This past Sunday, a few friends got together for a private group hunt. Chris Ralph from Nevada had come down for this weeks AZO Stanton outing as a guest speaker.

Although it’s a little late notice if you don’t know about it, but if you get a chance, go hear Chris speak. Chris has a degree in mining and his articles are often featured in the ICMJ. He’s a frequent participant on all the major nuggetshooting forums and a contributor of some really good information.

Our group met up at about 8a.m. Well, some of us anyway. J.K. Lyon, the inventor of the gold tube (kick ass) had a little breakdown. Cool thing I was running totally late so I found out just in time to go pick him up. We got there about an hour late.

Found Rod and Kevin Hoagland off in the distance climbing a mountain face. We geared up and went up to meet them. After completing the hike we came to the first spot where everybody was scattered about doing their own thing. Met up with Eric who was doing some probing and sampling for fines. Talked to Russ Ford and Kevin for a bit. I turned on for a bit and balanced my machine up. This was one of the only locations I’ve been to where I could sucessfully balance both channels perfectly. I detected quite a few targets and then went to meet up with Rod who had gone off to scan the area.

Rod and I talked for a bit and the met Jade Goodman, a friend of ours from the forums who I have never met in person before. He was working hard with his SD2100 and 11″ Minelab mono. Up the slope a ways was Chris Ralph so we went over to say hi and watch him dig one of the many hot rocks in this area.

Rod and I did some further exploration of the general area. After a bit, we met up with the group and decided it was time to “do a thing in a place” and head for a different area. Jade and John came along and soon, everybody else followed as well. Jade got a flat on the way out on the high road. Truck were taking off in 4 different directions and we finally got Kevin on the horn trying to find out what was going on.

As usual, Kevin, the perennial helper jammed up the 4×4 road in his ??????? faster than I could have imagined and he sent us on to the spot, staying behind to fix a flat.

We met up with Russ on the road and once everybody caught up, we headed out to the 2nd spot. This was a place that Rod and I had scored good gold in the past. I was happy to be out on this perfect weather day and immediately started hitting the washes. I felt a little out of the game after several weeks of not detecting due to work load.

After a bit of time in the wash, I decided to walk up on the benches to eat lunch where I met Chris again. He had a nice deep target and so I kicked back to eat lunch while he dug a nice deep target on a high bench. We thought for sure it was a nug but in the end actually ended up being 3 trash targets. We talked and finished out lunch, then moseyed over to a different wash and took a look at some old workings and did a bit of detecting.

After that, I talked with Rod and John for about 2 or 3 hours, just taking in the day and enjoying a few laughs. All in all a good day off for me. I can’t wait to get back into prospecting.

It was a pleasure to meet and hunt with Chris as well as Jade and everybody else. If you ever get a chance to do a group hunt, don’t pass it up.