More Nuggets In The Bedrock Tips

More Nuggets In The Bedrock Tips

One Saturday, June 14th, I got ready to head to the hills to try to find some gold. I grabbed my pulse machine, and I picked up my partner. We drove the four hours to get to the gold fields. The day was incredibly beautiful.

We cached our equipment in the outfitters tent we always set up for the season and went out with the detectors to find some gold. The week before, I'd finally found a nugget on the slate cliffs.

My buddy headed off to stomp some ground he'd been saving, and I went to a gully that had always intrigued me, but one that had consistently skunked me. The old-timers had done a massive amount of hand mining in this area, with stacks of rocks piled all over, and it's shallow to bedrock in quite a few places. There's massive old pines, and lots of guts, shallow little washes, with cast up boulders everywhere.

Well, what I'd noticed on previous trips, was that someone had moved a lot of hand-stacks from places that were shallow to bedrock, lots of them. So, they must have moved them for a reason. However, I'd tried detecting those places with my Minelab pulse machine, and I'd never found anything but little steel and brass boot tacks, as well as the ubiquitous square nails from the 1800's gold rush.

I started detecting along the exposed bedrock, generously uncovered by someone else. All at once, I got a whisper amplified by my enhancer. So, I kept scrubbing that coil over that faint bump in the threshold signal with the coil right tight on the bedrock. (To elaborate, the friable Slate bedrock is in up-faulted sheets, the tips broken in fractured finger-like projections.) 

With my pick, I worried out any loose bits of rock and soil, scanned again, and there was a sweet, mellow signal. With no soil or gravel to work, I started to pry out pieces of the bedrock but scanned after removing each piece. Having now exposed a  small space in the bedrock, the tip of my small sniping coil fit it nicely, and the signal was coming right through one of those sheets of bedrock, the piece perpendicular to the surface.

I kept carefully breaking the rock and scanning, and I noticed that the signal was moving, not getting any louder, but moving deeper. The target still had that soft, sweet sound, no harsh-edged tone. So, I removed a chunk of that sheet and the signal remained stationary, no drop. I looked and I saw a golden glow, a nice, flat nugget. I called my buddy over to see the nugget, and then I was ready to move to an adjacent spot, but my wiser buddy suggested that I scan the hole again--Duh! Sometimes I forget the basics, so I scanned again, and I got another signal! I retrieved another flat nugget, one lodged tightly between two sheets of bedrock, about an inch from where the other nugget was.

Then I really went to work on that little area--about two foot square--but no more signals. But, the bedrock sloped away downhill, and I noticed two inches of small, gravelly overburden and clay covering it. I scanned it, but no signal. However, and this is important, I took my pick and cleaned off all the dirt, every bit, then scanned it again, another sweet whisper.

I broke the sheets of bedrock, but the nuggets dropped quickly every time the bedrock was disturbed. Nevertheless, I got two more nice, flat nuggets that way, and one of them was bent on the end, as it was lodged in a perpendicular crack. So, I took out four nice small nuggets from a section of bedrock about ten feet long, a minor patch. I scraped around in the bedrock farther down the gulch, but got skunked.

I went back to the Outfitters tent to get some grub, geared up again and went to another spot that's always looked good, a place also cleared by someone eager to get to the bedrock. I used the same slow, "scrubbing the bedrock" technique, but got blanked.

It was getting dark, and I went up over a big sheet of bedrock that had a lot of slump on it, a spot loaded with square nails. I got a sharp signal, moved the dirt and a square nail flew to the super-magnet. Remembering my buddy's counsel, I scanned the spot again. Once again, that same soft, sweet tone I'd found earlier.

Only this time, the bedrock was different, solid, no leaves or sheets, just solid, hard stuff. I worked hard with my pick, went down a couple of inches, and out popped a nice, flat, nugget. By this time, I was beginning to think that maybe this was my day, and I'd better scan the spot again. Perhaps there was something lucky or sound in that technique. I did, and there was another signal, but I could not break the rock anymore with my pick.

So, I headed back to the tent for a masonry chisel and my small sledge, and a flashlight because it was dark! My buddy came back with me, and he made the bedrock chips fly. Every time he chipped out a chunk, I'd scan again, and the signal got louder. Yet, down four inches, the signal moved. Up on the side of the hole, in some bits and broken chunks of rock, the signal rang sharp and clear. Nestled in it was a little beauty with a pot belly and a very flat end.

I rattled the gold around in my gold bottle, six sassy nuggets in one day! It seems when the gold finally comes, it does so with a rush.


Update: I went back later to that solid bedrock with the Falcon MD 20 and got a couple more grams of gold from those cracks!

All the best,


Lanny

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Replies

  • Fun read . . and I'm jealous. I've only ever found 1 nugget with a detector. I'm just not patient enough.

    • I hear you, and it does take a lot of patience to get to understand whichever detector you choose to hunt with, but the results are sometimes far, far better than you'll ever do with a pan and shovel. However, it takes a lot of determination to stick with it until you've figured it all out.

      All the best, and thanks for leaving a comment,

      Lanny

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