Forum

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