The winter nugget hunting season has finally arrived in Arizona. While I’m sure that many people have been pushing back into the more remote locations of the desert for several weeks now, it’s finally cooled off enough that the remote nugget hunting areas are no longer off limits. It wasn’t until recently that I was able to break the 5000 ft. barrier for nuggets and so, at least in the past, it’s felt like cabin fever during the summer. Either that or heat stroke in the Little San Domingo at 9 in the morning.

Anyhow, this past Sunday, we got a chance to get back to one of our remote nugget patches for the first time in several months. We found that the area had been hit moderately by the monsoon rains and so Rod and Laszlo with their GP Extremes, Scott with his GS5 and I with my SD2100 hit the deck, excited to score some nuggets. We got there early and temps remained moderate all day long. After checking a few areas with my Coiltek 14″ mono, I decided to switch gears and changed over to my trusty Minelab 8″ mono, thinking that I would be able to get into some smaller areas. Hunting below an area where nuggets had been found previously, I was able to score a nice little .1 gram nugget. Moving up, I cleared a small area of detritus and heard a nominal ground signal which I passed over and then moved on.

A little while later, Rod came by with his GP and 14″ mono and in the same spot heard a clear signal. I was there so I helped him dig as it was under som low lying brush. Sure enough, he scored a nice 1.1 grammer, adding to the 1.2 gram nugget he had found earlier in an adjacent wash. Neither Scott nor Laszo scored that day but we all had a good time. We even discovered some additional clues that merit further investigation on the next trip. Luckily, the weather is such that we have months of great detecting ahead of us.