Many times when we are digging our butts off we think that it sure would be great to have a backhoe for a day or two. Man we could make short order of all this overburden. You know while we are at it lets take it down a little deeper too. We think these things and sometimes wish for them. Well as you know our wish came true. A little to true. We actually wanted to expand the hole south about 30 feet and to the west about 30 feet. What we got was a hole 30 feet by 75 feet. Now you might be saying to yourself what the hell you complaining about you got lots of room to work now. Well, your right we have plenty of room to work. Here is the problems. 1. On our orginal hole, he took it down 2 feet deeper than we wanted and did not separate the the tailings. 2. We have a ridge that splits our hole from north to south that the backhoe couldn’t even move so all that material was left in place. Lastly, from the ridge to the west end of the hole I asked if he could clean it up just a little so I didn’t have to remove so much by hand(I have a very bad lower back). This he did and did a very good job.

Well Doc and I looked it all over and Doc decided that he was going to work the old area and only wanted a space 20 foot by 20 foot and that I could have the rest.

I figured hey why not gives me more to explore and get a better fell for the way bedrock was going. One of the areas I marked out in blue in one of the pictures turned out to be empty material. So I took the jack hammer to the bottom and spent 7 hours busting up the bottom. Sunday a friend and I went out and cleaned up everything we could with the vac and ran it. We got a little gold but realized we are probably 2-4 feet from bedrock. So it looks like I’ll spend most of the season on the jack hammer and vac. The next 3 pictures are not in any order they are just shot of what I’m up against this season. Now as to what you wish for, well no regrets.

Oh my gosh, that was a long skunk. Week in and week out you want to do something about it, but really, you can’t do a damn thing about it but just hunt and wait it out.

This little .9 grammer of mine was found where it shouldn’t have been, about 2 inches deep in a two foot deep sandbar (coarse mixed schist gravels), middle of the wash in front of a boulder. Guess it never got the chance to sink before the water went away. It just goes to show that you should always dig everything, even when it sounds like a piece of tin and you know damn well that it is a piece of tin.

Oh well, it was a piece of gold….

Presenting the GPX-4000 Release Date Commemorative (found with the SD2100 and Coiltek 14″ mono)

C’mon, you know it’s funny….

<<<<<< Click Here!

Well, that didn’t take long. Hot on the heels of the recently released GP3500 comes Minelab’s latest offering, the GPX 4000.

Make sure to check out our real world price comparison: Minelab GPX4000 vs. SD2100

Also, Enjoy our Main Site , especially our article on how to buy a metal detector.

So far, we don’t know much, other than the press release which was posted on Doc’s forum last night. According to that release, this is not an upgrade to previous GP model detectors and we can expect to see a “new class of gold detector”.

That makes me wonder, is this a PI machine? Maybe it’s just a new class of PI machine.

Apparently we should expect to see digital presets and an LCD display which is of course very different than what we have seen from previous Minelab gold machines. The basic stats read in such a way as to indicate that it will definitely be a different look and operating mode than the previous models. From what I understand, the machines will look nothing like previous SD or GP detectors. So far nothing appears on Minelab’s website.
The machines are going to start hitting stateside by the end of October 2006.
I can’t wait to hear the reviews from experienced prospectors not associated with dealers. I’m sure it won’t take long.

I have been posting now for several months the on going work at our placer claim. Well today as I was browseing thru things I realized that it just might help a bit if I took you back a ways so as to see how our journey has came.

The 2004 season started out very well. Doc and I hooked and decided that between the 2 of use we could make 1 good man. He was finially feeling better after a bout with cancer and I had been thru 1 back surgery, 2 knee replacements and 2 bladder surgeries. If it wasn’t for walking sticks, I think we would have crawled alot.

Now up to this point all of Doc’s mining had been dry placer and all of mine had been hard rock. Well we met up in the super market one day and got to talking and decided to go out and give it a try and see if we could get a long. We woorked 3-4 different places to no avail. At this point Doc suggested we try the OK area. Now I had not been up that way since 1959 with my father. He knew of a group of people that were trying to make a go of the mine. Well Doc and I decided to give it a try, so off we go not knowing what kind of condition the road going up the side of the mountain would be in. The road wasn’t washed out but it was rough. It took 45 minutes to go 7ths of a mile. When we reached the top of the hill, the view was just beautiful

From there we went done to where Doc and Jim had been working back in 1995-96.

This is an overview of the valley in which we are working.

Doc and I started working the area in late Feb. and we did very well up til June when he left for Washington to visit the kids and grandkids. I continued to work the area until mid-August when the thunderstorms started.

We didn’t get back up til Oct. of 04 and the damage from the floods were terrible. As you can see from the pictures, we had a lot of digging to do. Between Oct. 04 and Jan.05 we had 4 major floods hit the Dale District. By the end Mar. it was just to dangerous to get up the road so we began looking for other places. The flood pictures reveal the damage done and we dug out 6 times in between.

In late Jan.06, I hooked up with a tractor operator who would repair the road and berm the wash so we would not get flooded out anymore. We rented the tractor for 4 days and to work we went. While working on the road I came across some prospectors who looked lost but of course wern’t because they had there maps. Well we all just clicked and I invited them up to the claims to metal detect there little hearts out, not know that the start of a far reaching friendship had begun. They have made several trips out just to help us remove overburden and to metal detect. We were all in camp one morning and I had just run 4 buckets of material and as the gold became visible it was obvious that this was no ordinary placer claim. We(Doc, the boys and I own 320 acres. We decided that if we were to get serious we needed to open up some area old and new and find out just what we have. The following pictures I hope will give you some idea what we are up against. They are in no order. My other 2 posts on the work that was done conbined with this one should give you a pretty good picture of the scope of our work.

I have included one picture that all of you should take heed of: Watch out for Bees.