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The day was warm, but the sizzling, dog-days of summer were long gone. It had taken until around eleven in the morning to get rid of the chill in the shade of the pine-covered slopes. The butterflies were long gone, the songbirds too, and only a solitary crow or the occasional hawk drifted across the cobalt blue sky of the mountain fastness that framed my view.

This late in the mining year, I finally had the green light to work some bedrock I’d wanted to get at all season. A lot of the bedrock was now covered in water, but there was one pie-shaped piece that was mostly dry. But before I relate the main part of my story, I need to back up a bit and say that I’d already had a shot at the surrounding area. The bedrock sat down in a sort of oblong bowl with steep walls on two sides. As seepage from the mountainside was steadily adding more water to drown the bedrock, I was eager to get detecting before the entire area turned into a duck pond, but I’d only got permission to detect around the rim of the bowl, not the base. Well, I’d found a few small nuggets on the rim, nothing over two grams in size, and the rest of the targets were the usual suspects: sharp shavings from excavator buckets. Oh, and I did find the tip of an old pick where an old working from the 1800’s intersected the modern-day dig. Those old boys had sunk a shaft down to bedrock through some nasty boulders, then tunneled about thirty feet along the bedrock before quitting. Moreover, as there was no evidence of a bedrock drain in the exposed excavation, they must have quit due to water problems, the same problem that was threatening to deny me a chance at working the bedrock I wanted to get at.

Well, as I’ve said, I finally had permission to detect the pie-shaped piece of bedrock. Most of it was a reddish color, with some tan to whitish colored bands running through it, and man was that bedrock hard. The bedrock was really torn up in some places where it would break, but in other spots, the bucket’s teeth had just skipped over and scraped the mother rock the best they could.

In spots like this you either get lucky, or you get almost nothing it seems. So, not knowing what to expect, I fired-up the Gold Bug Pro. I’d also packed in my Minelab 5000, but I left it in the bag to check the bedrock later after I’d worked it with the pro.

Off to side of the bedrock pie, I saw a little pocket that was half filled with water and thought I’d try that first. Immediately I got a signal. The pocket was about twice the size of my boot sole, so I was shocked to have got a tone so soon. The meter read iron, but that bedrock had ironstone all over the place, so that wasn’t out of the ordinary. I fished around in the hole with my wand-magnet, and it came out looking like a steel porcupine! I scanned again, but there was still a signal. I hit it again with the wand and this time some chunks of magnetite were on the magnet, but no more steel. So, I scanned again, and the signal still rang.

Well, I don’t know if you’ve chased targets in the water or not, but anything heavy drops as soon as you disturb it, so I decided that I’d build myself a little dam of sticky, heavy clay to stop the seepage from getting into that little pocket, and finding clay for that purpose was no problem. I got some nice gooey stuff and packed it all around the pocket, then I went to work with my scoop bailing out the water. I got the tip of the coil in the pocket and the meter jumped straight up in the 40 range. Well, it was something conductive, with a good chance of being gold. I scanned again and the reading on the meter held rock solid, no movement at all. Now, some hot rocks will ring up in that range, but they’ll often bounce around a bit when you scan back and forth or across the target from a different angle, but this target pinned that meter steady. I rooted around with the scoop and scanned the contents under the coil. There was a nice, solid sound and the meter still loved it too. It didn’t take long to isolate the target, a nugget that was just over a gram.

Because of that early success, I kept at that same spot for a while. It was where the bedrock had been broken, but it had left lots of little pockets that water was working its way into. I’d scan the pockets and if I got a signal, I’d build my clay dams and go to work bailing out the water so I wouldn’t have to worry about a target dropping deeper when I tried to dig it out. I spent close to an hour doing this and wound up with a nice catch of small nuggets in my bottle. I swirled the bottle close to my ear and heard the golden rumble of coarse gold.

I worked some places that were under about six inches of water as well and found a few more small ones that I added to the bottle. Next, I went to work the part that was above water that ran back in a pie shape to the rim of the cut. This part was different from the broken bedrock. This bedrock was iron hard and there were bits of steel everywhere left as the bucket had scraped and skipped its way across the bedrock.

However, what interested me were the places where I could still see some clay. In most of these spots where the clay was visible, there were little troughs running anywhere from a foot to three feet in length. They were cupped and rounded, and some of them still had river stones in them. The top run of boulders and river run had been ripped off with as much bedrock as would fracture and sluff, but the troughs (from two to three inches deep, maybe three to four inches wide at maximum, with a maximum of five inches of depth in one spot) had escaped the efforts of the excavator buckets. (Maybe an ancient run under the looser, later-era bedrock?) I started to run my detector along one good looking trough but got nothing but bucket shavings that had been worked or transported into the mix.

I spotted another trough that ran at close to a 45-degree angle across one spot and decided I’d try it next. The first pass produced a broad signal. Now if you’ve read my earlier stories involving broad signals on bedrock, this detector effect got my interest mighty quick. I took out my light pick and carefully started to loosen every bit of material in the trough where the broad signal was. I scraped up every bit of material and put it in my gold pan. I scanned the pan and got a nice signal, so off I went to pan it out. What a great sight! Sassy, coarse gold in the pan!! The broad signal came from a family of pickers with several gram nuggets thrown in for fun. I couldn’t believe it. I scanned the trough where I’d removed the material and got a faint signal. I took my pick and bar and worked my way down. I scanned again and the signal was louder. I was finally able to break off a chunk of bedrock and it exposed a little pocket filled with clay and small river stones. I put everything in the pan and headed for water. Once again, coarse gold in the pan! I kept working the troughs, finding broad signals from time to time until the sun dropped behind the mountain. By that time, I could no longer get any signals with the Gold Bug Pro.

So, before it got too dark to see, I fired up the GPX 5000 with a small sniper coil and went to work. Booyahh! Deeper gold in some troughs that the Gold Bug couldn’t see. My little bottle was heavy! I’ve just about got the data stripped from the pictures of that gold, and it was the best day I’ve had in a long time, but the deal I made had me promise not to tell the weight of the gold, and I am happily living with that publication ban. Well, when I reported to the miners what I’d found, they put on a ripper tooth and took another three feet of bedrock, and they did very well indeed. Let’s just say it was worth it to them to tear their equipment up some . . .

All the best,

Lanny