gold in his sluice-box. Prospector number two came along yet again with his detector and asked permission to check out the new workings. Number one, confident he hadn’t missed any gold, let him detect.

Prospector number two ran his detector over the bedrock and got a nice soft signal in a crevice. Number one was getting nervous. Prospector two got out his pick and broke off some perpendicular sheets of bedrock and scanned again: the signal was much louder. He cleaned the crevice out, popped the signal on the coil, along with a little water to remove the clay, and there was a buttery-yellow, pumpkin-seed-sized nugget! To say that number one was not a happy camper is gross understatement (things went flying, dark words exploded with vibrant colors, the wild animals fled, etc.). Nevertheless, prospector one was a good sport about it, and they both had some great stories to tell back in camp that night. (Prospector one invested in a metal detector soon after that.)

All the best,

Lanny

[Jim_Alaska]

Now that one was an inspiration for me Lanny. I have not done much nugget shooting in my mining life, but this year is different. Since we can't do other types of mining here in California I am going to devote quite a bit of time to detecting this season.

I am going to attempt to navigate the high bench I discovered, first of all to determine if it is indeed an old river bench, second, if it is, to see if it might give up an elusive nugget or two.

If I make it up there I will be the first person to ever set foot on that bench, it has been covered in material and even forest for millennia. If it is an old Klamath River bench it is about 150 feet higher than the present river. The state did me a big favor by removing all trees and overburden and actually exposing that bench for the first time ever. The state cleared it off because it was a constant source of rock slides onto the road in winter.

I have also been doing some scouting and finding places to detect that although they may have been mined, no one has ever detected the old tailings. I have found three that look promising, as well as some gulches that are way off the beaten track, beside a creek way up in the mountains, it is unlikely anyone has detected these places. I see no signs of detector digs at all. The old tailing piles look like they have remained the same as when the old timers put them there, no signs that anyone has ever dug into or moved material in them.

So I have been using the winter and the inability to dredge to make some kind of progress. Just because we can't do certain things, there certainly are other things we can do that we usually do not have the time for if we can mine other ways.

I don't know how much bedrock I can or will run into, but once I do find some I'll remember this short story, thanks for it Lanny.

[Lanny]

Jim, it sounds like you've got a great chance to hit some gold in that high channel, and what a great break that someone else exposed it for you, and the State to boot! Can't beat that.

Moreover, if you get a chance to detect some virgin tailing piles, you might find yourself a small bonanza.

I wish you the best of luck as you get out to do some serious detecting Jim.

All the best,

Lanny

[Jim_Alaska]

Thanks for the encouragement Lanny. I am excited about the prospects. Of course there is a concern on my part regarding my disability. My brain is constantly getting my body into trouble by telling it that it can do things that it can't do. Of course stubbornness kicks in also, most of the time I just have to try until it proves impossible.

My age and my disability will certainly have an effect on my ability to get up to that high bench. I am extremely unstable on my feet even on level ground and cannot walk or stand without a cane. I have a medical condition that results in no feeling from my knees to my feet. So it will be a challenge, but one I am determined to try. At least there is more hope in this situation because the heavy equipment left a fairly smooth trail up the steep hillside, so I don't have to actually climb.

I'll post my preliminary results, perhaps soon because I am planning on trying to negotiate the place today for an exploratory attempt. Perhaps I can get pictures, this bench is very visible from the road. Actually I have been calling it "a bench", but what I am actually seeing could be three different benches. They are one above another and with the characteristic flat, almost road-like look that large benches have. I am hoping it is actually three old benches formed at different periods of time.

[Lanny]

Jim, that really does sound exciting, in fact, I found myself salivating a bit thinking of the prospects.

Good luck with your expedition, and I'd love some feedback, and perhaps you can turn your finds into something bigger as well if it works out.

Please be careful out there.

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

Lake Placers #1

(This story continues on after we heard the story of the giant nugget found on the rock pile just below the dam of the lake.)

So, after we’d jawed with the rock-pile owner some more, we decided we’d better head up the trail to check out the lake placers. The gold runs up both sides of the lake, so we picked a side and headed on up.

We weren’t in much of a hurry that day. My partner had a badly broken wrist, complete with a new cast plastered on just before we’d left home. So, we were taking it easy.

While we hiked along, we enjoyed one of those gorgeously long, northern summer days: the warm, calm ones perfect for bottling, only to be opened much later on a frosty, winter’s day. Moreover, as it was summer, the sunlight that far north would last well after eleven or so, and then a lengthy twilight would continue after that.

Enjoying that extended summer sun, we walked along the lake and saw the cutthroat, true ambush experts, rising in a feeding frenzy, hammering the various insects floating the surface of Nature’s fast food outlet. That healthy population of fish was likely why the locals had never un-dammed the creek at that place.

As we continued up the lakeshore, a breeze periodically stirred the surface of the water, yet calmed quickly, allowing the trout to continue their feeding.

Along the borders of the lake, the willows waited patiently for a new breeze to whisper up the shore the news of our coming.

At last we reached the claims we had permission to hunt. There was evidence everywhere of shallow surface mining that had exposed the bedrock in great sheets. That bedrock was mostly iron-hard, as the D-8 Cat that had just finished scraping was only able to cut into small sections of rotten bedrock. The rest of the bedrock was a hardened nightmare. Even the excavator had skipped and skidded across most of it as well. This had frustrated the placer miners as the area was known for its coarse gold.

To backtrack a bit, about a month earlier, I’d been on a gold-scouting expedition. I’d made the trip with an in-law of one of the miners. The bedrock spot I’ve just described was the first place he and I visited.

The placer miners, a couple of brothers, were then working on one of the lake claims, but when they saw us, they shut down to chew the fat. That’s the way of the remote north, any visitors or news from the outside is a welcome break. So, we yakked and caught them up on events.

As we talked, one of the brothers started to clean the header on the wash-plant's sluice. He lifted the screen off the box and scraped material into a pan.

All at once he stopped his scraping, reached into the header-box and tossed something straight at me. I was caught completely off guard by the toss, and the only thing that saved me was reflex.

Luckily, I caught what he chucked, and it was heavy! In my hand was an ugly black rock. And as I looked, I thought whatever that ugly was, it wasn’t gold, because who in their right mind would chuck a nugget to me while I was standing on a huge pile of cobbles, especially a stranger?

I told the brother that whatever he’d tossed me, it sure didn't look like gold. Pulling me up short, he told me it was a gold nugget. I was stunned.

He then took out a pocket-knife and very gently scratched away at one blackened corner. A gnarly black scale flaked off, and I was a believer! The glint of gold was unmistakeable. Furthermore, the nugget weighed in at over an ounce and a quarter, and it was solid gold, no quartz.

As to how they cleaned the black gold from that claim, they’d put it in a vinegar bath overnight. The next day, some slimy sludge was all that was left of the black coating. The resulting gold was a beautiful, buttery yellow.

In Lake Placers # 2, I’ll tell how we learned to hunt the nuggets on that claim.

All the best,

Lanny

[Jim_Alaska]

Well, "the best made plans of mice and men" took affect today. I had every intention of trying out the high bench I wrote about. First I wanted to wait until afternoon when it got warmer, it is still pretty cool in the mornings here along the river.

Then I took a nap, naps are not optional at my age . When I got up it was just a bit late, but not too late to go. But going involved more than just jumping in the truck. I had to find all my stuff to detect and dig with. This turned into a time consuming chore since I have not done any kind of mining for the last two years and in that time have moved from one house to another.

So, as is usually the case all my "stuff" was "somewhere". That somewhere became very elusive. The move from one house to another resulted in a garage packed to the rafters with "other stuff".

I am sure you have all been through the scenario after a move, the never ending quest to find what you desperately need when you need it, which never happens smoothly.

So, in the end the afternoon was spent rummaging through boxes, buckets, tool boxes and canvass bags. Found a tool here and a tool there, but not all together as I expected them to be. I usually keep all mining mining type tools apart from any other tools, but for some strange reason, not this time.

The upshot of this whole story is that I found what I needed, but by then it was too late, the sun was yawning and headed for bed behind the western mountains. So, the day didn't turn out as I had planned, but it was good in that all the tool and equipment finding is done and accounted for. So , no detecting news for tonight, but there will be another day. That day will probably be Thursday since I have to be gone tomorrow.

Sorry for hijacking your thread Lanny.