Golden Grams of Goodness: Nugget Hunting Tales

[Lanny]

Jim, as always thanks for your hospitality and your appreciation of the stories.

I truly understand how much it is to miss the lure of the north and wish you could visit it as well.

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

Lake Placers #3

As part of this ongoing series of gold tales, I’ll explain the channel depositions of this area. From what the geologists and the miners out-lined, the glaciers were masters of that northern kingdom for eons. There were glacial stream concentrations of six or seven channels laid down from different directions of deposition. This reflects the continual glaciation and resultant upheavals of watersheds in the area. Moreover, as the glacial streams were constantly re-oriented at varying angles, they dropped their material in those new runs, some being heavy with gold, others barren

The ongoing detective work, from the Sourdoughs of the 1800’s on down to today, went into determining which runs carried coarse gold. Furthermore, a super glacier had clearly bulldozed through this narrow choke point, scooping out most of the overlying channels as it worked its way down-slope and burrowed toward the bedrock. Evidently Mother Nature had been quite a help at stripping overburden. Nevertheless, with mysterious motives I'll never understand, she then burrowed deeper, hauling the rest of the coarse gold deposit off to banishment in an unknown location, leaving only the telltale bedrock gouges of that robber glacier, clearly evident at the end of the gold run.

However, the beauty of the gold run left in place was that the face was only about six feet from the standing forest with its green and yellow carpet of moss, the depth of the channel shallow to bedrock. Clearly, this lowest run of the remaining overlapping channels had been packing a considerable amount of coarse, nuggetty gold, likely the result of much higher than average stream velocity which had propelled large boulders along with the big gold.

I detected and recovered one smaller piece, match-head sized, from the crumbling rock, and then the ground went silent. So, we wandered back to the fierce zone of insane bedrock but only encountered a hot mess of false signals, no gold (I’d love to hit that spot today with the newest generation of Minelabs to tease more black nuggets from the bedrock!). Regardless, after finding only bits of blade on the surface, we wandered down-slope to where there was a four to six-foot wall of virgin rock and dirt. It was the spot where the bedrock dove under the forest floor and moss I mentioned earlier, and it marked the farthest advance of the mining cut.

There was a slump of dirt, maybe a foot or two in front of the aforementioned wall, and then there was an exposed sheet of that red hot bedrock. The detector could only function at about half of its capacity, losing a lot of sensitivity as to depth. So, I hunted with far less power, but at least I was still in the game. (The new generation of Minelabs and coils deal with ridiculous bedrock much better.)

I kept detecting, but the screeches from the detector sounded like a cat fight crossed with the squeals of train brakes gone wild! Regardless, I kept at it. As my buddy didn’t know how to run the detector, let alone deal with the hot bedrock racket in the headphones, he waited there like a bird-dog on point, ready for any game to flush. However, he didn’t have to be on point for long, as emerging from that tortured electronic noise there came the unmistakable low-high-low sound of gold!

So, I tried to isolate the target signal from the background racket, and all at once I heard this series of terrible high-pitched wails, followed by screeching sounds I’d never heard while detecting. I thought the bedrock minerals had finally conquered the detector until I realized the noise was coming from my partner! A complete squadron of black-flies had crawled down the front of his shirt leaving a bright red patch of raw skin in the middle of his chest!! (If you know nothing of blackflies, you know nothing about the weeks of pain, the scratching, the possible madness from misery.) After hosing my buddy down with a bug dope shower, I got back to detecting.

I was rewarded with the unmistakable sound of a good response. My partner scraped the bedrock as well as he could with one hand, and I used the flat side of my pick to clear the rest of the small stones and clay to expose the shallow pockets in the bedrock.

My dim brain remembered that the DD coil might be much quieter than the little 8-inch mono-loop, so I made the switch, but before I got down on my knees to investigate, I swung the DD in a wider arc just to test its operation and heard several quiet signals—things were rapidly getting interesting. However, the continuous racket of feedback was still there, even with the DD! Putting the detector aside, I knelt down to have a look. However, what I saw was a visual mystery. I was looking at solid bedrock. I mean there were no crevices at all. I couldn’t fit a knife blade into any visible spaces.

I’ll post Lake Placers #4 later.

All the best,

Lanny

[Jim_Alaska]

Hmmmmm....cliff-hanger huh? Something tells me that the intrepid prospector doesn't allow smooth bedrock to stop him.

No cracks huh? Followed far enough the bedrock will give up its mystery.

[Lanny]

Lake Placers #4

I knew there were signals in the bedrock, and they sounded sweet, so I headed off to gather tools. We had a small sledge back in the truck, an assortment of rock chisels, and the Estwing pry-bar, the one that has the pointed chisel end on the bottom, and the flat L-shaped head on the top. Moreover, the “L” can be used to scrape or be used as a chisel as well to hammer into a crevice—absolutely beautiful little tool.

Having rounded up the tools, I hustled back to the site. The most amazing part was that once I started to chisel out bedrock chunks, the original bedrock was indeed solid, but there was a natural cement of fine-grained, crushed black slate that had been running with the gold in the stream channel that created a perfectly camouflaged matrix, the matrix rock hard as well. In this way, Nature had hidden the original crevices perfectly.

Using hammer and chisel, I worked my way down well outside the edge of the signal’s midpoint. I usually had to go down two to four inches to get below the signal, but then I’d insert a longer chisel and reef on it until the piece of bedrock and matrix popped out. Sometimes the piece would flush up in the air just like a game bird! (It makes sense now why my partner was on point like a bird dog.) After the first nugget flew, we made sure to block the flight path with a large gold pan. We couldn’t risk losing any nuggets in adjacent cobble piles.

After recovering the nugget-rich matrix, I took the chunks and carefully tapped on them until they started to fracture and crumble. (As the matrix and the bedrock were of the same hardness, I never knew where the piece was going to fracture.) Having reduced everything to small pieces, I passed them under the coil to pinpoint the gold-bearing ones.

After tapping away to remove the remaining residue, the gleam of gold was unmistakeable. Moreover, all of the nuggets had wonderful character, nothing flat, featureless or hammered. It was incredible fun liberating a dozen of those long hidden multi-gram nuggets.

Did I smash any fingers while reducing the chunks? Absolutely. Did it hurt? If a fingernail goes black and falls off later, would that qualify? Regardless, the gold adventure was well worth the effort.

In another instalment, I’ll talk about detecting the test-piles farther up that same placer claim and what I found in them.

All the best,

Lanny

[Jim_Alaska]

Wow, incredible find Lanny, never give up. We have that naturally cemented material here on the Klamath River. Breaking it apart with hammers and chisels did not seem like a good option to me, too easy to lose the gold that the chunks held, especially any fine gold mixed in. Soooo....When dredging, as I uncover the cemented stuff I use a very high pressure pressure washer. This reduces the cemented material down to its individual grains and can then be sucked up with the nozzle. We don't have a predominance of nuggets here, most is fine gold and you can't recover it by breaking the matrix apart. It just gets lost in the pieces, but by reducing it we can recover everything.

Thanks for the end of the cliff hanger Lanny, another wonderful story from the north.

[Lanny]

Jim, truly enjoyed reading your story of the Klamath river gold cemented material. Wish I could have had some dredging time with you to have seen it first hand. I know you have far more mining stories to tell than I'll likely gather in the rest of my lifetime, and I love that you are willing to share some of them with me.

Thanks for the compliment about the story as well.

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

A New Learning Curve

My son and I loaded up our blue mule (Dodge 3/4 ton diesel) and headed for the mountains Friday evening.

That meant we'd be doing part of the drive in the dark, and setting up camp in the dark, but when we're out chasing the gold, that's no hardship at all.

Early the next morning, we did an equipment check: gold pans, a bucket full of sniping equipment, a couple of picks, as well as several detectors. On our way to check freshly uncovered bedrock, we wanted to make sure we had what we needed.

My son had his Minelab X-Terra 705, a machine he's got about 600 hours on detecting for coins and jewelry (and he's done very well!), a machine I gave him a few years ago, but he's never used it to look for nuggets, so this trip would be a new learning curve for him.

The 705 is a machine that Minelab put a lot of extra technology inside for the price-point at the time, and it had sniffed out nuggets in the past, so I knew it would do the job on shallow to gold bedrock that wasn't super hot.

To leave camp that Saturday morning, we ignited the throaty roar of the diesel and left camp slowly, as in August the super-dry roads in camp are blanketed with fine clay dust that mushrooms a cloud of dust that goes everywhere.

When we hit the main forest service track, we opened it up a bit more, but the washboard condition of the gravel roads wouldn't let us go too fast without shaking the truck to its core.

Next, we hit the paved highway and made excellent time.

It was a glorious, windless day. The sky was completely cloudless, the ceiling of air a perfect cobalt blue, the pines and firs a deep green that contrasted beautifully with the flawless blue sky.

After seventy minutes, we finally arrived at the mine, this after leaving the highway then slowly navigating a logging road, one heavily rutted from recent haulage. The road included what the locals call "punchouts", places where the roadbed has been pounded through by logging trucks that leave dangerous soft sections. If you hit those sections at speed, the front end of your truck dives down deep and fast and you experience the "punch"! Then you come flying out. If you enter too slowly, and not in 4-wheel drive, you get stuck, so it's an ongoing challenge.

At the mine site, the owner was chatting with the vacuum truck crew, the group cleaning the bedrock for the next couple of days. After his meeting, he told us where we could work away from the vacuum crew, but he also wanted us to check their progress to see if any gold was being left behind. We did from time to time, and we directed them to spots where they'd left some gold.

To work the bedrock effectively, I made sure my son had a magnetic wand to deal with the never-ending bits of steel from the excavation. Moreover, with the bedrock super-hard once again (like last week), the magnet would clear the surface signals so the softer sounds of gold could be heard.

We fired up our detectors. I chose the Gold Bug Pro as I love the digital meter on shallow bedrock as an aid to ID'ing the gold. Moreover, for any iffy signal, a quick swipe with the magnet usually solves the puzzle, or some quick pick and magnet work either tells the tale or requires more investigation. Furthermore, in several cases where the meter read lower than gold, the nuggets were sitting among pieces of magnetite (ironstone) that skewed the digital reading, but once the magnet had removed the ironstone, the gold signal was nice and clear.

While I was collecting a nice catch of nuggets, my son was having some frustration with his detector due to all of the bits of steel, but he kept at it and at last he found two nuggets with the 705! Well, the dam burst after that, and he showed some innovation as well. When he'd get a signal that was strange, he'd quickly switch to discrimination, and if he got any positive response, he knew it might be a nugget. He kept toggling back and forth over the next couple of days to verify signals, and it worked out very well for him.

The bedrock we worked was often broken in sharp slabs, so we had to be very careful while walking over and through those troughs of iron-hard bedrock as the footing was bad. To slip would be to get a nasty cut, and luckily, we avoided any injury until the second day my son did a nice circular slice around his finger when he reached too quickly into a crevice to check out a signal.

In the bedrock, there were slabs of clay stuck to the sides of the troughs either where the excavator had broken chunks of bedrock out or where we used bars to pry apart sections. That sticky clay held the gold! Sometimes, after locating a target, we could see the gold stuck to the clay and only had to pry it out.

I scanned a section of bedrock where there was a deeper hole. The excavator had hit a soft spot within that super-hard bedrock, and at the end a bedrock rise, there was a small pile of channel stones. I got a cracking response that turned out to be a six gram nugget! We kept at it until it started to get dark, and by the time we headed up to the mine boss's trailer, we'd caught just over an ounce of nuggety gold.

The next day, I let my son go solo, and I only hung around to give him tips if needed. However, he did well fine tuning his own system of ID'ing targets by toggling back and forth from prospecting mode to discrimination. He kept gathering a nice collection of targets in the little orange bucket he threw his signals into. (Rather than take the time to visually ID each target, he'd throw them in the bucket so he could pan them all out at the end of the day.) As well, when he'd get a broad signal under the coil (which often indicates a concentration of flake gold), he'd scoop that dirt into the bucket as well.

As darkness closed on that last day, he panned out the dirt in his bucket. He'd caught half an ounce of sassy gold! That included a three gram nugget he'd found through determination. He was detecting a flat chunk of bedrock that held lots of steel signals, but he kept swiping them off with the magnet. Then he got a good sound right on the edge of the flat bedrock where it dropped off into a pocket of water. He worked the signal with his pick until he popped it out, and that was how he found his nice nugget! Without removing the steel shavings that produce such a nasty racket in the headphones, he'd likely have missed the nugget.

So, we got a 1.5 ounce bounce for those two days, but golden memories of a hunt together that will last a lifetime.

All the best,

Lanny

[Jim_Alaska]

Another wonderful narrative Lanny. You detailed the day so well that there were great nuggets of information about "how to" that can serve others in the same situations. It's good to see your son finding his own ways of setting up his detector for the ground he is working.

I was interested in how he just threw all the targets into a bucket to be panned later. I say this because I have seen it done this way once before. A friend and detectorist in Alaska was the first one I ever saw do this and once I saw it , it dawned on me that this was a wonderful way to cover more ground faster, since you didn't have to isolate and pry out each target. Just throw it all in a bucket and sort it out at the end of the day, eliminating lost time in critically pouring through scoops and handfuls of material.

But sometimes even valuable tips like these are lost one old guys who are very set in their ways.....like me. I am way too thorough for my own good, which has been pointed out to me many times by others. I am never satisfied to just dump the target into a bucket without looking at it. I just have to actually see the gold, there is no getting away from it, it just seems to happen even when I predetermine that I should use the bucket and have more time detecting, rather than taking huge amounts of time going through every handful of material.

Oh well, I guess that there really is something to the old saying that "you can't teach some old dogs new tricks."

[Lanny]

Jim, I enjoy reading your responses and your reflections.

My son and I have learned to do the speed detecting (dumping the targets in a bucket or a pan) as our time on the uncovered bedrock is limited as it's only open for a short amount of time, so we just don't have time to visually ID every target. However, as we're both using the magnets to separate out the steel trash, that process stops those bad targets from getting into the bucket or pan.

In addition, as we're working on bedrock, the digital meters on the detectors have a good chance of quite accurately ID'ing what's under the coil.

Having said all of that, I still understand where you're coming from, and I too love to see what's in the dirt as that's part of the magic I miss by just chucking the targets into a pan or bucket.

All the best, and thanks for your comments,

Lanny

[Lanny]

This is a picture of one of the nuggets my son found during one of our latest summer adventures. 3-gram nugget he found on a lonely little shelf with his Minelab X-Terra 705, first time he'd used it to find nuggets, but he does have over 500 hours of coin-shooting on it.

All the best,

Lanny