Golden Grams of Goodness: Nugget Hunting Tales

[Joe S (AK)]

I bet that's where he put his lunch sack - with a lock on the door to keep the bears out of it.

Joe

[Lanny]

Jim, thanks for the tips about old cabins as I haven't really done a lot of in-depth detecting around the log structures because of the trash, but what you have written makes a lot of sense, and I'll give it a try this summer as I know the location of some old structures where gold was mined.

As always, I appreciate and value your comments and reflections.

I hope you're doing well Jim.

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

AK,

It's always easier to roll a big rock than drag or pick it up.

Whenever I happen to stumble on a big'un I'll carefully remove as much material from the downstream end with a long handled shovel (or if I happen to have the 2" dredge in use I'll use it along with long handled shovels, rakes and a 4' or 5' section of PVC pipe taped to the intake of the nozzle) to CAREFULLY AND SLOWLY clean out a fair amount of surrounding downstream material. I try for a hole lower than the rock. Then pry and roll the boulder into the cleaned out hole. Especially if it's on bedrock, that boulder is going nowhere for a long time.

Joe

Joe, great advice, and a great way to move those big rocks, thanks!

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

Good advice Lanny! Any advice on moving them big boulders?

What Jim and Joe have said below are great ways to get those rocks to move.

I have a long, thickish bar that's square, and it's had a flat chisel point (not the pointed type) put on it by a blacksmith. It's an amazing way to move those big rocks that are flat on the bottom. I use it to "nose" them around on flat ground. I get under the smaller end, pry and twist so the rock gets moving and with quick, short movements, keep it moving as I swing it around and off of the dirt underneath. (The big, round rocks will move a lot easier with the bar.)

That bar has got me out of some tight spots before as well. For instance, I travel a lot of remote roads and sometimes on the way in to where I'm prospecting (or on the way back out) there will be a fresh boulder on the road (slid off the mountain side), and that big bar was the only thing that let me move the rock enough to get around it with my truck.

When there's a pile of big rocks, I use a come-along and a variety of heavy duty straps around the boulders.

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

That was a wonderful local history story Lanny. I agree that there have been many that took the very same path and many were never en heard of. Your story could not have been told or known except for the small backwoods community that was there.

Like you, I have seen and wondered at the old tunnels. It is almost impossible to not go in and look around, but I am claustrophobic and that works in my favor. Old mine shafts are extremely dangerous.

There were of course other miners with other methods, many of them were solitary also. I knew of one in Alaska and have walked his hand cut trails and seen some of the work he did. His life was diversified, he mined in the summer and trapped in the winter. His story is a fascinating one and one that I have been attempting work work on in book form. Unfortunately my book writing is very slow, this one has been 15 years in progress, mostly because I don't work on it. I am a terrible procrastinator; it is too bad because unlike many writers, I have a lot of resource material, much of it is from my own personal observation and information gathering.

That sounds like a fascinating story background Jim, and I'd love to read it sometime, so I hope you get it into print.

I know only a tiny bit about your background, but I know from reading some of your other writings that you've been chasing the gold for a long time, and that you've had other great outdoor adventures as well.

As for writing, it does take a lot of time, and it's an easy thing to put off exactly because it does take so much time, so I know what you're talking about as I've been trying to put a book together for quite a while as well.

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

I bet that's where he put his lunch sack - with a lock on the door to keep the bears out of it.

Joe

Most likely . . .

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

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 commented on gold that is held fast in naturally occurring cement, looking like innocent concrete.

Therefore, the focus of today’s story is on some hidden gold I chased while nugget shooting in the far northern gold fields, a place where thick forests blanket the mountain slopes, where wildlife is plentiful, where apex predators like grizzlies and cougars still rule the kingdom. As well, eagles and ospreys haul thrashing trout and grayling from crystalline lakes, and moose, elk or black bear can be seen lazily crossing open, green spaces.

One cool morning, I crawled out of my outfitters tent to a clear, blue sky; the rain from the previous day had left a crisp freshness in the air, the scent of pine and fir sharp. Grabbing my things, I headed off up the canyon to a place I had permission to hunt.

I was off to detect the exit ramp of a deep placer pit/cut where the miners had removed a lot of overburden to get down to the ancient channel beneath. However, I wouldn’t be detecting in the pit itself as the face was a wet, unstable wall that kept sluffing sections of itself into the pit below. Clearly, water seepage was a serious problem at this location and likely had been for the 1870’s old-timers that had worked the area back then.

The placer cut itself sliced through the remains of at least seven ancient stream-beds, all crisscrossed one on top of the other at an ancient junction. The deposits were the result of long-dead glacial streams, left where two mountain canyons met. To clarify, these canyons were special. The high, black slate rims had protected the gold in those channels from being scoured out and carried away by what the locals called “robber glaciers”.

There was evidence everywhere of the workings from the 1800's where the overlapping channels were probed by vertical shafts, then horizontal tunnels probed onward until the gold ran out. Then, deeper shafts were dug, more channels explored, and so on, with the work heading all the way to bedrock.

The modern diggings were where they were because the miners had discovered a roomed-out section of bedrock on their claim, one worked by hand in the 1800’s. This is why they opened a cut and extended the area of that room. (After all, who tunnels and clears a large section of bedrock with pick and shovel unless the gold is good?) Moreover, the original room was excavated on what turned out to be a large, continuing shelf of bedrock. But, as the modern miners worked off to one side of the original room, the shelf ended (perhaps a fault), with the channel material dropping into a deep sump filled with large boulders. Furthermore, the exposed wall of that sump is what I’ve already described above.

So, there I was detecting the top of the exit ramp to avoid being crushed by a collapsing wall. As for the detecting conditions, the bedrock was red-hot electronically. So, I used a PI detector, with a double-D coil, but back then it was only sensitive to nuggets of one gram or larger. While swinging the coil, I was getting lots of chatter from the ground. But, between the pops and snaps, I heard the faint cresting sounds of possible goodness in the threshold.

Hitting a broad, repeatable signal, I scraped off the overburden of gumbo that covered the black and purplish bedrock, the bedrock itself laced with quartz stringers. Yet, however hard I looked, I couldn’t see a crack or fissure in any of it. I went back to scrubbing that severe bedrock with the DD and was rewarded with a strong series of sharper tones that rose above the background chatter.

Tracking the electronic path indicated by the coil, the targets trended diagonally across the ramp, and then continued downward with the dip of the bedrock. It dawned on me I was likely following invisible crevices, ones once connected with the long-gone bedrock of the drowned placer cut. Therefore, knowing that the detector wouldn't lie, I got out my crevicing tools and carefully chipped the signals from the bedrock, exposing the hidden crevices. However, unlike an earlier find at another location, this material was not solidly concreted. It was more of a crumbly composition; nevertheless, its colour imitated the bedrock material perfectly by hiding those long-lost crevices.

Next, I drug the material upslope from one of the diagonal cracks into a plastic scoop. I passed the scoop under the coil and got a cracking tone. I shook the scoop, settled the heavies, and sorted the material in the scoop.

There were five nuggets in the scoop. None were over a gram and a half. But later on, I found two more hidden crevices using the detector, catching more of those small, sassy nuggets of gold.

Personal confession, after catching nuggets, nothing lights me up like the rumble of chunks of gold as I roll them around in my gold bottle. I really don't know why, but I really get a kick out of that sound.

But, at this point in my story, you can brand me just plain dumb, as the mistake I’m about to reveal is one I've made before. It seems I always get preoccupied with the nuggets and then forget to check the surrounding material from the crevices. (A bit slow sometimes, I guess.) Anyway, my partner, bless his soul, did not forget the importance of that surrounding material. He gathered it all in a pan and took the works to the creek (under some murky premise that other, smaller gold will often travel with nuggets).

Man did my eyes pop when I saw how many smaller bits of good grams of gold there were in that pan!

I learned that day the value of having a detector that could find gold hidden in plain sight as well as the value of listening to my detecting buddy.

All the best,

Lanny

[Lanny]

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 some old workings near a creek almost strangled by thick stands of Alder, deep green ranks of horse-tails, clumps of butter-cups, and tall meadow grasses.

The heat from the sun made it humid by the little creek, with no breeze to lift it. However, this combination made things perfect for an attack by a living wall of black flies, mosquitoes, and no-seeums. The air was so thick with them that I was forced to breathe through my nose and keep my mouth closed or I got a mouthful of flying protein! So, I whipped out my can of nuclear grade Deet and gave myself a solid spray. That done, the flies backed off and spun angrily about four inches out.

With enough bug paste in my mouth to last a lifetime, I cut up the creek bank into the much cooler darkness of a stand of hundred-year-old pine, the floor carpeted with freshly dewed ferns. I wound along through the timber, then turned parallel to the creek, heading about thirty feet upslope. At this elevation, there was a gentle breeze blowing that sent the bugs back to the creek.

The signs of old 1800’s workings were everywhere, with more modern excavations from the 1930’s. Exploring the old diggings, I found some exposed bedrock. It appeared that a small operation had stripped off about ten feet of yellowish boulder clay (stubborn clay and boulders dumped by glaciers) to expose an old channel tight on bedrock, one that cut back under the steeply rising boulder clay.

The cut was about twenty feet wide and about sixty feet long. It ended where the shoulder of the mountain thrust through at a place where the old channel took a sharp turn to dive back under about fifty feet of boulder clay. Clearly, it was far too much overburden for a small 1930’s operation to work.

I headed back to the exposed bedrock, dropped my pack, and pulled out my sniping tools and my gold pan.

I scraped around for any low spots that still held accumulations of original channel, containing small tightly packed river stones and dark-gray clay. I found some spots, cleaned them out, then headed to the creek to pan: almost no black sand, and no gold. I went back up to the workings and sat on a flat boulder. I took a long look at the topography. I noticed a spot where the bedrock rose sharply from the exposed sheet, then levelled off as it ran back under the boulder clay. I also noticed the bedrock located there was covered with two feet or so of clay slump.

Personally, I'd rather not dig if there's good exposed bedrock to work, but as the bedrock was unproductive, I surrendered and took my shovel and cleared a spot about four feet square. The bedrock here was all uneven, with lots of irregular little pockets. I cleaned a few out but got no satisfying results. Ready to leave, I hesitated, then dug under the boulder clay where the bedrock started to dip beneath it. I was surprised to see a cumulative drop of about a foot, but then it leveled off again. However, what interested me most was the composition of the material between the boulder clay and the bedrock in the pocket I’d uncovered. It was a gray colored sand atop a packed clay and rock mixture that contained small pebbles. That material really lit me up! In that area, it’s the kind of stuff anyone hopes to find. It's a sure sign of virgin ground.

What I had opened up to find the pocket was the bottom edge of the face, the portion exposed in the 1930’s. As a result, I was working intact ancient channel, possible placer countless years in the waiting. The series of irregular holes I'd cleaned right before hitting the drop-off were encouraging. However, this was a bigger pocket, about a foot across, a great looking trap. Pumped now, I cleared several pans of material to bedrock, then lugged them to the creek. No gold! What was going on here? Everything was so perfect. I pulled out some lunch and took time to reflect.

After eating, I went back to examine the hole. The air had dried the moisture from the bedrock, and I was staring at some reddish bedrock, not black-colored slate like the other bedrock behind me. Regardless, that was not what caught my attention. The bottom of the hole was laced with what looked like a network of blood vessels, twisting purple veins sharply contrasted against the red rock. Never before had I seen such a geological result. Nevertheless, I took a screwdriver and scraped at the veins. Shockingly, they were nowhere near as hard as the rock. In fact, they were more like a purple clay, and I soon discerned they were sealing cracks in the bedrock! On fire, I dug and scraped and soon had about a tablespoon of material.

I hurriedly took it to the creek and sunk the pan. The bugs were back, but I didn't care. The blood I’d donate to get a look at something so interesting was insignificant. As I mashed the material under the water against the bottom of the pan, the water turned an ugly purple color. The panning water had been crystal clear, but I couldn't see the bottom of my green pan. I sunk the pan flat in the creek and continued to let the creek carry off the discolored water. The water was now clear, and in the crease were very dark, heavily stained BB-sized stones. This was something new. I tipped the pan back to pick out some of the stones and saw the yellow flash of sassy gold emerge. There among the black BB’s were three chunky pickers, no fine gold whatsoever.

I flew back to the hole. I gouged as far as I could into the cracks, but very little material remained. I took out an awl and probed the crevices and was rewarded with a soft resistance at the junction of two veins. I pushed harder and the awl dropped three inches. I twisted the probe in the opening, and it spun in an ever-widening circle. Having found a bedrock pocket that was fed by those gold-bearing crevices, I worked with a chisel and opened a hole to get the bent handle of a spoon inside. In this manner, I gouged around and drug out about three tablespoons of wet, purplish clay packed mixed with sand, and small stones. With no material left in the hole, I don't think my feet ever touched the ground on the way back to the creek.

I got the same result as earlier, a cloud of heavily dyed material from ancient, oxidized sediments. The stones were slightly larger than BB's when I could finally see them in the crease, but this time the gold poked through nicely! A clutch of pickers in the quarter to half gram range, and every piece was rugged with character.

I never found any more gold at that place as the bedrock dipped again, stopping me from chasing it under the boulder clay. But I did walk away with over ten grams of beautiful gold from my small, bedrock bonanza.

All the best,

Lanny

[Jim_Alaska]

Thanks Lanny, sounds a lot like my endeavors. Those are the kind of conditions that turn miners into thinking machines. So many times we just bull through as usual, but then there are times like this that turn us into thinkers. Just goes to show us that sometimes thinking are a good thing.

[Lanny]

So true Jim.

It's often the case that there seems to be a rush to get to the gold, when sometimes, slowing down to really look at the overall situation is what's needed to solve the riddle of where the gold is hiding.

Thanks for your reply, and all the best,

Lanny