Some Thoughts

Looking at the economy and gold prices these days all I can say is WOW! When I started this hobby gold was still under 250.00 an ounce and it was allot of work to make 100.00 with a drywasher and that was what got me started in metal detecting for gold nuggets in the first place. Back then we were limited to VLF technology for the most part and the Pulse Induction detectors had not yet really become popular or readily to the average prospector.

Oh, but how times have changed and over the last 20 years we have seen huge advances in metal detectors and especially with the Minelab PI detectors with the latest being the GPX-5000 which has the ability to work virtually any gold bearing ground efficiently and quietly ignoring most ground noise and false signals. These advances have also resulted in thousands of ounces of gold being found if not more in the same time span by pros and hobbyists alike….

The best part is that it is still being found with detectors even if it isn’t near as “easy” as it once was mostly because access is becoming more and more limited to someone wanting to begin in prospecting without joining a club or buying a claim. This is mostly due to folks claiming up every bit of ground in most of the known placer areas of this country, why? well with gold around 1700.00 an ounce every flim flam man, dreamer, sucker, and actual prospector are claiming all ground with any chance of there being a flake of gold in the ground!

There are more claims for sale on auction sites and website these days than I have ever seen and for high dollar with all kinds of promises of riches meant to widen the eyes of those with big dreams and deep pockets. Many buy these claims sight unseen and then want help later when they discover there is little profit to actually be made after investing into equipment and doing much backbreaking labor. Often out of frustration the claim is then dropped and reclaimed by the original seller to again be put up for sale!

These scams have always been around and always be as long as folks will fall for it, but with today’s gold prices it will become more and more common sadly. But the internet can also be a great educational tool and if these folks would do a few hours research before buying a claim and actually visit it to test the ground without the seller’s “help” much of this would simply stop.

For someone new to the hobby part of this education should come from joining one of many prospecting clubs across the country and getting out to see what mining and prospecting is really about. Many folks have never had a long term relationship with a #2 shovel and are amazed at how much hard work is involved in mining gold from it’s host material placer or hard rock. But right now there are places on many of the club claims I can use that I can take the family and camp overnight and run the drywasher recovering a couple grams of flakes and fines with the kids and grand kids. Yup takes some work, but sure is fun!

I have also started spending more time working with the drywasher by myself and have been doing pretty well for 6 to 8 hours worth of shoveling and I do not work so hard as to over do it most times. Heck with gold worth over 50.00 a gram it is fun to see a couple grams after a day in the Arizona desert just a few miles from home.

Yeah I know I was rambling some here, but I do that sometimes….

Good hunting out there, Bill

Metal Detecting and Gold Fever

Metal detecting for gold nuggets became my main form of prospecting in the early 1990s, before that I detected only occasionally and spent most of my time dry washing. I did quite well dry washing and over the years found several pockets or pay streaks, one produced over 6 ounces! In those early days I only used a detector to check my header piles for missed nuggets and half heartily swing the area for placer nuggets.

Then I began to find nuggets and I quickly gave up other forms of the hobby. Finding nuggets with a detector is a very rewarding hobby indeed and there is a lot more to it than meets the eye. There is no other feeling like the one you get finding gold nuggets with a metal detector. Research is the key to success and takes up a full 60% of the credit for my finds. The rest is just good old hard work and luck or perhaps being shown a good producing area by someone else.

There are many ways to research for potential placer areas suitable for nugget hunting with a detector and new info is a guarded secret, with even the best of friends ending up at odds over new discoveries. A lot of time and study goes into play before the successful nugget hunter scores that new patch. Sharing information you have worked long and hard on can sometimes be a mistake as gold does funny things to people and makes them do things they otherwise would not consider. I have actually been followed by folks trying to find an area I was working.

There are two main types of nugget shooters, first there is the lone wolf hunter. These guys spend most of their time hunting alone or with a trusted friend looking for out of the way placers overlooked by the second type of hunter. These guys usually hunt in twos or more and can be found in various clubs and gold hunting organizations. There is a lot of hiding of info going on in both groups, but most respect that privacy hoping to be let in on the secret before the area is hunted out.

There are always those that will do anything just short of murder to get into a new patch you have discovered. The strange part being that most don’t know they are that way until they see a handful of nuggets found in a spot they didn’t know about. I have had cases where I’ve made plans to return to an area found by two of us only to find the other partner had snuck back before our planned trip and cleaned it out.

Rarely now do I hunt new areas jointly unless the research was done that way. Even the most solid and honest man can get shaky knees and shifty eyes around a several ounce patch, but over the years I’ve met others including myself that seem to have it under control. I feel there is an advantage to keeping some of your finds to yourself to avoid feelings getting hurt when friends want you to share information. Some people have left there families, jobs, and everything they know after finding a few nuggets to become full time nugget chasers.

There are professionals that make a good living doing nothing but hunting nuggets, but to most of us it is a hobby. Gold fever is very real though and I gave up all my other hobbies including sports to focus all my energy on gold hunting. I spend somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 hours a week or more swinging a detector in the AZ deserts and wish it could be more. To me there is nothing more rewarding than spending a couple of days camping and finding gold nuggets in our southwestern deserts!

As in any sport or hobby there is always the “my tool is bigger than yours” thing going on with some and they are always down talking each others detectors. The truth being the detector is only as good as the feller swinging it! I’ve seen both good and great finds made with most models available that are designed to hunt nuggets, but some machines out there can be deadly in the right hands. Technology is always advancing and new and better metal detectors are coming out all the time. Again I will mention that research is the key to success and the more you do the more nuggets you will put in your pouch!!

As always I welcome all feedback and questions, Good Hunting!

But it Doesn’t Look Any Different…

Back in the early 90′s I was living in an Airstream trailer on Jackass Flats in the San Domingo Placers of AZ. I did this for about 8 months with my wife and daughter. Yes she stuck with it that long while I struggled to be able to just feed us running my drywasher and detecting. I had to give it a try after I found over 6 ounces in a bench one afternoon on a Roadrunner Claim. I figured it would be easy money so sold our land in AJ and became prospectors….

Anyway back then with gold at around 350.00 an ounce I had to find areas to be able to make at least 50.00 a day to be profitable! That meant with gold at about 12 dollars a gram I needed an area able to produce about 5 grams a day… I was able to find a few, but most were 1 to 3 grams a day so I would move elsewhere for “better” gold. Worst yet the price was falling steadily at that time from the 1980 prices over 600.00 an ounce and by 2000 it was again down to 272.00 per ounce…

So now here we are with the gold price at 1402.60 and a gram of gold worth 45.24 a gram…

Now it isn’t like I forgot where all my spots were at Little San Domingo and elsewhere and I have sure been having fun drywashing along with my metal detecting and a few hours shoveling can bring a gram or better and all day digging actually pays! The gold looks the same as it did years ago, same weight, but the value? Our dollar is in deep do-do my friends…

Gold has not changed at all to make it worth more since it was 19.00 an ounce in 1800 now has it?

With the recent rain it is back to full time detecting until the dirt dries in a month or so, but I am also doing a little sampling while in some of my favorite beeping areas, something I have not really done for years but today seems a good idea.

I think gold and silver will still feed my family even when our dollar will not…

Digging the Trash…

Gold nugget hunting requires that you dig all targets and that means digging lots and lots and lots of trash. Face it, miners were very messy and they have littered most placer areas with every type of metal imaginable. They were not worried by the fits it may give us metal detecting in 100 years. Some people start finding to many bits of lead or iron in an area and they move on, they are missing gold! I have personally found more than one nugget in places or a hole where someone else was digging. Did they tire of digging trash? or did they just not work the spot as well as they should have? Either way they left gold.

I have learned over the years that the mood you are in directly affects whether or not you will find gold. On those days you go at it only half hearted and start passing up targets because your sure its just another bullet or bit of rusted tin you are leaving gold for the next feller that digs all his targets. This little fact I learned the hard way several years back at the cost of a three quarter ounce nugget!! It was in a trashy area I had been avoiding even though we had found gold on the same hillside. I sent a fellow I had recently met to the area to try out his new detector and the rest is history.

Shown is a few weeks hunting’s worth of trash and there are even a few nice old buttons, old cap and ball slugs, buckles, etc,found while hunting. Sometimes the “trash” can turn out to be a valuable artifact and anything interesting or strange should be kept for later identification. Then there are the coins, jewelry, and trinkets of all kinds lost by miners of years past. Then sometimes there is the chance that loud “must be trash” signal is a long lost miners stash. that’s been true more than once. I wonder how many walked on by sure that loud signal was another tin can?

Now we get to the hot rocks, or are they? when in gold country you are also will be dealing with hot rocks and most of what you read tells you to kick them aside. This is OK as long as you identify them first because what you are kicking aside may just be a meteorite. They are tough to identify if you are not an expert, so in most cases of a strange looking rock, keep it. there are places a person can get samples identified at no cost and some meteorites are worth much more than gold. Heck in the late 1980′s many of us were throwing away those pesky hot rocks at Gold Basin and it turned out after being educated by John B. that we were tossing meteorites…. :tisk-tisk:

Most gold detectors VLF or PI now have a iron ID feature you can use to tell if your target “might” be iron. In most cases after you get to know your machine it can be 85% correct, what about the other 15%? This feature can be helpful in the identifying hot rocks and that is what I use it for the most with a VLF. in my opinion why in the heck would anyone trust anything but their own eyes to tell them if a target is gold or not? You can examine while a machine can only guess and alert you to a target…

Often folks think this hobby to be much easier than it is with all the nuggets being shown on forums and websites, but in truth there is allot of research, work, trash removal, and luck involved with pounds of metal objects of all types found. So to many of you new folks to the hobby all that trash metal you are digging along with occasional nuggets is what we all do, but those that have dug a couple pickup trucks full over the years have gotten used to it now.

So my advice to all interested in nugget hunting with a metal detector KEEP DIGGIN ALL TARGETS and be patient that next bullet or bit of iron may just be a nugget.

Good hunting

The Nugget Hunter #1

I am sharing some stories from a close friend that passed some time back. His writings are well worth your time and I sure miss hearing them around a campfire…

The Nugget Hunter #1

by Richard Delahanty

Gold is where you find it! How many times have you heard that old cliche? As with all old saws, there is a lot of truth to it. As with all old saws, there is also a catch to it. You can’t find gold if there is no gold in the area that you are hunting in. All things being equal, the number one factor that will determine the success or failure of your quest for that elusive yellow metal is placing yourself in an area where gold has been found before. But didn’t the old-timers get it all you ask? Not by a long shot! It has been estimated that only about 5% of the available gold has been found which leaves 95% for you and me to find with today’s super-sensitive gold detectors. Seems like pretty good odds doesn’t it? So, now what?

There are two ways to go about picking an area to prospect. The first is to find someone who already has hunted the area and stick to him like glue. You will not only learn a lot about the place but, if you’re a novice at nugget shooting, you will also pick up valuable hunting techniques as well. The second method is to seek out all the “How To” and “Where To Go” books, magazine articles and maps pertaining to the area that you are interested in. The way I go about it is to zero in on a general location and then try to get topo maps of the area. The topos are quite helpful as many of them show the location of mines and placer diggings. These are the locations that I’ll seek out when I arrive and then go from there. I’ve used a combination of these two methods over the years and they have worked well for me. On the subject of topo maps, there is a site on the web where you can obtain topos of any area in the U.S. and download them for free, which is great news when you consider that a new topo now runs $8.00 a pop. The site is at www.topozone.com.

You have done your homework well and picked a promising area to prospect. Now what? You are now on the ground standing beside your vehicle and you are looking at all that vast, wide open space and think, “Good grief, where do I start?” If you have chosen a good spot, there may be some old placer diggings in sight and there isn’t a better place to begin. Look for drywasher tailings piles and start going over them with your coil. You just may get lucky as some very nice nuggets have been found on old tailings piles. Drywasher tailings generally show up as two piles of material, one pile will consist of coarser material from 1/2″ or 3/4″ on up. This is the header pile which came off the screen of the drywasher. The other pile a couple of feet away is the tailings pile of finer material which has been vibrated over the riffles of the drywasher. Gold can be, and sometimes is, found in either or both piles so check them carefully.

If there are no obvious diggings around, you will then have to go by guess and by gosh. Pick a likely looking gully or larger wash and just start walking and swinging. The adage, ‘ Gold is where you find it’, truly applies now. A nice nugget can be lurking just about anywhere. Check behind obstructions in the bottom of the wash, along the bottom edges, the banks themselves or up on the lip of the wash. When you run out of wash, try the next one over or walk some nearby ridges and saddles. There is just no way of telling where that first nugget is going to show up. Or the second one and so on.

If there is a “secret” to finding gold, this is it: Go where gold has been known to be found and get out and walk and swing your detector. The more time and effort you put into it the better your chances will be. The beautiful yellow stuff is out there and you can certainly get your share!

What a Hobby this has Become!

Wow as I write this gold prices are at $1355.70 an ounce making my hobby of 20 years way more profitable than I ever imagined. Sadly the dollar is suffering with the economy in it’s current state, but still nugget shooting is a good way to spend my spare time. Heck some months I now make more detecting than my job pays on my weekend hunts. No that does not happen every month, but it happens. I really wonder what the future will bring…

I got into this hobby when gold was in the $200.00 an ounce price range and after just puttering for a few years I began to find good gold regularly so started getting more serious about my efforts. With some research and listening to others successful in the hobby I upgraded my equipment and began spending most of my time with a metal detector hunting open areas near well known gold placers in Arizona. Learning as I went hunting much of the time on club owned claims I managed to get pretty darn good at locating new areas to hunt on my own by simply working areas looking similar in looks to the gold claims the club owned.

Back in the early 1990s there were no internet sites one could learn from really so we were reading every book we could get our hands on and spending time in the field learning the hard way. Getting another detectorist to share info was as now like pulling teeth for a newbie. Nobody ever wants to give up a area that is producing gold and with today’s prices this is even more true, but there are now many sites including mine Nugget Shooter that will give the beginner tons of info to get started in gold nugget shooting.

With gold prices getting higher and higher with no end in site what better way to spend one’s spare time can you think of? Heck I spend my time in the outdoors hiking with my detector, get to explore new areas seldom seen by others, plus find some gold and in my opinion it just don’t get much better than that!

See you in the goldfields….Bill

Gurly Gulch Gold

A story I wrote in 2004 truth or fiction?

“FROM THE DIARY OF THE MAD PROSPECTOR”

This is a short tale that will begin a new series at my site, some will be true, some will be fiction, and some will have a few names changed to protect privacy and claims. I have spent some time while on trips sitting in camp and just writing and this story and the ones that follow are the results. So here is #1 and I hope you enjoy it!

Gurly Gulch Gold

It was finally cooling off in the deserts and I was sure getting the itch to get out there to go camping trip for a weekend, just the dog and I. Late October in Arizona is perfect for prospecting with cool nights and warm days of the kind that just make a feller happy to be alive. I had told the boss on Thursday that I would like Monday off and with his blessing I was now packing for a 3 day weekend metal detecting and enjoying some well deserved rest and relaxation.

During the hot summer months I like to spend a lot of time reading and researching new areas to prospect when the cooler months come around and a little spot called Gurly Gulch was at the top of my list. This is where I planned to spend a few days nugget shooting provided I could get into the area as planned. Many times when “going in blind” so to speak I have run into locked gates, washed out trails, no trespassing signs, and other obstructions so I try to have more than one route in planned just in case, but most times it’s one way or no way. I think about half of my leads and hard work end up meeting this fate and it’s back to the old drawing board so to speak.

Gurly Gulch was a location I found mentioned in a small town newspaper article from 1901 and the story went something like this: An old fellow name of Trevor Gurly prospected the area and would come to town for supplies and was often loaned money by the local grocery to keep him in grub. Trevor would simply come in pick up what he needed and promise to pay as soon as he could and this went on for a year or so. Then one day Trevor came in with a big grin and a nice handful of nuggets to pay off his grocery bill and get supplies for his next trip and the nuggets were described as “goodly sized” by the writer of the article. Trevor then filed a claim that he worked and lived on until his death in 1922.

Now I followed up this story with some good ol’ research and could not find mention of Trevor Gurly or his claim. There were some placer claims in the area, but none in the general area of my search. All this time there was a nagging feeling that I had heard the name Gurly Gulch before, but I could not remember where. There was a general description of the area and how to get there from town, but it was pretty vague. I continued researching through my other channels looking for info to guide me to this old placer area with no luck. After exhausting all my resources I simply gave up and went on to the next location I was interested in and put Gurly Gulch and it’s nuggets on the back burner.

Then one afternoon in late August I was puttering around and came across an old treasure hunting book I had purchased at a thrift shop several years ago for about $4.00. The book is a very limited edition from 1933 and only has 69 pages, but the second story was from the same area that I had been researching looking for Trevor’s old claim and believe it or not Gurly Wash (not gulch) was mentioned in the story I was reading as a landmark of sorts for a lost treasure that was also reported to be in the same area. The best part of all this was that along with each story is a hand drawn map by the author and it showed the exact location I was looking for about a half of a mile from where the lost gold mine is possibly located.

That was why I thought the name was familiar, I had read it in this book a while back and put it on the book shelf forgetting all about it. Taking my newly found hand drawn map I went to my pile of topo maps and quickly located the trail and wash known as Gurly Gulch or Wash back in 1901. The wash is not now named on any map I looked at and that had made things difficult or even impossible without this hand drawn map.

Arriving at the turn off from the highway at just about sunrise on Saturday morning I headed into the desert for an 11 mile drive into what I hoped would be Gurly Gulch with high hopes of being able to locate Trevor’s old placer workings. The drive in was somewhat rough with a few washed out spots, but a easy trip relatively speaking. I could see that the road got a fair amount of traffic, but that was to be expected with all the old mines in the area.

The drive in proved to be very interesting and I found myself stopping to look around and scan the hills with binoculars more than once. According to the topo map there were many mines in the area and this was very true with many small mining operations long closed dotting the rough mountain terrain. Man those old boys were tough judging by the location of some of those mines way up the side of a steep mountain with a trail going almost straight up. Taking a load up would be one thing, but coming down would be very dangerous.

I was very close now to the wash listed as Gurly wash on the treasure map from the old book and was keeping an eye out for a trail or road exiting from the main one I was on and I found one going off to the South. I was exactly where I was supposed to be from what I could tell and matched the topo map also. So I continued on the trail until it came to a camp area near the wash and finding some level ground I parked my truck. Now normally I would set up camp first off, but I was not sure yet if I was even where I wanted to be so I gave DJ. a drink and we headed off hiking up the wash for a look see. Right away we found where someone had thrown their cans and bottles into a small dig hole and some of the broken bottles and tin cans with the lead solder were from the right time period with some newer stuff mixed in.

Further up the wash I found a small tributary that had very old drywash header piles showing along the bank and that was enough to send me back to the truck to set up camp, any more exploring would be done with my detector in hand. Setting up is very quick for me and in no time DJ. and I were feeling right at home and while he was content to just lie around all day I wanted to get after that wash with the old workings. Now I had no way of knowing if these were Trevor’s workings, but according to all the facts I had been able to put together I was darn close. So with that in mind I got my gear together and went to work on that feeder wash up from camp.

I began as I always do in a previously drywashed are by checking some of the header piles for missed nuggets and after about an hour without digging anything but trash from the piles I decided to work the small wash and its benches. About ten feet up the wash from where I started I got my first nugget, very small and well worn. Now with spirits high I slowed way down and began thoroughly detecting the little wash from side to side and up the banks. By late afternoon I had managed to snag several small shiny well worn bits from the wash itself and a couple from the bank, but none were over a penny weight. Nice gold to be sure, but not what I was here hoping to find as the source of Trevor’s gold was rumored to have produced bigger nuggets.

I decided to do a bit more looking around before supper this time taking my detector with me and I tried several little feeder washes and managed a couple more small nuggets for my efforts. This was sure getting to be fun and gold is gold no matter what the size! The sun was just beginning to go over the mountain when DJ. and I decided it was supper time and we walked the main wash back to camp. The main wash and the one I think is Gurly Gulch is about 15 feet across in it’s widest spots and narrows here and there with exposed patches of bedrock, just what a fellow with a detector likes to see. On the way back I was swinging some of the more obvious spots that would trap gold and kept pretty busy digging trash all the way to camp.

Just before leaving the wash and calling it quits for the day I got a booming signal about 2 feet up the bank that stopped me in my tracks. I began to get that butterfly feeling in my gut that I always feel when a target has that special sound that is somehow just a little different than that last booming trash target. Well I didn’t have to even dig because when I scraped away the topsoil, sticks, rocks, etc. with the side of my boot out pops a very nice slug of gold, smooth and shiny that would go at least a third of an ounce. What a way to end the first day in a new area and I was thinking I may have found exactly the spot I was hunting from my desk top during the hotter summer months. There is just no bigger thrill for me than to actually score after all the research and planning involved in finding such a spot.

It was just starting to get dark with the sun setting somewhere behind the towering mountain to the West of camp that it had hidden behind a couple hours ago. This camp area had been well thought and placed close to the base of the mountain to supply afternoon shade in the heat of the summer, Trevor perhaps? As I was sitting there looking at a canyon up the mountain a strange shadow emerged from the side of the mountain startling me and it took a minute for me to figure out what I was seeing in the fading light. It was bats! Thousands of them coming out of the side of the mountain from a cave or mine shaft, but I had seen no shaft on the face of that mountain with the binoculars. Perhaps I’d hike up there tomorrow and have a look around since the canyon below was part the wash I was camped next to.

Well the rest of the trip was just what a nugget shooter dreams of with a good supply of new well worn smooth nuggets added to my poke and yet another spot on my list for future hunts. I didn’t find any more of the bigger nuggets, but did score several in the one to three penny weight range to go along with the smaller stuff that seemed to be fairly plentiful though a fellow had to work pretty hard to get them. Funny thing though is that I hiked all over that rough slope where I thought I saw those bats come out and couldn’t find a cave or mine anywhere, but those bats came out each night I was there. Problem was they didn’t come out until the side of the mountain is just a dark shadow well after sunset and the bats show in the failing light filtering through the canyon making it almost impossible to see where they are coming from.

Now I didn’t give the bats a whole lot of thought until on the way home I guess because treasure hunting and lost mines are not something I spend a lot of time doing, but what if those bats were exiting a mine that was hidden many years ago as the story goes. I still have not found the time to get back to the area as it is quite a drive for me to get there from my home and well I have always had places closer to home to find nuggets, but something about those bats and that story keeps nagging at me. I think perhaps this Fall when it cools down a bit I will spend a few more days in Gurly Gulch.

Copyright 2004 William E Southern Jr