Happy New Year, and ending 2015 with a bit of luck


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First of all, Happy New Year to everyone, hope this year will be fantastic.

Yesterday I ended 2015 on a good note.

I had a training customer in town from Alaska. Took him out to the Gold Basin area. I was driving to a spot I had in mind when I caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye as I drove. It was a gully between two mountains that I had never noticed before. I stopped the truck and said, hold on a minute.

I backed the truck up, rolled the window down and took a long hard look. How come I had never noticed this gully before? I just got "that feeling." I told my customer, this is where we are going to prospect, if there isn't gold up there then there isn't any gold anywhere.

Now these two mountains had higher mountains behind them.

So when we started up the gully it wrapped around behind the one mountain and ended up in a flat area, which was caused from alluvial gravels coming off the larger mountains in the background.

I let my customer start detecting at the beginning of the gully and I just kept walking up the gully, I just had that feeling. So the gully starts getting not so steep, it is just sort of a 20% drop where this alluvial gravel is at and the consistency of the gravel is really fine and quartzy, as opposed to a bunch of larger cobbles that were present in the lower gully where my customer was. Not a sign of a dig hole, absolutely no signs that anyone had ever been in this gully, aside from coyote paw prints.

I finally turned on my GPZ7000, balanced with the ferrite ring, and literally took ten steps into the gully and got a target. I called my customer up and told him to swing his SDC2300 over the area to see if he could hear it. He did, it was clear as a bell. Six inches down he popped out a little specimen that was primarily quartz with a little gold. He was over the moon. He uses a Gold Bug up in Alaska, and he had never dug anything that deep and they don't find specimens very often in Alaska. He is used to the little solid pieces at 2 inches.

Then it was bang bang bang. Within 50 yards we pulled 8 nuggets, not one piece of trash. Every target was a nugget. A true virgin patch. The deepest and largest piece was found at about 12 inches, it's the big piece on the 100 dollar bill. I targeted it with the GPZ7000, the SDC2300 would not pick it up until we got about 5 inches of dirt off of it. I let the customer dig it and keep it.

It was a really fun day. Not often you get one of those feelings and happen on a true virgin patch. So all in all we took 8 nuggets, customer got three and I kept 5. I could have put him on more nuggets but during the last hour he committed the cardinal sin, "Don't go looking for gold when you are in gold." I was basically trading off. I'd find a target and let him come detect it, and dig it, then I would detect one for my poke, then the next one I would call the customer over, and back and forth.

But my customer decided to go over the ridge looking for another area, so I just kept detecting the sides and pulling out a nugget here and a nugget there. I will be going back. For sure I have not found the source. These were all specimens, some with more gold and some with more quartz.

Here's a picture of the 5 pieces I kept cleaned up a bit.

Take care gang!

Doc

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I think it's important for customers who are trying to learn, to actually dig a real live nugget. So if I get a target, I want them to be able to hear it, and experience the thrill, and sometimes frustration of recovering it. Now of course a lot of times it isn't a nugget it's a piece of trash, but those pieces of trash are usually shallow. When it is a nugget, it is a real learning experience. Especially when you can stand there and help them understand what they are seeing as they dig deeper and deeper through the layers of dirt.

When someone gets down about three to four inches and they are hitting hard packed dirt, I can tell them, "Now my experience tells me that this is less likely to be trash, do you know why?" Most don't know, but then I explain to them that trash usually isn't going to get past the hard packed dirt, only a nugget will do that. (exceptions for those damn deep bullets we have all dug) Then I make them stop and actually look at where this target is at. If it is a nugget, why would it have stopped here?

Is it up against a bush? Is it on the inside bend of the gully? Is it behind a boulder? Is it right where a little rill coming off the ridge empties into the gully? Every nugget has a story, but the little bastards are like hardened criminals, they don't like to talk when they are being interrogated. So you have to use your knowledge, and your wits, a little common sense and some luck to try and unlock the story of their journey.

In this case the first three nuggets were all found on the right side of the gully. I told my customer, that would make me think they possibly shed from the right side of the ridge, although that is not always the case. I told him to remember that the course of that gully may have changed over the last couple of hard rainfalls, and maybe what is now the right side of the gully was the left side. Point being is the nuggets shed from somewhere so it would be a good idea to also check the bushes on the sides of the gully just up the side of the ridge a bit. When I did that I snagged two more nuggets hung up in bushes on right side again.

So basically I was trying to teach my customer how to actually prospect and try to read the signs that would lead him to more gold. I have seen too many newbies find a nugget in a gully and they finish the gully and off they go. Never bothering to check the sides or try to figure out how that nugget got there,

Anyway I enjoy training and teaching, I always have. I taught at local colleges, (Criminal Investigation) and also at the Las Vegas Metro Police Academy, so it's sort of in my blood. I always hope that some new guy that I have trained considers the knowledge he/she received to be more valuable than a few little nuggets I might be able to put them on.

Doc

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WTG Doc!
That's awesome that you and he both got nuggets. That's a really good day :)
GL to you in that new area.

Tom H.

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Hey Doc,

Great story and finds with your customer. Always great to get a new customer over his first nuggets and let him dig it. Like your field instructions, I do the same, prospect also and see if I can locate good targets for the customer to examine and dig. It's always good to let them her what we call "faint" targets, most new customer would never ID or did them.

We still need to get together and do that hunt we have talked about for over a year.

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