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
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 hunti
Read more…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
Be Careful What You Say
Some years back, my mining buddy and I were working our off of 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
Small Bedrock Bonanza
I was on a prospecting walkabout one midsummer day. The sky, a perfect cobalt blue was accompanied by the deep warmth of a blazing sun. Happy to get a break from several days of either cold drizzle or pounding rain, I checked out
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
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
Invisible Gold in Plain Sight
In the past, I’ve talked about finding difficult gold: gold that is wedged deep in crevices; gold that is cemented in a matrix the exact color of the bedrock, hiding any cracks or crevices that were once there; also, I’ve
Did something the end of the summer season I haven't done before.
I went to visit a friend of mine that runs a large placer operation.They had made a cut 70 feet deep to bedrock, and they'd piled the dirt up near their huge washplant to be processed.
Detecting For Nuggets The Hard Way
Armed with my detector one balmy, late-summer weekend, I set off to find a nugget or two.
As a nugget shooter, I sometimes stupidly fail to appreciate the difficulties associated with hunting nuggets or the low level
A Lonesome Nugget Tale
Flashback to the the summer of '99, and I was swinging the SD2100 up in Northern British Columbia. We four-wheeled up an incredibly bad road to get to the site. The road was so bad that one of the other mining operations had dro
Gold Monster Outing
Went to the gold camp in the Rocky Mountains last week. The weather was gorgeous, all kinds of songbirds back, plus the flowers of the mountain meadows are in full bloom, purple crocus and shooting stars, yellow buttercups, multi
Can you smell the rice cooking?
I recall being far to the north in a historic gold field, and I had the opportunity to have a chat with a Sourdough (a seasoned miner from the area) about his claim. He took me to a spot one day and told me a most inter
Flashback Series: Tales From The Flat, Part 3
Confronting the terror.
During this paralytic horror, my only comfort was the assailants were on the same side of the tent as my dozing partner. However, my shameless security in using my partner as a
Read more…Flashback Series: Tales From The Flat, Finale
Well, I know it’s hard to believe, but it took us a while to get back to sleep after the wild horse encounter. So, we bucked up our spirits by telling far less scary stories about real bear encounters, mos
Flashback Series: Tales From The Flat, Part 2
Things that go “snort” in the night.
After our largely sleepless night, the next day we set about cutting firewood, and we went off in search of drinking water (we even located a local spring of pure water
Bugs, Blood and Gold: Tales from the North.
(This is prospecting humour, with mild fiction, but sadly, based in reality.)
I have to talk about a perplexing, maddening phenomenon that occurs ever year in the summertime: hundreds of prospectors line up
Flashback Series: Tales From The Flat, Part 1
Oh, the things we discover when we camp with someone for the first time . . .
In the 1990’s, I used to chase the gold a long, long ways north and west of where I currently live, and the last section of the
Black Bedrock Gold
This past season, I had the opportunity to work what I can only describe as an old placer cut. It wasn’t anywhere near the size of a regular placer pit, and the cut itself was only about fifteen feet deep, but however they’d figu
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