Every prospector has streaks of bum luck, times when you can’t seem to find much - if anything. This is less true for folks who dry wash or dredge, but electronic prospecting, detecting, is especially prone to dry streaks. Its just the nature of the beast. My present dry streak started way back in May. I went on a prospecting trip and in the first 10 minutes, I found a 4.2 dwt nugget, almost a quarter ouncer. That was one nice nugget, and I was real pleased with it. However, I was there for 3 more days after that and found nothing but trash the rest of that time. Although it didn’t seem too bad at the time, that was the start of it. Several weeks later I took off to Alaska for a week of prospecting. I had a great time and hung around with some great guys, but I got the skunk for an entire week. I ran my detector all over, but never found a single nugget. Now I did run a highbanker for a while on that trip and picked up 7 dwt of fine Alaskan gold, and that was great. Some may say that wasn’t a skunk, but as far as gold found with my detector, I drew a big zero. Then in mid July, I returned to the Sierra Nevada high country, my own backyard - and spent 4 days prospecting and got nothing for the whole trip. Lots of trash, including small, good-sounding items like heavily rusted boot tacks and 22 bullets, but no gold. That’s a total of 14 days detecting without a single nugget (although its true I was not detecting all day long for each of those days). Still, I have to say that’s the longest streak I’ve gone that I can remember without detecting any gold. When you are in a dry streak, there may well be gold where you are looking, and others may even be finding it, but you cant seem to get your coil over a nugget- that’s basically the definition of a dry streak. So I was officially stuck on the Skunkville express and I need to find a way out.

Now honestly, I didn’t write this to feel sorry for myself - I wasn’t bummed or anything, I wasn’t throwing a pity party for myself - That’s totally not what I am trying to say. I wrote this just to post a little realism. This type of thing is not unusual in detecting for nuggets, so don’t be surprised when if happens to you. When you get in a slump you gotta step back and make a plan. Explore, change how your doing things, check your attitude, whatever, shake things up and try something new. Most important of all - DON’T GIVE UP!

Dredging in the Yuba River at Sierra City

I think a lot of new guys see all the nugget pictures on forums and in magazines and figure all the experienced prospectors are pulling down a couple hundred dollars worth of gold every time we go out, and it just ain’t that way. Sometimes things go well, and sometimes they are not so great. There is no doubt the more you know and the more experience you have prospecting in the field the better off you are, but in no way does that make you immune to the skunk. Next month I’m headed out to do some serious exploration with my detector in some new locations. So how do you get out of Skunkville and get back in a productive mode? Here are a few thoughts:1. Make sure you are not doing something systematically wrong.
Probably the first thing is to make sure you are not doing something that will prevent you from getting gold. Are you digging those weak signals? Is your detector set up right? Are you using the right coils? Dry spells can make you wonder and really doubt your skills at finding gold. I think I am OK as I am digging small non-ferrous trash things don’t seem any different to me. I’m confident I am doing things right, I just need to get the coil over a nugget.

2. Keep up your enthusiasm - never give up, never surrender.
Its easy to get discouraged when you are not finding anything but trash, but you’ll be putting that detector in the closet for good if you loose your optimism. Detecting for gold requires perseverance, you need to keep at it. Dry streaks happen, and they can last a while, but you need to have the enthusiasm, perseverance and confidence to ride them out and find those new patches.

Its easy to get discouraged when you are not finding anything but trash, but you’ll be putting that detector in the closet for good if you loose your optimism. Detecting for gold requires perseverance - you need to keep at it. Dry streaks happen, and they can last a while, but you need to have the enthusiasm, perseverance and confidence to ride them out and find those new patches.

3. Get out and explore new places.
It’s easy to get in a rut and just go back to the same old spots trying to eek out a few last crumbs. Eventually things can get pretty well cleaned out and the gold just stops coming. One of the best ways to break out of a rut and make a new find is to get out and do a lot more exploring. Try some new places! Do some research, check the claims and land status for the area, then get out and hit the field. Exploring new locations, ones that hopefully have not been pounded previously by others, can lead to new finds.

4. Take a break and try something different.
Sometimes you just need to take a break from detecting, just a little change of pace. I know where this awesome dry crevice that is up on a bench about 20 feet above the river in California gold country. I’s like 10 feet long, 4 inches wide and at least 30 inches deep and it runs perfectly perpendicular to the river. I know one guy made a halfhearted attempt to clean part of it out and got down about 18 inches in one spot. He was rewarded with a half-ounce nugget for his trouble. I think the bottom of the crevice would be much richer. Maybe I should take some time off from detecting, but I figure it would take 5 to 7 days of hard work to really clean that thing out properly. Should I just take a bit of a break from detecting? Sometimes a short break will recharge the confidence and enthusiasm, especially if one is successful with the change.

5. Enjoy your time, no matter what gold you find.

Getting out in the field is a great thing on its own. Whether you are out alone, with friends or family, you have to remember to enjoy the time. The mountains and the desert are beautiful, so take time to notice and appreciate their majesty. None of us will be detecting forever, so enjoy the time you have. If you can enjoy detecting trips even when you have not found any gold, you are well on your way to keeping the right attitude and frame of mind no matter what you are finding.

Sample Panning High in the Sierra

 

 

 

Well, back to my story - as you see I’d been riding a skunk much of the summer. I’d had a few great trips, and I had found nearly a half ounce of gold highbanking, panning, sluicing and just sniping around. But I had my detector out a number of times since June, and never found a single nugget with it. All that ended when I returned to a spot that I have been successful at before and hit a real nice nugget. The nugget came in at seven pennyweight. Only about 2 feet away I hit another nugget just a bit under a pennyweight. I was real excited, hoping for more — but it turned out to just be a two nugget patch. Actually, last fall I had found a 3.6 pennyweight nugget, only about 20 feet from that same spot where I detected the two nuggets. No doubt I’ll return there shortly and try a couple of different coils on that same area and hit it real hard. Here’s a little report about that successful trip in general, how I went about trying some different things, shaking it up a bit, exploring and eventually finding some nice gold. I ended up with both some good gold and some good prospecting ideas for next year. On Thursday I had arrived at Sierra City about noon, and did little sniping on the North Fork of the Yuba after I had my camper in place and set up. I knew were there were a couple of real nice looking crevices at a spot where I had done well last year. I worked down through the crevices and several contained junk iron, (usually a good sign) but all I got was a few flakes and colors out of each little crevice. On the way back to camp I crossed the river, and as I arrived on the other side I looked up and saw some beautiful ripe blackberries and thought of reaching out to pick them. However, as I looked up, I lost my balance and fell backward into the shallow water on the slippery algae covered rocks. Nothing damaged but my pride, I picked the berries, ate them and strode back into camp, soaking wet!

Bedrock crevices on the banks of the NF Yuba River

On Friday, a friend and I traveled to the head of a small stream to do a little prospecting, sampling and metal detecting at some old mine dumps in the area. Several friends of ours have prospected in this area this summer and done fairly well. Mostly they were just crevicing along the sides of the stream, and the best nugget found in recent months was one pennyweight in size — it was crystalline and quite beautiful. The area is interesting and in addition to the hard rock mine, there are the remains of an old stamp mill as well. Bits and pieces of the old mill are strewn along the Gulch. This little stream has been fairly rich and the old timers found a 50 ounce nugget further downstream in the 1850s. I really think the best potential for this little stream is to come in with a small dredge and work it in the spring when there is a little more water. The little crevices and potholes in the bedrock along the edges of the stream have been worked pretty well now by our little group. The real potential I think for the future lies under the small areas of overburden in the middle of the stream. What little potholes and crevices are there have not been touched and since these lie along the main line of flow in the stream, I would expect them to probably be better than the little spots along the side of the stream — and the edges of the stream have been pretty good. I’ll probably try that next spring. It will be a big project to bring my 4 inch dredge down to that little stream. Somehow if I could get hold of a much smaller dredge to take in there that would make things easier however it would just take that much longer to move the material. Saturday, we took a trip out to the spot where I have found some nice nuggets in the past and gave the old detector a chance to shine, and it did! There are not a huge number of nuggets at this location, but they are good sized and the average of all the nuggets I have recovered here is just a touch under four pennyweight. Since the two nuggets I found on Saturday weighed in at just a hair under eight pennyweight the combination fit perfectly the average of four pennyweight per nugget. I picked these two up with my GP extreme — I was using a Coiltek wallaby Mono, but a good-sized coil like the wallaby was totally unnecessary as both nuggets were only about 4 inches deep. I think you could have found these with a Radio Shack detector.

The 7 penneyweight and 19 grain nuggets that broke the Bum Streak

Sunday and Monday were days of exploration and looking for new spots. There is a location in that region which I’ve known about for years but never had an exact fix on the spot. Historically, it produced a number of huge nuggets over 100 ounces in size and some well over 100 ounces. The problem was that the descriptions were really vague and could could have led you to anyplace for miles around. The area has poor access and to just go out there and tromp around in the deep forest would have been a big waste of time. It’s not like Nevada where you can see for miles — in the dense forest you might come within 50 yards of it and not see it at all. Last winter, while doing research for another spot in the same general area, I came across the geologic map that gave me the one last piece of information I was looking for. Although it did not state the exact spot of the rich area I was interested in, it showed some geology to me which fit the bill for what I expected this deposit to be. I was then able to use aerial photos and pinpoint the spot and hike to it. On Sunday, I got there and it was just what I had expected. There among the trees were tall piles of Quartz and country rock — yet it had obviously been mined as a placer. The spot was really only about 10 acres in size which is pretty amazing for the number of coarse nuggets it has yielded. After exploring around the area and hiking up the hill to get to the target spot I really only had about an hour and a half to detect before I had to start heading back toward camp. The ground was trashy and I found a bunch of square nails and only one bullet, but the most important thing was that I didn’t see one single other dig hole! This is an odd spot and it didn’t surprise me that no one else knows of it. I even picked up a couple handfuls of Quartz crystals up to about 4 inches in size — the smaller ones were almost perfectly clear. Unfortunately, during the time I had available to prospect I wasn’t able to detect anything but trash, but I confirmed my GPS coordinates and took photos of the site and I shall return next year when I have more time. This is one of those sites where I may or may not find a single nugget but if I do, it might be huge! This is one of those rare spots were a true retirement nugget is a genuine possibility. Targets that seem like a gigantic piece of trash must be dug!That high country is wild and remote and on my trips up there this week I saw four different bears — a mother and her two clubs, plus a young bear on his own probably about two years old. I had never seen small cubs in the wild like that before. That is one of the times when bears are extremely dangerous — when you come between a mother and her cubs. Luckily for us, at the time we were in the car and we were not between the mother and the Cubs. We were also in the car for the young bear on his own who heard us coming and started running up the dirt road in front of my car. As soon as he found a spot where he could safely go over the side he dropped down into the forest and out of our view. The Bears came and went so fast I never had a chance to even attempt a photo of them before they were out of sight. However, one of the forest citizens hung around for a minute or so and gave me a chance to grab my camera and shoot a few shots. He was a young buck with forked antlers covered in velvet.Monday I only had a half a day to spend prospecting because I still had to finish packing up my trailer and then haul everything back to Reno. So on Monday I drove with a friend to small canyon known for its gold and we tried to see if we could get access allowing us to go up the canyon. Access and private property are big issues in the California gold country and there are a lot of good spots up there which are just simply blocked off to public access. I’m not trying to argue property rights one way or another — it’s just simply a fact of life that this is an issue California prospectors have to deal with. Anyway, things worked out really well we were able to drive in and find a decent place to park where I could easily turn my suburban around. It turned out there was a trail not marked on any of my maps that led up the stream. We hiked about a mile up this little canyon and came to the site of an old hard rock mine also not marked on any maps nor mentioned in any of the extensive old reports I have on that area. There were also the remains of an old stamp mill and an old miners cabin just off the trail. Next to the miners cabin there were piles of big boulders at the old timers had winched up out of the creek. This little creek has also yielded some very nice gold.

Gold Bearing Tributary high in the Sierra Nevada

My friend found an old Heinz ketchup bottle from the turn-of-the-century — it was empty but whole and undamaged. The main trash dump at the old cabin seemed to be completely untouched. All along the stream the growth was lush and green with tall trees casting shade everywhere. There were even wild strawberries growing at the site — something I’ve never seen in the Sierras before. The little brook had bedrock exposed here and there along it’s length with lots of good looking spots to dredge, and some nice spots for sniping as well. I think this spot may be open to claim but I’m not fully sure so I needed check some records and see if it really is. Unfortunately, I didn’t bring my camera with me on the hike so I have no photos of this beautiful little spot. We also did not bring pans because we just really didn’t have enough time to take any samples or do any real prospecting - mostly we were trying to see about access and what the spot looked like once we got back into the creek. Again, another spot I’ll have to explore more thoroughly next year (however, I may drive back to post a claim up there in the meantime!).

The 1.1 penenyweight “ground noise”

When I found the 7 dwt nugget and 19 grainer (about ¾ dwt) on Saturday, the first thing I did was search the dozer scrape where I had found them for more gold. It didn’t seem like I found any more, but I did find a little spot where there was a hot spot about 5 feet away. It was very weak. I dug down about 3 inches and it didn’t get any stronger, in fact, it seemed to get weaker. I walked away, thinking it was a bit of ground noise. It was very weak and sounded just like a normal bit of indistinct warbling, a little bit of ground noise just the kind we all walk past regularly, and for good reason. On the rare occasion when a mineralized spot gets dug, the apparent target just disappears when it is dug and spread out on the pile. Ground noise is not common at this location, but it does occur. Besides, it was the end of the day and time to go anyway and I knew I’d be back later to check the whole area out further.A few weeks later, I returned to the same area to cut some firewood and do a bit of detecting. A friend and I cut about a cord and a half of firewood, stacked it in the pick-up and trailer we had with us, and then in the time we had left we did a bit of detecting. I tried a few spots, but came back to the spot where I found the two nuggets. I had thought about things in the couple of weeks since I was there, and decided I really wanted to check out that spot of ground noise I had walked away from. It was still there in my old dig hole - in looking at it closer, I found that from one angle, it sounded just like a very weak and warbling ground noise, but if I turned 90 degrees and swung the coil from the other direction, it sounded like a weak (but good) target (I was using a Coiltec wallaby mono). This is still not outside the pale for mineralized spots, but I decided to dig out another 2 inches just to see. When I retested the now deeper hole, the target had definitely gotten a bit stronger – it now sounded real good in one direction and like a weak target in the other. I told my friend who had come over to watch that I was for sure going to dig this now and it was either going to be a bit of mineralized ground or gold. Nearly all the trash here is shallow and I was now down about 5 inches from the original surface in hard and in place gravel/rock. I dug another couple inches and it was finally a strong and very good sounding target. No doubt it was gold. Another inch or so of digging and it was out of the hole, the rock was getting real tight and hard, it would have been hard to dig much deeper. I sorted through the pile and here is the target I finally found. It weighs 1.1 dwt. it is fairly thin, and I think the poor response until it was very close to the coil was due to it being in the ground on edge. I rechecked the hole afterward - and that funny “ground noise” was gone.

In recent years there has been a something of a new form of tourism growing in Alaska. Several historically productive gold mines have created facilities to bring in prospectors and tourists to see and experience the remote gold country of the Alaskan wilderness and find their own nuggets. Both experienced hands as well as new prospectors are given an opportunity to experience a new environment and potentially make some spectacular finds.
There are a number of operators beginning to offer this type of unique recreation, including the Moore Creek Mine in the Iditarod area, the Gaines Creek Mine and several others. This new tourism offers significant benefits to both the mine owners and the visitors. Visitors have the opportunity to potentially find some very significant gold while experiencing the beauty of the Alaskan wilderness. Visitors at both Moore and Gaines have produced some very large nuggets and even for those who do not set records, many visitors find the largest nuggets they have ever found. On the other hand, mine owners gain a new and unique source of financing mine exploration and other operations. Initial funding to get a project off the ground can be difficult to acquire and tourism offers a very unique and creative way to gain those first seed monies for a property.

A few weeks ago I had to opportunity to visit and sample the primitive Alaskan mining experience for myself. I went to visit the Moore Creek gold mine. I’ve been prospecting for 30 years, but it was an experience like nothing I have ever done before. There is no practical access to the mine, except by air. I went in with 9 other guys. We met in Anchorage, and flew together to the little Alaskan community of McGrath. From there, our bush pilot, Mike Stewart, was able to transport us and our gear from McGrath out to the mine in three trips. The flight into the mine with the Mike was really exciting with spectacular views of the surrounding country. I have never flown in a little single engine plane before, so this was a real first for me. The runway in McGrath was paved, but out at the mine it was just dirt and grass. In such a little plane you really get the feel for how fragile the plane is and how the dangerous outcome can be if you have any problems. Mike is a very safe pilot and there were no problems at all.
It was so strange to me that it was never dark the entire time I was there. I think the sun set around 12:30 at night, and rose again around 4:15 am, but it was like dusk the entire time in between, so it was never really dark enough to see any stars. Evening campfires were held in what seemed to be essentially full daylight. This gave those participants who desired to do so hours of extra time in the evening to prospect. One night I went to bed at 11 pm and the sun was shining through a window in my tent right into my eyes. That’s something I’d never experience at home.

It was cloudy most of the time and rained at least a little bit everyday, thought most days the rain was just a short shower or two for maybe 10 minutes at a time. It reminded me of a similar situation in Seattle where I was told that kind of drizzle was considered a dry rain.

There was lots of wildlife, and beavers, rabbit, birds, wolves, etc. were in or around our camp. We saw moose droppings, but no moose. The only bears we saw were viewed from the air in a plane. However, we did find fresh bear prints in the mud about 150 feet from our tents one morning after it had rained.

Most of the guys in my group brought their own metal detectors, including me. While it may be easy to bring in a metal detector as they are comparatively light, Moore Creek offers a quite a selection of gold recovery equipment to the visitor. A number of different types of metal detectors are also available for visitors to use at the mine. In addition, the mine has several Keene Dredges including a 6 incher, several high bankers, a gold wheel, sluice boxes and pans. For the most part all the items a prospector would need to find and recover gold on the property. Owner Steve Herschbach’s idea is that, other than those that want to bring their own detector, the mine can provide whatever prospecting equipment is needed for the week – that the visitor really only need bring a sleeping bag, clothes and personal effects, as the mine will provide the necessary equipment. This works out well as Steve is part owner of Alaska Mining and diving supply in Anchorage and is a dealer of the equipment he provides.

The facilities at the Moore Creek Mine are very comfortable with large cots and two men assigned to each roomy tent. The tents are pitched on a flat along side a stream at the site of and old camp marked by original log cabins that are still in use. Tasty and hearty meals were provided each day by camp cook Bob Herschbach, Steve’s cousin.

Moore Creek is in the rolling hill country at the base of one of the local mountain ranges. The area topography is old and well-rounded with few steep slopes or rugged rock outcrops. Erosion is generally small and the surface exposures have changed only a little since Pleistocene times. Drainage gradients are fairly flat and Moore Creek meanders back and forth across the valley that contains it. The creek heads in the divide that separates streams flowing into the Kuskokwim River from those that flow into the Yukon River. Moore Creek and others to the east flow into the Kuskokwim River. Bonanza Creek, just over the low divide from the headwaters of Moore Creek, and other creeks to the west, flow into the Yukon River.

The elevation at Moore Creek Mine is about 900 feet above sea level. Willow Mountain peak is just two miles away, and at 3009 feet and is the highest point in the area. The hill immediately above the mining camp on which the Broken Shovel vein outcrops crests at 2225 feet.
The timberline in the area is at roughly 1,500 feet. Moore Creek is surrounded mainly by spruce forests in the flat areas around Moore Creek itself and the surrounding hills, with scattered birch and cottonwood. Thick alder and willow grow from the timberline to about 2,000 feet, and higher elevations are covered with tundra, moss, and lichen growth. All disturbed ground, such as old mine workings, trails, and ditches are commonly grown over with thick alders and willows. Some drier tailing piles have light spruce and birch stands, especially on the north sides of the piles.

Placer gold was first identified in the Iditadrod area at Otter Creek on Christmas Day, 1908, by gold prospectors W.A. Dikeman and John Beaton. This was the first discovery in the region and word spread fast. By the summer of 1909, many prospectors, including several hundred from the Alaskan boomtowns of Fairbanks and Nome, had arrived into that remote country. Prospectors spread out from the discovery site on Otter Creek and began to make a number of additional placer discoveries in the area. The townsites of Flat and Discovery were established on Otter Creek.

Prospectors moving outward from Flat discovered gold on Nevada Gulch, a short tributary of Moore Creek in 1910 and the discovery claim on Moore Creek was staked in 1911. Moore Creek is located 42 miles east of Flat by trail. Shallow deposits were worked by open cut scraper and hand methods during the first 20 years of operation. Manual mining techniques, focused around efforts like ground sluicing and small scale hydraulic mining constituted the bulk of the work in those early years. In 1927, a Northwest dragline, one of the first in southwest Alaska was brought into the district for exploration, overburden removal, and mining. The dragline operated for many years stacking tailings to create many of the regular, linear tailing piles up to 6 meters high that stretch far down the valley of Moore Creek. Large scale mechanized mining was nearly continuous until Alaskan Statehood in 1959 and some smaller operations continued intermittently through 1986. From 1911 to 1986, at least 53,990 ounces of gold and 12,520 ounces of silver have been produced from the Moore Creek Mine. In addition, about 1,383 ounces of gold and 64 ounces of silver were produced from nearby Nevada Gulch, mainly from 1911 to 1929. Some small scale exploration and development activities continued through 2001. The Moore Creek Mine property was purchased by Steve Herschbach and several associates in 2003, and the first initial test tourist operations began in 2005.

Bedrock underlying upper Moore Creek is Upper Cretaceous sedimentary rocks consisting of interbedded sandstone and shale. The placer deposit occurs in multiple ages of ancestral terrace gravels and in modern stream gravels. The bed of Moore Creek has moved by erosion in a southeasterly direction, leaving behind considerable terrace or bench gravels. The older terrace deposits are inferred to be Late Tertiary to early Pleistocene in age, based on similarities with other dated deposits in Interior Alaska.
In the modern stream, gravel averages about 10 ft thick. On the bench placers the gravel is shallower, only about 3 ft thick and covered by roughly 2 ft of clay and vegetation. The placer paystreak is about 1.9 mi (3 km) long and 330 to 1310 ft (100 to 400 m) wide. Pay gravels range from 13 to 20 ft (4 to 6 m) thick and are overlain by 5 to 6.6 ft (a.5 to 2 m) of overburden. Gold is concentrated at the base of the gravel and the upper 1.5 ft (0.46 m) of bedrock. The gold is associated with considerable vein quartz. Reported gold fineness ranges from 746 to 883 with averages in the high 700’s, this is quite high in silver and low in gold compared to other deposits in the Innoko and Iditarod districts. The largest nugget found while Steve has owned the property was a 24.7 ouncer found by a tourist visitor to the property in 2005. A $2000.00 nugget is reported to have been found on Nevada Gulch in the early years, which, if true, would have been a nugget exceeding 100 ounces in weight, given the purity of the Moore Creek gold and early gold prices.
Other than what is attached to the nuggets themselves, there is very little vein quartz present in the gravels. This perhaps the most unique feature of the location as vein quartz is very common in placer gravels throughout the world. Some chalcedony and agate derived from the volcanic rocks to the north are present, but vein quartz is very rare. The principal heavy minerals identified in concentrates from placer operations include native gold, cinnabar, scheelite, native silver, tetrahedrite, chromite, magnetite, and zircon.

The source of the gold is likely a mineralized monzonite intrusion and associated contact zones about 1.2 mi northwest and upstream from the placer deposit. Gulches converging on the intrusion have all been mined for gold. The northeast trending Iditarod-Nixon Fork fault forms the southern structural boundary of the intrusion. It is postulated that the Late Tertiary to possibly Late Pleistocene placer deposits at Moore Creek may have been successively offset right laterally by transcurrent movement along the fault. This would make the deposits progressively younger to the northest. Many of the large gold/quartz specimens that have been recovered have some monzonite attached, possibly indicating a source within the cupola of the intrusive. However, others have attached volcanic material indicating at least some of the cupola fracture zone which gave rise to the veins continues beyond the rim of the pluton into the volcanics.
It has been estimated that there is a minimum of 11,000 cy of virgin gravel with potentially significant gold content. An unknown amount of gold remains in the 1.5 million yards of tailings that line Moore Creek for nearly 2 miles. Much of the tailings are worthless stacked overburden, but certain others appear to contain significant amounts of gold and offer real potential for re-working, as the early recovery systems were not very efficient.

With the recent increases in the price of gold, Steve and his partners in the Moore Creek venture are seriously considering the possibility of reworking some of the old tailing piles and possibly some of the areas of virgin ground left behind by the former operators. His first goal in that process is to get the mine’s runway extended so he can bring in planes with greater carrying capacity. This will allow him to bring in modern earth moving and gold recovery equipment as the existing equipment on site is very old and inefficient.
Moore Creek Mine Owner Steve Herschbach and his partners have recently leased out the property to a Vancouver mining company, Full Metals Minerals (FMM-TSX:V) to explore for hard rock deposits on the property. Arrangements are such that this does not impede the ongoing tourist operation. Moore Creek mine is not too many miles from the recent big gold strike at Donlin where Barrick and Novagold have discovered a 28 million ounce gold resource. The Moore Creek property has been only lightly explored for in place lode-gold deposits and may hold significant potential.
While I was at the mine, a team of geologists from Full Metals was exploring the property, taking samples and mapping the area geology. While it is generally believed that the most likely locations for any gold bearing resources still in place lie within the Monzonite pluton on the hill above the mine and the volcanic rocks adjacent to it, other possibilities were being considered. Future plans for drilling and other efforts will be determined based on the results of the current exploration efforts.

Success in detecting nuggets within the old tailings piles requires good technique, hard work and some luck. You have to cover as much ground as possible and do it properly. This gives you the most chances of finding some of those big nuggets – but you also need a bit of luck as well. I had the bad fortune of getting a blister on my heel the first whole day we were there and it slowed me down the rest of the week.
The group I went in with was a really great bunch of guys, but as for me, my luck was as bad as its ever been. I never got my detector over a single piece of gold. I was completely skunked for the entire week. I dug at least 50 targets, all trash. As an example of my luck, one of the last days I went out and crossed a small stream and turned right and hunted some tailing piles, I found only junk targets with my detector. The next day, another guy from the group crossed at the same point, turned left went about 10 feet and found a 2 ounce nugget , that’s just the way the ball bounces. The nuggets are just kind of spread all over in the old mine tailing piles and there is no way to know in advance where they are – so a bit of luck does play a part. On the other hand, Glen, one of the other guys in our group, really had the lucky hand  he got more than a pound of gold during the week, including 5 pieces over an ounce. He worked very hard and his largest nugget was over three ounces in weight. He told me he was digging around 4 trash targets to every one gold target and that was far better results than I achieved. By the end of the week, folks were calling him “Mr. Lucky” - His luck for the week was pretty much the exact opposite of mine. I was getting a little discouraged with the detecting, so I started spending part of my time shoveling gravel into a high banker. Moore Creek offers a lot more possibilities than just detecting. I did a bit better there and I recovered seven pennyweight of fines doing that – so I at least had some nice Alaskan gold to bring home. The detecting is a hit or miss type of thing, but the high banking and dredging operations offer a surer chance to get some gold. The odds for a spectacular big nugget find may be less, but the gold more sure.

All of that considered, the bottom line is that you don’t have to find a ton of gold to really enjoy and appreciate the remote gold country of Alaska. It was the trip of a lifetime for me, a beautiful and very isolated, unspoiled country different from any I’d ever experienced. Great guys to prospect with, good folks in charge of the operation, good food and a comfortable camp all added up to a trip I’ll never forget. Additional information about Moore Creek camp can be found at:

http://www.moorecreek.com/index.html.

I finally got out in Mid May for my first full long weekend prospecting trip of the year. Normally I would have been out much sooner, but we had a real late spring in the Sierra Nevada this year with lots of late rain and snow continuing through all of March and much of April. Local weather forecasters said it was the largest snow pack ever recorded in the Sierra that late in the year.

Last fall I had located a new spot where I had done well with my metal detector – I picked up over three quarters of an ounce of gold in just two days detecting time. That’s certainly a spot worthy of further investigation. Family issues had prevented me from getting back to that location right away, and then the weather turned and the snow began to fly and I knew it would be spring before I could return.

I was excited to be back up in the Sierra Nevada high country – I had looked forward to my return for months. As I drove up to the site, I was surprised to find that the access road into the area was very badly damaged by the rain and snow run off. Some ruts were up to 4 feet deep, and I had to put my suburban into four-wheel drive and pick my way along the road carefully. Even though I had waited until mid-May, when I started to approach my destination that excitement turned to disappointment, as there in front of me were deep drifts of snow sitting upon the road and still blocking the way. I was surprised how much snow was left in the shady areas. I’ll bet the snow had been over 10 feet deep up there in the middle of winter - that’s the main reason why I had not been back in spite of how well I had done the first time in. Daytime temps were in the 80s - yet still the deep snow lingered in the shade. Melting snow covered the roadway with water and many places on the road was very muddy even though it had not rained in several weeks. After driving that road several times over the weekend, my suburban looked like a giant mud ball on wheels.

Although I couldn’t get in to the precise location that I wanted to reach, there were still a few of the lowest of the workings in the same general area that were accessible before I reached the last big drift that was blocking my way. So in spite of the snow, I did get a chance to do some serious prospecting, though not exactly in the locations that I had planned.

Things started out real good at the only mine I could reach. I set up my detector and within 10 minutes I had found a real nice nugget. It had been a good strong signal and was only about 5 inches deep. It looked to be something close to a quarter ounce, and my hopes returned, because its hard to be discouraged when you’re looking at a nice nugget like that. I felt that in spite of the limitations of the snow, I was going to do real well. Unfortunately, for the rest of the weekend, every single target I found was trash. Nothing but iron wires, bullets, buttons, rusted can pieces, etc. Sometimes detecting trips are like that. I had hoped to do better but I did get my one nice nugget – after cleaning it turned out to weigh 4.2 pennyweight. Next time I am up that way, the snow will be gone and there is no doubt I’ll get in much farther in. Hopefully, I will get to do some of the prospecting that I had intended for this trip.

The area where I was detecting is a location that had been ground sluiced in the old days. Ground sluicing is basically a small scale, low pressure form of Hydraulic mining. In California, hydraulic mines have been a large source of gold to prospectors armed with metal detectors. It is not uncommon that small patches of bedrock or crevices in them were overlooked by the old timers and these have yielded some nice gold. In some places, the lowest level of the gravels were strongly cemented in a manner similar to caliche. In many places, the old timers did not bother with this cemented material, and cobbles of the cemented material can be a good source of gold in old hydraulic mines. Standard high-pressure hydraulic mines are often very large and can occupy more than a thousand acres. Because of this, most of their locations are well plotted on topographic maps. As a result, many have been heavily worked over the years, yet still these mines continue to produce for the persistent prospector.

Hydraulic mining was actually first developed in California by Edward Mattison at the Coyote Diggings near Nevada City. Ditches had been dug to bring water to the rich dry diggings north of town, and the flowing water gave Mr. Mattison and idea for a new mining method. In 1852, Mr. Mattison played a stream of water under pressure against a bank of gravel thereby washing the gravels down from the bank in such a way that the gravel slurry flowed down on its own into a sluice box. The gold was recovered in the box in exactly the same manner as a standard sluice box. The technique was hugely successful, as the force of the flowing water allowed a single miner to process more gravel in a day that one could shovel into a sluice in a month. It’s use spread through the area like wildfire. Most of that early hydraulic mining was done on a small scale with low water pressure. As time went on investors began to put large sums of money into this new and successful type of mining and built long and expensive water collection systems – networks of ditches that brought water to the mines at a very high pressure. Instead of small hand held hoses, these mines had large water cannons, called giants, that shot millions of gallons of high pressure water at the banks of ancient river gravels which were often 50 to 100 feet high. This allowed the miners to process huge quantities of gravel, creating the very large hydraulic mines that are so common in the Mother Lode country and elsewhere. Eventually these mines became the victims of their own success as the vast quantities of gravels they were releasing choked rivers and streams creating flooding and agricultural damage downstream. A series of the lawsuits in the 1880s essentially shut down Hydraulic mining operations through most of California (thought they continued in some limited areas).

Since hydraulic mining is banned under modern environmental protections, why should today’s prospectors be interested in the small-scale hydraulic mining method known by the old timers as “ground sluicing”? The simple answer is because they have great potential for the prospector armed with a metal detector. These little known operations are much smaller in size than their gigantic brethren, and are not normally shown on topographic and other maps. Because of this, they have not been worked nearly as heavily as some of their larger cousins.

The large standard hydraulic mine workings were normally run by well-funded companies with qualified staff. Ground sluicing operations were usually run as one or two man operations and were much less efficient at recovering gold. The operation takes its name from the cuts in the ground the miners used to wash the gold bearing gravels into the sluice box. Ground sluicing also required the operators to do a fair amount of pick and shovel work to move the gravel into the sluice box – certainly nothing like doing all the work by hand shovel, but much more hand work than a larger scale mines. Deposits that were ground sluiced were smaller and often worked out within a year or two, even by small groups or even single miners, so the deposits were not a hugely productive and are far less well known, most are not documented in any mining publication. In a number of places, where they have been rediscovered, these deposits are yielding well to prospectors who have found these old sites. They have excellent potential for yielding some good, coarse gold nuggets.

Because these sites are poorly known, what are the signs that a prospector might look for in the field when searching for them? Some of the typical workings that mark these old mining sites include:
1) Ground cuts – These are basically the trenches in the ground from which ground sluicing gets its name. These narrow trenches carried the gravels to the sluice box.
2) Stacked rocks – in narrow and steep locations there was little room to move the rocks away. The old timers were forced to stack the rocks into walls along side the stream they were mining.
3) In many locations the gravels contain rocks that are too large to pass through the sluice. The miners took these rocks out of the sluice placed them into piles. These piles of coarse rocks are an easy marker for the modern prospector to see.
4) Small areas stripped of their ground cover and soils are often left behind as the mining operations processed these materials for their gold.
5) Small scale ground sluice operations could not afford to bring water from long distances. Where creek or river water was not available close at hand, ponds to collect rainwater and snow run off were often constructed, and the workings will be right below them.

The three most common types of placer deposits which may have been worked by ground sluicing sites for these working include:
1) Gravel benches along rivers and streams, especially smaller streams
2) Tertiary river channels high on mountain tops
3) Residual placers around hard rock quartz deposits

The location I found last fall is not an old river bed, it is a residual placer that has formed near the top of a mountain and belongs in the third category noted above.

Through out the area at my new spot there are piles are tossed cobbles – They were not stacked as there was plenty of space and stacking was not necessary. I have tried them but found only a few pieces of junk - I would expect any finds in them to be gold-quartz specimen chunks - there are no fines in them and most are dropped right on the bedrock. These are cobbles that were too coarse to roll through their sluice under the low water pressure the miners had. I’ll bet the sluices were just long wooden troughs with wood or rock along the bottom as riffles. The 4.2 pennyweight nugget came from an area where it appears they did not clean off the material all the way down to bedrock and the nugget was in that material that was left behind. Almost all the gold here is coarse. When I found this place last fall, I got 4 nuggets totaling over 15 dwt. The average size of all the pieces I have found up there to date is 3.9 dwt. Just as an experiment to see what amounts of fines are present, I took a couple pans full of gravel on the inside bend of a little drainage that has water in it because of the melting snow, and I did not get a single color. Plenty of black sand, but not even a speck of tiny gold (and the pan came from only about 30 feet away from where the nugget was found. It seems that the majority of the gold here is coarse. In my two trips to this area, I have seen virtually no sign that anyone else has ever detected here before, as a result I think it does have a lot of potential, but we shall see on future trips just how that works out.

– Chris Ralph

Here is a little pendant I finished doing up a while ago, a little project I thought gold prospectors might be interested in. The thing to note here is that good solid gold quartz can be cut up and made into some very expensive jewelry. Crushing them up for the gold content may be a serious waste of potential cash for some pieces. This gold-quartz stone is from a piece I found near Grass Valley, CA. It is mounted with 16 very nice little Columbian emeralds in a pre-made 14K gold mounting. These Natural Columbian Emeralds of a quality and clarity that you just don’t normally see its just they are small. The setting of all those little stones was a real pain in the behind, but I think the final result was worth it. Actually selecting that many matching stones all the same size was also a major pain in the behind as well.
The mounting cost me around $40, the stones were a bit more expensive but I had them on hand, and with the gold quartz, this is seriously a $400.00+ piece of jewelry. Yep it takes equipment to turn a stone into a nice cabochon, but I have the equipment needed, so it worked out OK. Check out the original sixteen to one mine website to see how expensive gold quartz cabochons really are.

The best gold quartz has a nice spattering of gold on a pure white background, though some other colors of quartz can be good as long as they are attractive. The piece must also be solid, as cracks will cause the gem to fall apart during cutting.