Forum

The Island.

Well, this story doesn't have anything to do with a traditional island, at least not in the sense of one with a sandy beach fringed by palm trees surrounded by ocean. This story of the island is about a flooded section of bedrock that was once placered for gold, an area within a highly restricted claim that required hard-to-come-by permission to nugget shoot.

I'd passed by the spot on that claim before while hunting adjacent ground and thought about wading out to try my luck, but the flooded ground had deeper, dark pockets, boulders, and lots of uneven ground that made for dicy wading in the muddy waters of the earlier summer rains. But, a lack of rain later in the hotter months had cleared up the visibility allowing me to see and map the bottom much easier. 

The island itself consisted of one small section of bedrock that stood a couple of feet higher than the surrounding bedrock I've mentioned all drowned in icy water issuing from springs somewhere deep in the mountain. 

However, before I could start detecting, I had to get out to the island. This required some delicate wading with my mining boots, careful the whole time that I didn't set my foot wrong on a loose rock or step into one of those dark holes to fill my boots. Nevertheless, I made it with socks dry to the elevated bedrock, the highest point being on the south end. The bedrock was slate, red and tan mostly, not that the color particularly tells a person anything about its ability to hold or trap the gold, but what I really liked about it when I looked around was that there were lots of natural traps in the bedrock, with cracks surrounding, underlying, and spidering off from those traps.

I'd packed with me the usual sniping tools, two gold pans, a sucker bottle, my blue Estwing mining pick,my little Falcon MD-20 for sniffing gold from tiny traps, and the Gold Bug Pro to scan the larger, lower section that sat just above the water running all the way to the north end where the island pinched out. (If you're thinking this island was big enough for development, don't waste your imagination's energy. The whole chunk was only about twice the size of an average garden shed, but I always remind myself that when it comes to finding gold, the size of the ground to be searched isn't always an indicator of possibility. What the detectors tell me is much more valuable, as is what my eyes tell me about the ability of the mother rock to capture the gold.)

I pulled out the Falcon first and set to checking the multitude of little pockets that ran down the slope from the highest point trending toward the flatter, lowest section. Almost instantly I got a positive signal. Now, the Falcon is not a complicated detector. On most hot rocks it blanks as you approach a hot rock and "boings" as you move away. If it's metal (iron or otherwise), the machine emits a signal that gets louder as you approach a target then holds steady as you keep the head of the probe over the object. I couldn't see anything, but there was definitely a positive signal. So, I dug in my carrying bag and got out a pry bar that's great for working open cracks, prying up loose pieces of bedrock, and prying off parallel sections. As I've mentioned, there were lots of cracks around those pockets and a nice piece the size of a couple of silver dollars popped right out. I scanned again and this time got multiple signals.

I scooped out the clay and small particles with a sturdy spoon from the carry bag and plopped the contents into a pan. A quick pan later, three nice pickers appeared. I decided I'd do a rapid scan of that entire descending piece of pockety bedrock, and I got signals on and off all the way to where the bedrock started to flatten out. I had no idea if they were gold or bits of steel, but I went to work with the pick and bar and worked off any loose bedrock I could, then scooped and scraped all of the residual material into my pan. Booyah!! Stars in the heavens all over in that black universe of magnetite! Lots of small pickers were running with all kinds of flake gold, lots . . . 

I kept at that scan, pop it out, and pry the cracks system until I could no longer get any positive response. By the way, this involved lots of rescanning after I'd pop out the loose chunks of bedrock or after I'd pry off a section of bedrock that was weakened by a crack. And, on the rescans, I'd often find targets down too deep to ID on the first pass, but that's because the Falcon is not a depth machine by any stretch of the imagination. As to why I wasn't using the Bug Pro, I couldn't get the coil into the little pockets! But, I did scan the entire slope (much like a mini-downhill ski run made of bedrock) with the Gold Bug after I'd finished with the Falcon to ensure I'd left no targets behind, and I did find a couple of laggers that were down deeper yet, but the take with the bigger detector was thin. The Falcon was the one that shone for that specialized purpose!

With the gold collected in the bottle, I went to work on the flat. The Gold Bug Pro got immediate hits, but there was metal (the wrong kind) everywhere! So, I pulled out the wand magnet and went to work. Hedgehog time! And again, more hedgehog decoration on the end of the magnet. After that, I went back to detecting. I'd like to say that I didn't dig any trash, but the clay clinging to the bedrock is a master at holding tiny bits of steel away from the draw of the magnet. 

I stared scanning again and got a hit right away that popped up in the 40 range! It was a great little nugget of just over two grams. I worked the bedrock until it went silent and by the time I was done, I had a nice collection of gold in the bottle, flakes, pickers, and nuggets. The biggest was only five grams, but the total weight back at camp was almost 16.5 grams! What a day, and the gold ranged from pancake flat to real character pieces. Man, did that fire me up!!

That experience led me to a very similar location a couple of days later that exceeded this story's take, and once again, I had to make my way through a water hazard to get there.

All the best until then,

Lanny