Even though it’s getting closer and closer as the weeks go by, it’s still not quite time to start the desert nugget shooting season. Temperatures are still high and it’s difficult to get in a long hunt. In light of that, we decided to get out for some prospecting in the high country. Rod came up to my neck of the woods with Scott Huey who just moved back to Arizona from Maine.

We got a chance to look and some good bedrock and do a bit of panning before it was time to gear up with the detectors and do some nugget hunting. We had a nice bedrock creek picked out and as it turned out, the monsoons had totally slammed it so there were a lot of targets to have, both metal and hot rocks. Rod had his GP Extreme with a Coiltek Joey Mono, I my SD2100 with a Minelab 8″ mono and Scott had a modified, shaft mounted Eric Foster Goldscan 5 with an Eric Foster mono coil.

I headed up the creek and dug a couple of targets right before I popped this nice .6 gram nugget on bedrock.

I spent the rest of the day exploring the monsoon damage of the creek and cherry picking spots for nuggets but as it is, I was only able to recover iron and lead. I’m sure there is more placer gold in this creek and I’m more than satisfied with the take for the day.

Aside from the gold, it’s good times with good friends, as always. Plus, I got a chance to watch Scott work with the Goldscan 5 which was a really cool machine. I can tell you, it handles the ground well and the bedrock in this particular creek was hot. More about the Goldscan 5 soon.

It was a great day and a great way to avoid the heat. I can’t wait to do it again soon!