I got out early in the a.m. with Rod yesterday on a hunt in the Little San Domingo placer. Figuring it was going to get hot quick, we were gearing up well before the sun rose in an area where Rod had found an 18.5 grammer previously. By the time we were ready, it was starting to get light and we found a small drainage that looked really good for nuggets with lots of exposed bedrock.

Well, right off the bat the threshold on my detector started to pulse and sure enough, it was indicating a low battery. Darn! I could have swore I had at least half a day left on that battery and I knew I had not brought another. Since I run a Coiltek 12 volt regulator on my SD2100 I searched Rod’s truck for an extra 12v but to no avail.

Here is Rod detecting on my trip back to the trucks…

Locating a small target on bedrock….

Coming up with no battery, I decided to to some vac packing. Luckily, we had planned to do this anyhow or I would have been totally out of commission. I went to a couple of likely spots and broke some bedrock and sucked up the virgin material.

The bedrock in the LSD is a really strange, pinkish basaltic flow that is unlike anything I’ve seen elsewhere. It tends to be rotten and easy to break up and expose virgin material deep within. Like a lot of desert gold, it tends to be dispersed in pockets and so can be sort of hard to find, even though it’s basically everywhere.

Getting back to the trucks to process my first bucket of material, I decided to set up my Goldbuddy mini highbanker. I like bringing the Goldbuddy into the desert because it can run on a minimal amount of water and is a very relaxing way to process material. Well, I got the machine set up only to find I had forgot my power leads and was unable to hook the unit up to my battery. I just sort of shook my head at this point and did the only thing I could do which was to start panning. Honestly, I was probably able to process my two buckets of material faster this way. I think the sluice works best when you have a whole lot of material to work. With two buckets, the cleanup would take all the advantage out of using it.

I followed Rod to explore a different drainage which turned out to amount to nothing as far as detectable ground and I started to feel really nauseous and had to sit down for a bit. It never quite left me and so we decided to pack it up and get out as it was starting to get pretty hot anyhow. I thought I’d drank too much coffee for an empty stomach but in the end, I had a little case of the flu. Mild but I’m glad we got out when we did. You can’t afford to take chances with your health out in the desert.

In the end, this is what I came up with for the two 1/3 buckets….

Looking forward to next weeks hunt.