By Dave McCracken

With comments added by
Brian & Jim McCracken and Eric Bosch

“It was only Pure Luck that got us through this Whole Adventure.”

Dave Mack

 

Jim with gold  Three guys waving from the dredges

Atlin Lake

Note: This story was originally formatted as a pictorial-diary to document and memorialize one of the greatest adventures in my life. My brother Brian presented the pictorial presentation to me as a Christmas present in 1989. Many of the original pictures are included here.

Brain: I have known my brother, Dave Mack, for his entire lifetime. That’s because I was born two years ahead of him. During our growing-up years, Dave was “my younger brother.” Adventure has been Dave’s calling since his earliest days.

We grew up in a navy family. Our dad was a submarine commander during the cold war, so we were moving somewhere else every two years or so. When we lived near the water, Dave’s adventures nearly always revolved around boats. He devoted a winter to building his first row boat in the family’s living room when he was about 13 year’s old (we didn’t have a garage). The following summer, he used that boat to start a lobster-trapping business in Long Island Sound. Saving his money for something more substantial, Dave built his first motor boat in a friend’s garage the following winter – which vastly expended his reach out on the water. He got himself SCUBA qualified when he was 15, and most of his adventures after that revolved around being underwater. I remember he built this tow-sled to drag behind one of his motor boats, which allowed him to get dragged around with the ability to control his depth so he could search the bottom for signs of wreckage or anything else interesting. Dave and one of his friends used that sled day-in and day-out, searching for a sunken wreak that was supposed to be located near where we lived in Waterford, Connecticut. He never found the wreak; but until this day, I’ll bet nobody has covered more of the bottom of Long Island Sound off of Waterford, Connecticut. Dave was a heck of a good fisherman during those early years, and I never met anyone who could spear fish better underwater.

During the times we lived away from the water, Dave’s adventures were all about building forts. All the way back to the third grade, Dave was building them underground when we did not have access to trees. But Dave’s tree forts were the best. He built this fantastic, large 2-story tree fort back when he was in the 5th grade. A bunch of us pitched in to help with that project. We used that fort to make war with our next door neighbors of the time (the greatly-feared Garrett brothers). Those were several local guys of about the same age as us. We were kind of looked upon as “outsiders” because we moved around a lot. Dave came up with a big piece of tire inner tube and rigged a huge slingshot on top of our fort, and we were landing big green apples about a hundred yards over the trees to smack against the (much smaller) tree fort of our neighbors. We couldn’t even see their fort; but we could certainly hear when our apples struck home. In turn, they lobbed pretty sizable rocks in our direction. Those guys were not really our enemies. “Making war” from elevated forts in the trees was fun; something exciting for boys to do. Those skirmishes eventually evolved into battles with BB guns. We were lucky nobody ever got hurt really bad. We lost interest in war with our neighbors when the Garrets and several other local guys, Tommy Tracy and Peter Oats, started a rock band. That’s about the time that Dave really got going with his sea adventures – and I got interested in girls.

Dave’s tree forts were built so well, we used them as a place to meet up (mostly with our girlfriends) all the way until our youngest brother, Jim, graduated from high-school. Jim tore the fort down before he departed Connecticut to meet up with Dave out in California. It must have been a big job taking that fort down!

Being the oldest, I was strongly influenced by our father and was somewhat strong-armed into the U.S. navel academy at Annapolis just after high-school. Dave was much-less of a conformist. Rather than being pushed off on a university by our father, he and his best friend devoted most of their senior year in high school making a camper out of a Chevy step van (bread truck). They saved their money and departed on a year-long trip zigzagging across Canada and the U.S., eventually to end up out in California. After a time, Dave decided to join the navy and try out for the Navy Seals. The Seals were a seriously-dreaded program at that time (during the Viet Nam war), and I’m not sure any of us believed Dave would make it through the training. It was probably more of a surprise to our father than anyone that Dave actually did make it into the navy Seals!

Tent in snowAfter that, Dave and I were fortunate that our time in the service brought us together in Subic Bay, Philippines during 1975. That was another very interesting time. We shared some very hair-raising (and probably illegal) adventures there, as well. But we will save those stories for another day.

This particular adventure started during the winter of 1981. Dave had already been dredging gold for about a year or two and was just starting to figure out how to find the high-grade gold deposits. I was between jobs at the time and invited myself to spend the winter of 1981-82 dredging with Dave on the Trinity River in northern California. There was snow on the ground, man; it was freezing! We lived in a timberline tent, heated by a wood stove. Dave lived out there in that tent for the better part of three years. It was something you adjusted to after a while. Dave and I took turns on the cooking detail. We ate a lot!

Now, anyone that knows Dave, knows that he is a hard-pusher. “No pain, no gain!” You had to get the work done if you wanted the gold to add up. End of story! We dredged as hard as we could nearly every day.

We were dredging right out in the middle of the Trinity River about 8 miles upstream from where we were camped. To minimize the pain involved of trying to get into a diving suit out in the snow and mud, we were getting into our dry-suits in the warm tent and then driving up to the claim. All we had to get around with at the time was Dave’s Honda motorcycle. I used to ride on back, balancing a fuel container on each side of the bike, hugging Dave with my legs to keep from falling off the back. There was often snow and ice on the road. We used to get some pretty strange looks from others who were driving cars. But it was just another day to us. No pain, no gain!

The water in the Trinity River that winter was ice cold, sometimes down in the mid-30’s. We were doing two long dives in that cold water every day. We would stay in until our bodies were so cold, we could not take it any longer. Sometimes, even before lunch, we would do jumping-jacks on the bank to get some heat fired back up in our diving suits. Our toes were so numb, they were beyond feeling. The second dive of the day was always the hardest. Many times, we stood there and dared each other to be last, “one, two, three, go!” and we would both be still standing there looking at each other, sometimes laughing at our situation. It was hard, but we did it. Placing your face in the water was like getting smacked in the head with a power slap; it stung something awful and gave you a splitting headache! I always dreaded that part of it.

Still, we were recovering quite a bit of gold for our effort, including some nice, big nuggets. It wasn’t enough to get rich. It was enough to get by. Uncovering cracks that were loaded with gold on the bottom of the river, sometimes even pockets of gold, was serious adventure! We were hoping for a real bonanza, but we just found steady gold.

Dave with bottle of goldIf Dave wasn’t filling up spice bottles with gold, he would just keep sampling around until he found a richer gold deposit!

If the gold prices in 1982 were the same as they are today, we would have been making some serious money! But as it was, we were having to sell a lot of the gold we mined so we could pay for fuel, food and the other costs. We were keeping the nuggets, though!

One day, Dave suggested that we should spend the upcoming summer season dredging in Alaska. I immediately jumped on the idea and ran it by our younger brother, Jim. Jim had never done any gold dredging, but he had been getting an earful about it from Dave and me. Jim immediately signed onto the plan. Dave then ran the idea by one of his best dredging buddies, Eric Bosch. Eric could not have been more than about 18 years old at the time. His mother, Anita, told Eric he could go with us on the condition that we also take along her young black lab, Sadie, to help protect us from grizzly bears. Eric & Sadie jumped right on board. That made five of us. One day I suggested to Dave that we bring a cook along so we could devote most of our efforts to mining. So Dave arranged with this strange old prospector named “Joe” to go along with us on the trip. Joe had a 3-inch dredge. In exchange for cooking and cleaning up after the rest of us, Joe was going to be allowed to mine for gold in his spare time. That made six of us.

Jim: This was a life-long dream come true for me; going to Alaska with my brothers on a gold mining adventure! Everyone else was just as excited about it as I was.

Brian: After taking some time to prepare, we all met in Big Bar, California in Mid-May of 1982. Big Bar is a small community nestled along the Trinity River. Dave had already acquired a beast of a Dodge Power Wagon that was in pretty sound shape. When Jim and I arrived in Big Bar, Dave and Eric had nearly finished building-up an 18-foot box trailer that we would pull behind the truck. The trailer would be used to haul Dave’s 6-incher, three 5-inchers and Joe’s 3-inch dredge, along with all the support gear and supplies that we needed. Then it was to serve as a cook shack and bunk house once the gear was removed. We located and installed propane and 12-volt lights, along with a very large, old propane freezer. We installed a wood stove with a removable smoke stack. This was a lot better than a tent!

Dave: Brian and Jim both grew full beards before they arrived so they could look the part of “Alaskan miners.” They looked pretty good, too. So they were real disappointed when I asked them to shave the beards off. I was warned in advance by some Canadian friends that we should not go up there looking all rough and burly, especially if we planned to do any business in Canada. I predicted in advance, if the opportunity presented itself, that we might want to stop in British Columbia or the Yukon Territory on the way to Alaska and do a little mining. Eric and I had already trimmed ourselves up even before Brian and Jim arrived. We were going to play it safe and project a clean-cut image.

Brian: There was still more work to do when Jim and I arrived on the Trinity. We all jumped to it, and we departed exactly on schedule at 10 AM on the first of June, 1982.

We had mounted an old camper shell and had removed the back window out of the truck so that the six of us could ride together. We had no plans to stop until we reached Alaska, except for fuel and meals – which we made for ourselves (mostly sandwiches) to save money. Eric’s small row boat was tied down to the top of the camper. We were really loaded!

Jim: The first part of the trip was really hairy. This was because the trailer was wandering around dangerously behind the truck – especially if we got going faster than about 45 miles per hour. As hardy as that Power Wagon was, our trailer was packed full to the top with heavy gear. All we started with was a bumper hitch. We could not load any more weight in the front of the trailer without fear of breaking the truck. There was so much weight on the bumper, sometimes it felt like we were pulling a wheelie down the highway!

In Portland, Oregon, we finally decided to stop and buy an anti-sway bar that connected between the truck’s bumper and the trailer hitch. That made all the difference, and we were able to pick up the pace. After that, we started making pretty good time, shifting off with the driving, taking turns sleeping in the back. We traveled day and night.

Eric: We started going through tires on the truck shortly after we got on the road. Before we reached Whitehorse, I believe we replaced every tire at least once. The trailer tires had plenty of tread on them when we started, but they were old and could not take the heavy load, especially once we reached the Alcan Highway in Canada, much which remained unpaved at the time.Alcan Highway

Brian: We drove straight on through, day and night, hour after hour. But we had a reliable tape deck and brought along some great music. We were rocking out to Pat Benatar, Sticks, the Alman Brothers Band, Santana, Steve Miller and other rock n’ roll music that each of us had brought along. The rule was that whoever was driving got to pick the music. Our old companion, Joe, from an earlier generation, was having visible trouble adjusting to our music, but he was not really complaining, yet. That came later. For the moment, we were moving right along. We were on the Alcan Highway by the third day.

Never mind that we were in June; it was cold once we began driving through the Canadian Rockies. It was like 14 degrees during the daytime and got really cold at night.

Jim: One morning at around 6 AM, just as it was getting light, I was driving along (dirt road) at about 50 miles an hour; and just like that, it was everything I could do to keep the steering wheel in my hands. Everything was flipping out of control!

Brian: I looked out the window and saw the trailer right next to us! I remember thinking, “What’s going on?” It turned out that we got a flat back on the trailer, and then broke one of the bolts that held the leaf spring to the trailer’s frame, causing the trailer to fishtail all over the place. We were quite fortunate that we did not completely jackknife and roll both the truck and trailer right there. That would have been the end of our trip, big time! We were lucky!Trailer with broken wheel

We really did a number on that wheel, but we were feeling lucky that we had not lost the whole trailer!

Eric: It was our first flat on the trailer. We also destroyed the wheel rim. This was not just any rim; it was something special from an old trailer axle. Fortunately, we had brought two spares. Unfortunately, to place more weight in the front of the trailer, we had stored both spares all the way in the front of the trailer. That was a mistake we only made once! So there we were on the side of the Alcan where we needed to unpack nearly the entire trailer just to get at our spares. We all felt pretty foolish about that. This is one of the things you learn on a trip to Alaska: Plan on getting flats!

While Dave and Jim worked on unpacking and repacking the trailer, Brian and I drove the Honda motorcycle 20-miles back to the nearest town to find a hardened steel bolt that would reattach our leaf spring. This was a bit of a challenge, since Canada is on a metric system, and the bolt went along with a bushing that had to fit just right. It took us a while, but we finally found what we were looking for. The store had three in stock. We bought all of them!

Alcan HighwayWhen we returned to the trailer, we were about frozen to death! The temperature was below freezing. Brian and I had to take turns driving the Honda, because it was so cold on the guy in front. When we got back to the trailer, Dave and Jim were waiting for us with the spare tire ready to go. In all, we only lost about half a day.

Dave: The bigger problem was that we were going through our money much faster than we had planned. Pulling that heavy load, the Power Wagon was only getting about 4 miles to the gallon of gasoline; 6 at the most, even when we were going down hill. We had to buy things along the way that we had not planned for, especially tires. After we blew the second tire on the trailer, we went into a tire store and bought 4 brand new ones. It was too risky to run the Alcan with such a heavy load on those old tires!

Out of pure luck, we also were able to find another spare rim for the trailer. This turned out to be very fortunate, because we lost another rim one day when I was driving. We had just topped another hill, and I was manually applying trailer breaks as we descended the other side. We were totally overloaded, and the last thing we needed was to get going too fast down a hill on a dirt road!

I’ll never forget driving down this hill and getting passed up by a wheel that went right by the driver’s side. It was going quite a bit faster than we were. Maybe it was sleep depravation, but I could not put any logic to it. My first thought was that it was someone else’s wheel. But we were the only ones out there! About the time the wheel bounded off the road and out of sight down a steep hill, it occurred to me that it might have been one of our own wheels. Sure enough, when I looked in the Northern Lightsrearview mirror, I could see that the break drum from the rear left wheel on the trailer was down rolling on the road. Great! Luckily there was no serious damage. But it took us hours down in the brush before we finally found the wheel. The lug bolts had torn right through the rim, rendering it useless. But the tire was still good.

Eric: One night, we came up over a hilltop and the entire sky was lit up in a blaze of bright-colored white, yellow and red electricity. It was so dramatic and sudden that we pulled the truck over to the side of the road and had this very serious discussion, trying to decide what was going on. We finally came to the conclusion that there must have been a nuclear war. We turned on the radio for news, but there Dave & Ericwas no reception out there. There were also no other vehicles on the road. We even had some discussion about turning around and going back home. That’s when Joe, who was dozing in the back of the truck, sat up and said, “No, you knuckleheads, those are the Northern Lights!” The entire sky was on fire with an electric light show. We grew quite accustomed to this later in the trip after the midnight sun would disappear, again.


Brian:
It took us a full five, long non-stop days to reach the town of Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory. We were down to our last 200 Dollars. That wasn’t even enough to get us up into Alaska! Basically, we were broke! We found a camping area just outside of town, set up some tents, and took a timeout to get some real sleep, clean things up a bit, and take stock in our situation. Our financial situation was not good. We were going to have to come up with some money!Joe and Brian

Even though we were out of money, Joe was always asking us to buy something else that he needed to do the cooking properly for us.

Jim: We were just young guys in those days, and we had already invested all of our savings into this trip. There was no more! By the nature of the way we were raised by our father, looking back on it, I don’t think any of us even considered the idea of asking him for a loan. Not that he wouldn’t have helped us. Sure he would have. But the price to pay for telling our dad that we had gotten ourselves stuck up in the middle of nowhere with no money would have been way too much to pay. We would have looked for dishwashing jobs before we did that!

Dave: I knew an American gold buyer who was based out of Whitehorse during the summer months. It was something about the Dollar exchange between the Canadian and U.S. currencies that was making it work for him and the Canadian miners that he was buying gold from. He told me to look him up when we reached Whitehorse. I had his phone number. So I gave him a call as soon as we had a chance to catch our breath. He invited me over to his office. Jim and I drove the motorcycle over there from where we were camped.

Jim: The first thing we learned in Whitehorse was that Canada was strictly enforcing a motorcycle helmet law. We barely got into town, and were sternly scolded by an RCMP officer (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) from the open window of his cruiser on the far side of the street. He yelled at us so loudly that I thought we had joined the Marines. He was a totally no-nonsense dude. He said, “Get some helmets on or else!” We said, “Yes sir!”

Dave: After advising my friend of our situation, he suggested that he could introduce us to some of his clients that were recovering hundreds of pounds of gold from ancient gold deposits located adjacent to Pine Creek near Atlin, British Columbia. This location was more than a hundred miles from Whitehorse (that is a 3-hour drive on today’s roads according to Google Earth). My friend was pretty certain these Canadian miners would allow us on their creek since they were not doing anything with it. And if not there, my friend said we would turn up others near Atlin that would allow us to dredge on their property.

Atlin has a fantastic gold mining history; it is one of the richest areas in all of Canada. The standard dealwas 10% of gold recovery to the claim holders, and another 5% finder’s fee for my friend. That seemed more than reasonable to me and my partners!

Wide view of campWithin just a few days, we had made 10% deals with several claim owners in the Atlin area. Let me just say that while America might be the super power, generally speaking, we do not even come close to matching up with what the Canadians are doing with mining. The miners who we were being introduced to were operating whole fleets of huge earth-moving machines. They were literally removing hundreds of feet of overburden to gain access to extremely rich layers of pay-dirt. When they saw our tiny 5-inch Keene dredges, it was only politeness that kept them from laughing out loud at us! I’m sure we made for amusing discussion at the local bar, because we heard about it later. To them, we were just playing. Besides, they had zero interest in Pine Creek, because their forefathers had already mined the creek…

Brian: We found this wonderful place to camp up on Surprise Lake, which was about 15 miles upstream from Atlin on Pine Creek. It was an organized campground with a pit toilet, but we were the only ones there. The surroundings were outstanding! We didn’t know it until we pulled in there, but this turned out to be a renowned fishing area with glacier-fed lakes (cold), beautiful rivers and creeks, surrounded by snow-capped mountains. It was now mid-June, and there was still 3-to-4 feet of snow on the ground in some places. Surprise Lake overflowed to begin the lower stretch of Pine Creek.

Unloading at the lakeUnfortunately, the entrance into the campground was very rough and we broke a leaf spring on the trailer getting into the campground, something we would have to replace before we could leave.

Eric: After unloading all the mining gear and setting up camp, I decided to row out on the lake and see if I could catch any fish. Mainly, I was just happy to get out of that truck. The guys kind of laughed at me when I first went out there. This was because they were used to fishing on lakes in America where you usually have to work hard to catch even a small fish. I had a nice big fish in the boat after my first cast! That sent the other guys running for their own fishing gear. Then, everybody got into the act and we were catching fish like crazy! Later, Jim and I rowed over to the other side where a small creek was emptying into the lake, and these same fish were trying to get up the very shallow creek in such large numbers that we could have gathered up as many as we wanted.Lake Camp

We were the only ones out there camped on this beautiful lake that was full of fish!

Dave: One thing we noticed as soon as we got into Canada was that things seemed a lot more expensive there than what we were used to. This was even more true when we got out to Atlin. Just a medium-sized jar of peanut butter was like $10. And we were some hungry boys. Since our money needed to be spent on fuel for the dredges, we felt we needed to do something drastic to get some meat in the freezer.

Jim: The day after setting up camp at Surprise Lake, Eric and I went hunting on the Honda. There were all sorts of primitive roads out there, and we had to be careful to not get lost! As we started driving around, it became clear almost immediately that we were in the middle of a massive, historical gold mining area. There were old miner’s shacks and old mines around nearly every bend! Gold prices were very low at the time, so most of the buildings and mines were abandoned. There was hardly anyone around, except for an occasional person or two we would see driving around from time-to-time. It seemed pretty safe to go on an unlicensed hunting trip.Eric & Jim going hunting

Eric: We had brought two weapons with us on this trip. The first was a shot gun that we literally had loaded and ready for potential bear attacks. The second was my trusty Winchester 30-30. This was my personal favorite hunting rifle. I had knocked off a lot of dear using this gun. Since I was familiar with the 30-30, Jim agreed that he would drive the motorcycle and let me take a shot if we spotted any game.

 

 

 

Old mine  Two Cabins
Old mine 2

Similar to the way we underestimated the fishing, we realized how plentiful the game was before we had traveled more than about a mile away from camp. Jim followed the road around this bend; and there was an entire herd of these huge animals right out in an open meadow. We didn’t even know what they were. It was meat! They were so close; I didn’t even have to get off the back of the motorcycle to nail one. He went down in a single shot!

Driving through mudJim: Dave and Brian had gone off in the truck to case out where we would begin our dredge sampling program on the following day. So Eric and I went back to camp and got one of the tarps that we had brought along, some knives and some trash bags. Then we spent the rest of the entire day cleaning that big animal and packing hunks of meat to our freezer in camp. We stocked it completely full of meat. We then dragged the remaining carcass off out of sight to help feed the wolves (which were surely there). When Dave and Brian returned later that afternoon, Joe already had steaks cooking on the Barbie! Things were looking better. Worst case, we could just eat fish and meat until we started mining some gold. We were not going to go hungry out there! But our money shortage forced us to place a severe limit on what we would spend on food in the store.

Power wagon at high speedBrian: Before deciding where to begin sampling, we spent quite a bit of time driving around the surrounding area. As they were in their spring thaw, the side roads off the beaten track were mostly wet and muddy. We got stuck several times even with the 4-wheel drive. Ultimately, we decided the best way to deal with the muddy sections of road were to hit them hard and fast so the momentum would carry us through. Boy, that old Power Wagon was like an army tank!

Here was Brian charging through a bog at about 60 miles an hour!

Dave: The local claim owners that we were working with owned several miles of Pine Creek. But there were only a few places which allowed direct road access. So, on the following day, we launched a 5-inch dredge and decided to knock out a sample hole right there where the road met the creek. There was still snow and ice on the edges of the water. The creek was ice-cold! We all had dry-suits to keep our core temperatures intact. But I got a migraine headache that hurt so bad that it turned my stomach every time I stuck my face in that water; no exceptions!Jim thumbs up

Jim giving the thumbs-up signaling that we were recovering gold on the first sample.

Amazingly, we got right into pretty rich gold on the first sample hole! The gold was sitting right on top of a layer of hydraulic tailings, under about two feet of hard-packed streambed material. This was gold that was lost from old-timer recovery systems. There were a lot of fines and flakes. There were also some nice gold nuggets! We were making money on the first day. Things were looking up!dredges on pine creek

Production dredging in the first gold deposit we found on Pine Creek.

We launched my 6-incher on the following day and decided to shift-dive the dredges, one person down on each of the two dredges at a time, while the other two guys had a chance to warm up. We wanted to do some production dredging in the deposit to see how the gold was going to add up before we committed the other two dredges.

It was going pretty good. But, things were so expensive up there, it didn’t take long to realize that we needed to find a richer gold deposit if we wanted to come out ahead after all the costs. When I say “come out ahead,” I mean we wanted to come out way ahead!

Here is the sun at about 3 O’clock in the morning!

Midnight sunEric: By this time, it was not really getting dark at night. The sun got smaller, kind of like the moon; but it never really got dark. This had the four of us out on the creek until very late in the day. Working in the cold water gave us insatiable appetites! This all came to a head one evening when we returned to camp and Joe had not cooked nearly enough food to feed our hungry appetites. He was also complaining bitterly that he had no way to get to the creek after we went off for the day — so he was not able to get any mining in. Joe generally had a negative emotional attitude. He was just made up that way. His negative emotions were something that had been dragging on all of us for the whole trip. It all came to a head that evening with the rest of us fiercely growling (in hunger) at Joe that he must feed us more! We were so angry at him; I believe Joe thought we were going to kill him. This is not an exaggeration. From then on, Joe was fearing for his life!

The meals were much bigger after that, and Joe was sending each of us out with three thick peanut butter plus two cheese sandwiches per day. We were using most of the gold we were mining to buy more food at the local store. We were eating it all.

Joe never got in a single moment of mining. All his time was devoted to meal preparation and clean-up. He was quiet and sullen. He was very hard to read, but we could all sense his resentment. We were not sure if he was worried that we were going to kill him, or if he was perhaps planning to poison us. We were all regretting that we had brought him along.

Jim in dry suitWe had to back out of our dry-suits one person at a time to keep from being swarmed by millions of hungry mosquitoes!

Jim: The mosquitoes along pine creek were so ferocious; that to keep from being eaten alive, we each had to get out of our dry-suits one person at a time, with the other three guys waving the mosquitoes off. The (big) mosquitoes would literally swarm us in clouds!

Brian: After we got a few ounces of gold ahead, we made a special trip in to Whitehorse and sold it to Dave’s friend (he paid us $260/ounce at 70% of the spot price), and we used the money to stock up on fuel, food and supplies. We were filling two 55-gallon drums with fuel in the back of the truck. Fuel and supplies cost us much less in Whitehorse, than in Atlin.

Dave: One of the T-80 air-breathing compressors from the two new 5-inch dredges we had bought from Keene Industries lost a bearing on the first day. I called Jerry Keene and asked if he would please send us a replacement. He said no problem. So I gave him a General Delivery address for Atlin, British Columbia. One of our 5-inchers was going to be out of action until the compressor arrived.

After a few days of working this first gold deposit, we decided it would be best if Jim and Brian continued to work it to produce income, while Eric and I, who were the most experienced, started a serious dredge-sampling program on Pine Creek. We needed to locate a richer gold deposit!creek

The claim owners were coming down every few days to see how we were doing. They were impressed with what we were recovering, surprised that we were finding any gold at all from the creek. They were also showing us some of the larger nuggets they were finding. The claim owners were into really big gold, and lots of it!

Eric: Since the creek was accessible by road up there, Dave and I just started up by Surprise Lake, dredging sample holes as we drifted downstream towards where Brian and Jim were dredging. The water was freezing, so we shifted off, each taking turns. We didn’t find very much gold during the first few days, so we were starting to get a bit discouraged. Still, Dave and I had learned from previous experience that the only way to win was to continue the best we could with enthusiasm.

fast waterDave: Eric and I had just successfully maneuvered the dredge down through a very bad set of rapids. This required him to run downstream with the dredge to get it lined up just right. I was downstream with a rope and had to pull the dredge across the creek just at the right time, to keep it from smashing into some boulders out in the current that certainly would have flipped the dredge over (which would have been a disaster). The operation went smooth and we were pleased with ourselves. We set up to do a sample hole just below the rapids. It was my turn.

After getting through my blinding headache, I dredged a sample hole right out in the middle of the fast water. The streambed was only about a foot to bedrock, so the sample was completed pretty fast. I only saw a smidgen of gold on the bedrock; it was not what we were looking for!

As I was dragging the suction hose back into the slower-moving water towards the side of the creek, it occurred to me that I ought to try a sample there. That was a moment of fate. To this day, I remember the thought process playing out: “Should I or shouldn’t I?” You have to have your mind and emotions in the right place to find high-grade gold. It is a lot about getting dialed into the right wavelength. Since the streambed was so shallow to bedrock, I decided to dredge another hole. That single decision changed the outcome of this whole adventure, and that of the others who were with me! A whole philosophy could be built up out of this single idea that virtually every decision we make in our lives affects the final outcome for each of us, and perhaps, to some degree, for all of us!

In closer to the bank of the creek, only about 6-inches into the streambed, I could see that I was getting into something entirely different than what we had seen in any of our earlier experiences along Pine Creek. This was a much harder, older material. I immediately saw the gold spread all throughout the material. Unbelievable; we struck it rich!

I took a moment to uncover an entire pothole along the bedrock that was completely filled with gold nuggets!

Eric: Dave came up and told me to bring my mask over and take a look. As painful as the cold water was, I already knew he must have turned up something really good. Heck, he was only in three or four feet of water! When I stuck my head in the water, I could see the gold even before I dipped down closer to take a look. The small area he had uncovered with the dredge had gold spread all over it. It was the richest gold deposit I had ever seen!

Dave: After Eric got a look, I took an hour or so and tried to load the sluice box with gold. I wanted it to be the most abundant clean-up I ever had. The streambed material was just pocked full, all throughout with gold. The cracks and holes in the bedrock were completely full of gold. It was, by far, the richest deposit I had ever seen. One thing I noticed was that the streambed material was so hard that it was coming apart in clumps. I didn’t give much thought to this, mainly focused on getting as much material sucked up into the dredge as I could.

When I ended the dive, I was disappointed that there was not more gold in the dredge’s sluice box. The riffles should have been overflowing! Don’t get me wrong; there was a lot of gold there. But there should have been more! Then it occurred to me that I should look at the dredge’s tailings…

Eric: The box was loaded with gold when Dave came up. It was, by far, the best clean-up I had ever seen. There were beautiful nuggets up to ¼-ounce in size. The riffles were loaded with flakes. I just could not believe our good fortune. It was soooo amazing how things had changed for us in just a single sample hole!

Then Dave put his mask on and looked at the tailing pile. He came up and told me to take a look. I don’t recall that either of us were experiencing cold-water headaches at that time. I could see that the tailings pile was almost entirely made up of streambed clumps of hard-pack that remained full of gold. The clumps had washed right through the sluice box carrying the gold along. It looked as though there was more gold in the tailings, than we had recovered in the sluice!

Dave and I devoted the remaining part of the day scooping all those tailing into our clean-up tub. We then broke up the material as best we could to release the gold. After our clean-up, we floated down river to where Brian and Jim were just finishing up their day. It was late; maybe 8 or 9 PM. But, by the light in the sky, it might just as well been five O’clock in the afternoon.Eric with first clean-up

Eric showing off our first serious clean-up. It was around 8 ounces for about an hour of dredging.

We were all in a celebration mood that night! We probably worked till 2 AM doing final clean-up on all that gold, rocking-out with Pat Benatar, Led Zeppelin, Steve Martin and some Rolling Stones. Joe saw our gold and immediately retreated to his tent. I suppose I was closest to him of anyone on the trip. He had completely separated himself from all of us, including me. The only feelings coming from Joe were resentment. It was starting to feel very wrong for us to have someone with that much resentment preparing our food for us…

Dave: We had to come up with a new plan on how to work this very compacted streambed material so we could avoid washing clumps of gold right across our recovery systems. These days, we would just hook up a pressure washer to break up the gravel. But this all happened long before low-cost pressure washers were on the market.

Finally, we decided that we would sacrifice the following day making a trip into Whitehorse and buy some geology rock picks at the local prospecting store. We would sell some gold and stock up on supplies. I had also received a notice from Canadian Customs to stop by and pick up the T-80 compressor which had been shipped by Keene.

Jim: Not having any better ideas, and being worried about Joe, Dave, Brian, Eric and I began taking turns sneaking out into the forest and burying our rapidly-growing stash of golden treasure. Over top of what we were selling for expenses, our stash started adding up big-time as soon as we got into the rich deposit.

Brian: Our plan was to place all four dredges into this extremely rich gold deposit. We were going to float the two dredges from downriver upstream about half-mile to get them there. We were going to lower the other 5-incher down over the hillside with a rope as soon as we got the replacement compressor installed. It was looking like we could turn this into serious gold production. We figured we still had two months remaining in our season. We were gearing up!

Dave: Our first stop in Whitehorse was at Canadian Customs. They had sent a pick-up slip to me in care of General Delivery in Atlin. I went to the counter totally unprepared for what happened. After giving the slip to the lady, she brought the box over and set it down on the counter. I could see that the box had been opened. Without any fanfare, she looked me right in the eye and asked me what it was. I told her that it was an air compressor for a portable gold dredge. She then freaked out and demanded to know what I, as a U.S. citizen, was doing with a gold dredge in Canada? That’s when I realized this was not going as planned.

Improvising as best I could, I told her we were actually on our way to Alaska and stopped to do some fishing on Surprise Lake. I told her that we broke the compressor when we unloaded our trailer so we could have a living space on the lake. She wanted to know if we were gold mining in Canada, and I told her no (this gal knew a liar when she saw one). Then, she explained that I had no need for the compressor; and that I could pick it up when we passed through on our way to Alaska. Her boss was listening in. He seemed like a nice guy, older and more calm. He told her to give me the compressor. I took it and made a hasty retreat.

I have not been back up to Canada since then, so I don’t know the way things are these days. But back in 1982, the Canadian Customs authorities and RCMP officers were some no-nonsense, very serious officials! We had also got (forcefully) yelled at by the local RCMP officer near Atlin for driving the motorcycle around on the back dirt roads without wearing helmets. There was no politeness in the demeanor.

Jim: On the other hand, during our short time there, we had made friends with some of the local people – who were as hospitable as anyone we had ever met. We were buying some supplies in Atlin, going to the post office, using the pay phone in town to call home, and doing other business there. In our running around, we had gotten a chance to meet several other Canadians that were actively mining. They had extended open invitations for us to operate our dredges on their claims.

It turns out the Forth of July is also a big holiday in Canada, and the local mayor actually sent someone up to our camp one day to insist we go down and play in the annual fast-pitch softball game. We spent the entire Forth of July making friends with the very hospitable locals in Atlin. Everyone was really nice to us!

Dave: My encounter with the lady in Customs changed everything. It was clear from our conversation that our days dredging in British Columbia were going to be limited. Until I walked into Customs that morning, we had no idea that we were not allowed to mine up there. My understanding was that America and Canada have a mutual agreement which allows citizens from both countries to mine in either country. And while this is most-certainly true in America for Canadians (or anyone else who wants to operate a gold dredge in America), Canada turns out to have some very substantial bureaucratic steps that an American must take (before you even enter into Canada) prior to doing any type of commercial mining up there. At least that’s the way it was in 1982.

Eric: We went from Customs directly over to the prospecting shop and bought some geology rock picks, the kind with hard-pointed tips. We were going to use those to pick apart the gold-laden hard-pack on the bottom of Pine creek before dredging it up. The idea was to break the gold loose from the other material so it would get caught in our recovery systems. We also pitched out enough dough for two motorcycle helmets. Then we loaded up on groceries and fuel and returned to camp.

Jim: Our feelings of exhilaration from the day before now had a dark shadow hanging over us. We did not want to be in trouble. But we also did not want to walk away from all that gold!

Dave: Have you ever experienced the feeling of “impending trouble,” even when you don’t know exactly where it is going to come from? It’s like you know that powerful forces are organizing against you. It is the feeling of “being in trouble,” even though it has not caught up to you, yet. I saw the determination in the lady from Customs. This was not over. It was just starting!

Still, since we had made our discovery in a place along Pine Creek that could not be seen from the road (even though we could see from down on the creek when vehicles passed by up on the road), we believed that we could get some days of dredge-production on the creek before anything was going to happen. Actually, we were not even certain that anything was going to happen. The gold deposit was Lowering Dredgesso rich; it was only going to take a few days of production to put us in really good shape!

We lowered the other 5-inch dredge down a steep hill on a rope to get it set up in the rich deposit as fast as we could.

Brian: With uncertainty hanging over us, we decided to drop the other 5-incher down over the side of the hill (with the new T-80 compressor back on board) and leave the two other dredges down near the creek access road for a while. This would allow us to get more time immediately dredging in the rich gold deposit. It was a good plan. After getting the second dredge down there and set up, we did shift-diving well into the first night, using two dredges side-by-side.

It had to be about midnight by the time we got back to camp. Joe was about to have a nervous breakdown when we pulled in. He was like an old mother hen, giving us a hard time about getting home so late while dinner had been ready for three hours. Actually, it occurred to us later that he might have been frightened to be in camp at night alone. This was grizzly country!

When we showed Joe the concentrate from the day’s production, he shut right the heck up and returned to his tent. The concentrate was loaded down with pounds of beautiful golden flakes and nuggets. It was just an unbelievable sight to behold!

We reheated our own dinner and ate quickly. Final clean-up took several more hours to complete. Now we were filling up bottles with gold. Some of the nuggets were too large to fit in the standard-sized 4-ounce bottles that we had brought along, so we emptied out spice bottles of their contents and started filling those up, too! I remember it was Eric’s turn that night to sneak off into the forest and find a hiding spot for the gold.

We hid the gold in a different place every night, carefully refilling and covering past hiding places so nobody would catch onto what we were doing.

Dave: One of Joe’s responsibilities was to be first up in the morning and get the coffee going. Since this was done inside the trailer, and I was bunked in the trailer, I was always up as soon as I smelled the coffee. Joe always poured me the first cup, because he knew I was going to want it as soon as I rolled out of my sleeping bag.

The following morning, I heard Joe come into the trailer, but did not hear him preparing the coffee. Everything was quiet, but I knew he was there. So, after a while, I rolled over and peaked out of my warm sleeping bag at him. Joe was just standing there, holding his crotch with both hands. Both of his eyes were rolled back in his head. He had flipped out on us! Concerned, I asked Joe how he was doing. Without even looking at me, he said, “I gotta get out of here!” He clearly meant it. So I told him I would arrange to get him on a bus towards home that very morning. He went off to pack his things. I made the coffee.

After getting breakfast and lunch together, we all drove into Atlin and dropped Joe off at the Greyhound station. A bus went through there every day. We bought his ticket home, gave him a few hundred Dollars for food, and slipped him two ounces of the beautiful gold that we had recovered just the day before. He was so surprised when we gave him the gold, we could see that he was having second thoughts about leaving. But we had already bought his ticket, and it really was time for him to go. So we each said our goodbyes to Joe and could see that he was crying as we pulled away in the truck. That was the last any of us ever saw of him. Some years later, Eric said he heard that Joe died of a stroke sometime shortly after returning to America.

After that, we started bringing the motorcycle with us to the claim. Each day, when we were winding down with the mining program, one of us would return to camp and cook dinner and pre-make lunch for the following day. We took turns. As much as we all got used to Joe, things were a lot lighter around camp after he was gone. We turned the music up louder!Jim and Dave with coffee

Dave & Jim with the all-important hot coffee.

Jim: Yeah; I remember one day it was my day to cook and I decided to take a short cut with Dave’s motorcycle back to camp. Dave and I were always into motocross riding when we were growing up. As I came down this hill, I drove through what looked to be a puddle and buried the Honda in muck all the way to the handlebars! As hard as I tried, I could not get the bike out of the water alone, so had I to hike back and get the guys to help me pull it out of the stink-hole. Dave was (rightfully) pissed off about that, because he loved that bike. He spent the next day in camp flushing all the water out of the engine and getting the bike operational, again. I’ll never forget the first time he pushed down on the kick starter and a whole bunch of dirty water gushed out of the exhaust pipe. I looked around, and Brian and Eric were doing everything they could to keep from laughing. We didn’t really lose much production out of it. The rest of us just worked all the harder to keep the dredges running while Dave fixed the bike.

There were no more short cuts with the Honda allowed after that!

Eric with handfuls of gold  Close up of gold

Eric showing off the clean-up from our second day; more than double
what we did with a single dredge, but only in a few hours of work.

Eric: Our second production day with the two 5-inch dredges was much better than the first, even though we lost quite a bit of the day getting a second dredge into action and moving everyone’s dive gear to the new location. The deposit consisted of around two feet of black-colored very hard-packed material. It was laced full of gold! This special material would disappear once we got out into the creek a ways. But the rich material extended right up under the bank. It was on the second day that we recognized that we were dredging directly under an old water ditch that had once followed alongside the creek. Remnants of the old ditch could still be seen for a long way. Best we could tell, the old-timers never mined under the ditch. This was a near certainty, because if they had, the old ditch would have been gone, and we could still see parts of it.

Jim: But that black material was really slow to work. We had to manually pick the material apart with our little rock picks.

Overview of rich depositDave: These days, we would just plow through that hard-pack with a low-cost high-pressure washer. One of those would have had us going dozens of times faster. As it was, we were only able to dredge a small fraction of our real production capability. Still, for what we were doing, the deposit was building up our gold reserves very quickly.

The rich gold deposit also extended up under the stream-bank.

Brian: Towards the end of one day, right on schedule, one of the claim owners arrived to see how we were doing. He didn’t have any trouble finding us and climbing down the hill using our rope. When we showed him the gold we recovered, he about had a heart attack! He was also quite pleased. And you could tell right off that he was reassessing the potential of these yellow-pontooned dredges of ours. When we explained that our deposit was extending up under the bank, he offered to send a tracked excavator over to remove the overburden for us. How’s that for hospitality? We accepted his offer with great appreciation! We would not need his help for several days, because there were still plenty of the underwater portions of the deposit accessible to us.

Dave: Whenever we took the truck anywhere, it was usually Brian who did the driving. As the oldest brother, he had always been the most experienced driver. So he just naturally took up that role in our program. That is, except for the days when Brian returned to camp early to cook dinner. Brian made wonderful spaghetti where he would add in nice hunks of different kinds of vegetables and meat. Everyone liked that.

Since we were doing so well with the gold, we voted unanimously one day to up our daily ration of jelly and milk-honey on the peanut butter sandwiches. This was a big morale-booster, because we were getting tired of these thick peanut butter sandwiches which only had a little sweetener on them. BullwinkleCanada has this special, fresh milk-honey mix that is to kill for on a peanut butter sandwich!

One morning, we were driving along Pine Creek in the direction towards the claim; and out of nowhere came this mammoth of a she-moose. No horse ever got this big! It came running out from the side of the road, generally in the same direction as we were going, except at an angle to cut us off. She was right on top of us before we even realized she was there! We were driving about 40 miles an hour, and she was going faster. When she bumped the side of the truck, we went into a slide right off the side of the road. Brian managed the slide just right to keep us from toppling over in the truck. The moose just kept on going. There was a pretty sizable indentation in the driver’s side door where the moose bumped into us (nothing more than a nudge).

That moose was not afraid of us a bit. Clearly she was showing us who the boss was. I’m certain she nudged us on purpose. I was in the passenger seat, so I probably got the best look at the animal. There is one point where she dipped her head down and looked right in the window at us, and I remember thinking that she had that very same silly smile as Bullwinkle the Moose in the television cartoons!

The whole emergency was over in 10 seconds and the moose was already long gone. We sat there for a moment in silent disbelief, and then broke out into hilarious laughter.

Brian: Actually, my read was that the moose was trying to knock us off our feet. On that slippery dirt road, had I allowed her to make full contact with the truck, we probably would have spun around and rolled.

Eric: It was late spring. She probably had a young calf around somewhere close and was just trying to keep us away. Good thing we were not walking up the road that morning!

Two dredgesJim: Work continued pretty-much the same for a few more days. We were limited by how much black material we could pick apart underwater. It was very slow going because the water resistance would only allow you to pick so fast. After a while, my arm would get so tired from the activity, it would go numb. Then it would be someone else’s turn for a while.

Taking shifts, we kept two dredges running side-by-side for long hours into the night. Since we were not using them, we removed the other two dredges from the creek downstream, and stored the components in a tent and under our trailer in camp to make the mining components less visible.

Brian: One day, these people drove into camp and launched this big canoe into the lake. They were using an outboard motor for power. The two guys loaded the canoe completely full of supplies and prospecting gear. We sent Jim over to talk with them. They said that once you get off the main road up there in a boat, there is an entire universe of rich mining country that has never even been prospected before!

Loaded canoe  Canoe departure

Jim: The prospectors were friendly. But they were committed to their own program, only talking as they were loading their canoe. It would have been overstepping to ask where they were going, and they didn’t offer anything up on their own. Once the canoe was loaded, they parked their car up in the campground, and off they went. We never saw them again.

Dave: But we watched them motor across the lake, and we were all thinking how that would be a wonderful, romantic way to launch a future prospecting trip…

SadieEric: Sadie turned out to be a wonderful companion for the whole trip. She also played her important part in warding off dangerous animals. We made her into an outside dog, but she didn’t seem to mind. We depended upon her to sound out if any bears (or moose) decided to visit us during the night. None ever did, probably because she was there. Even though we locked the back door on our trailer when we went to the creek every day, Sadie would remain tied up there so any visitors would have to contend with her in our absence. Nobody ever bothered any of our stuff for the whole trip. We were all glad we brought Sadie along, and I’m sure she was glad to be there with us. We delivered her safely back to my mom when the trip was over.

Brian: Atlin during 1982 was a small, friendly town. My perception was that all or most of the inhabitants were involved with gold mining in one way or another. There were no secrets in that little town. Everyone there had known what we Americans were doing with our yellow dredges. It started off as a friendly joke to them.

Dave: But when we got into the really rich gold, the claim owner, and sometimes his partners, was coming down towards the end of every day to see how we were doing. They were clearly impressed. One day, the claim owner actually made the comment that we were doing better than they were! And that would not have surprised me, because they were having to clear hundreds of feet of overburden to gain access to the very same ancient layer that was directly exposed to our dredges.

Dave, Brian and Jim with goldThere are a number of good reasons why I should not say how much, but we were getting a lot of gold. This was probably our undoing, because news of our discovery must have traveled all around Atlin and elsewhere. The amount of gold we were pulling out of the creek was no joke!

Brian, Dave & Jim showing off a clean-up

Jim: But the gold was not coming for free. Some days we would go to the creek at 7 or 8 in the morning and not return to camp until almost midnight. Dave was pushing us really hard. Nobody was complaining, though. We didn’t know how many days we had left before we were going to get bounced from this rich deposit, so we wanted to make the most of it while we could.


Eric:
I was the first one to spot the RCMP patrol car drive up the road one day, going towards our camp. I pointed it out to Jim when it drove by. Jim just rolled his eyes back in this “here comes the problem” look. I nodded to him.

All four of us together

We asked one of the claim owners to snap this picture of the four of us. The picture was taken
at the height of our gold production, about a day before the heat came down upon us.

Dave: When Brian and I came up for a break, Jim and Eric told us the patrol car was probably up in our camp looking for us. We had been expecting trouble from the authorities ever since my visit to Customs in Whitehorse about a week before. In fact, we were surprised that it took them so long to show up!

While we were there on the bank discussing our options, we saw the patrol car drive right past our location, headed down towards Atlin. Our truck was parked behind the claim owner’s gate and out of sight, so the officer didn’t know where we were at. We decided to finish out our day on the creek. While the going was slow with those rock picks, every minute of dredging-time was adding serious gold to our reserves.

Brian: On a notion, the following morning, we sent Jim into Whitehorse on the Honda to sell some gold for traveling money, and to buy a replacement leaf spring for the trailer. It seemed wise to get ourselves ready if a quick departure became necessary.

Jim: That was a long, cold drive on the motorcycle even during the daytime! I was wearing the helmet and my best winter clothes, but I still had to stop frequently to warm myself up. The trip took a long time. When I got to Whitehorse, I sold gold to Dave’s friend first. Then it took a while, but I found a replacement spring and a few more bolts to repair the trailer. Then I made the very long drive back to camp.

Brian: We decided to park the truck even further down the access road by the creek where it would be harder to find in case anyone was looking for us that next morning. This meant we had to make an extended walk up the road in our dry-suits, but we decided it was better to stay out of sight.

Dave and Eric were down dredging when I spotted the patrol car drive by the first time. A little while later, the officer drove back down the road going the other way. We knew in our guts that he was looking for us. You know that deep, aching feeling in your belly when you are in trouble? That feeling was growing in me.

Eric: The patrol car drove by two more times while we were eating lunch.

Dave: I was sitting there on a rock eating a sandwich when I saw my brother, Brian, dive behind a rock to keep from being seen as the RCMP officer drove by. That’s when I knew it was time for us to leave. How things came out on this project was really my responsibility. The original idea was to stop in Atlin and mine gold just long enough to get well again. We had already far-exceeded those expectations. When Brian dove behind the rock, I felt deep internal pang of irresponsibility. I have been living on the edge of some kind of trouble my entire life. It is quite something else to put others through it; guys that are not used to being in trouble with authority.

After just a short discussion, Eric, Brian and I unanimously agreed that we would float the two dredges and all of our support gear down to where we had parked the truck, load everything up, take it all back to camp and stow our gear. The following day, we would go ask for some assistance from the claim owners in dealing with the authorities. It still was not clear to us that we were really doing anything wrong. The claim owners had told us they believed we were within the law.

Brian: As soon as we reached camp, Dave and Eric went right to work on our final gold clean-up so we would not have any visible gold lying around if the officer showed up in camp.

On a hunch that we were in trouble, the first thing I did was load all of our remaining meat from the freezer into trash bags. Then I dumped it all into the pit toilet there in the campground. I also emptied the trash. It was not easy to let go of that meat. But we had switched gears into damage control.

Dave: When the clean-up was finished, I immediately went and hid the latest gold out in the forest. It was a good thing that I did. Because just after I returned, five or six official vehicles came driving into camp. The local RCMP officer was leading the pack. As they were pulling down onto the flat, I told Brian and Eric to just keep taking the mining gear apart and allow me to do all the talking. Brian made some kind of comment like, “Sounds good to me!”

I walked up to the officials as they were getting out of their vehicles. There were several RCMP officers in their unfriendly, no-nonsense mode. It reminded me a little bit of boot camp where the drill instructors always treated us like low-life worms. There were several officials there from the Department of Environmental Control. They were not friendly. There were two officials from the official Canadian Mining Office. The superior of these seemed to be in charge. He seemed like a nice guy that you could talk to. He asked me what we were doing.

I walked him over and showed him that we had broken a spring on our trailer and explained that we had to remove all our gear from the trailer to have a safe place to sleep. He wanted to know if we had been using the mining gear, and I told him some local claim owners had given us permission to play around in the creek. He wanted to know if we found any gold. So I showed him our bucket of concentrates and told him we were doing pretty well. He and his assistant borrowed some of our gold pans and worked some of the black sands down in a wash tub. The boss was impressed, but his deputy told him it was a poor showing. It really was a poor showing!

Brian: While the mining guys were talking to Dave, all the other officials spread out and started looking around at everything in the camp. I remember hoping with my most sincere prayer to the universe that they were not going to go up and look in the pit toilet. They looked in the trash cans there, but they never went into the toilet. Good thing; because if they looked, they probably would have seen all that raw, frozen meat laying in there. That would have been the end of us!

Eric: After a while, both patrol officers came over and started grilling me about the gold we found. I told them we were mainly fishing and that we had only played around in the creek just a little bit. I told them, “There wasn’t much gold.”

It was very interesting; because both RCMP officers seemed really nervous. They each had a walky-talky in their hands, held out in front, like perhaps someone else was monitoring the conversation. Perhaps they were accustomed to handling more hardened criminals than we were.

Dave: The patrol officer then came over and grilled me. This was the local guy from Atlin that was so impolite to us about the motorcycle helmet (riding around out on back dirt roads). He could have just as easily informed us politely that we needed helmets in Canada even when riding out in the forest. Why all the yelling? He was yelling at me now, it was common knowledge all over Atlin that we were recovering kilos and kilos of gold with our suction dredges. I just calmly waved that off as something that happens everywhere we go. “You know how stories get started; there is nothing to it”

In anger, the local RCMP officer informed us they were going to search our truck and trailer. The other officer was going to search our truck. “Go for it,” I gave him permission, and I followed him into the trailer. He looked in the refrigerator; but it was empty, except for some butter and a partial bottle of local milk honey.

He saw the 30-30 and shotgun on the wall and asked if they were loaded. I told him they were not. I watched him struggle with the internal decision to not check the guns. There was ego involved here, and he didn’t want to look foolish trying to open the breaches of unfamiliar firearms to take a look. It was a good thing he didn’t look, because it actually turned out both guns were fully loaded. We had normally been unloading them during the daytime, but I guess we overlooked it with everything else that was on our minds.

I gather that loaded guns would have gotten us into a lot of trouble if they wanted to push it.

While the officer was searching in our internal storage compartments, Brian came up into the trailer and was kind of crowding us. I couldn’t figure out why he did that, but just kept my mouth shut while the officer searched. The officer also felt Brian crowding us and didn’t like it. He ordered Brian out of the trailer. But his search turned up nothing of interest inside the compartment, and soon we were all standing in a group outside.

Eric: I was just a young guy in those days and didn’t have much experience in business. But I was learning a lot from Dave and Brian, both who had received some similar management training during their younger years. They were managing our mining program with the use of a production graph. Every day, after our final clean-up was weighed, they would carefully mark the number of ounces on the graph and connect the line from the previous day. Their management approach was to do whatever was necessary to make the curve move upwards in a steep direction every day. After marking daily results on the graph, we would have some discussion about what we could do on the following day to push the production results even higher. We were always coming up with a new idea. Mostly, it was just about working long, hard hours in the creek. Dave is one of the hardest pushers I ever met. But we were all pushing together to make each production day better and better. There was not a single day we didn’t push the gold production higher than the day before, some days it was double. The production curve on our graph showed nearly a vertical line. Production was so high after the first few days in the rich deposit; we had to add another sheet of graph paper to the top of the first one just so we could log the growing amount of ounces that we were getting every day!

Brian: I was standing there outside the trailer watching the officer go through our stuff, and then had this nightmare awakening that our production graph was taped to the wall inside the trailer right there in plain sight. All of the information was right there on the graph, from the pennyweights we found on our first day, to the kilos we were getting during the final week.

The officer had not recognized the graph on the wall for what it was, yet. The only thing I could think of to do was distract him. So I moved up into the trailer and started looking over his shoulder with Dave while he was searching. This made the officer suspicious, nervous and mad. He told me to get out of the trailer. Shortly afterwards, he followed me out. Unbelievable; he totally missed our production graph that was in plain sight on the wall!

The other officer didn’t find what he was looking for in the truck, either. We were not hiding any gold there.

Dave: Actually our biggest luck was that they did not take the film from our cameras!

Eric: When the searching was finished, the local officer gave it one more forceful try, “We know you guys found at least 100 kilos of gold in the creek; the news is all over Atlin. Either come up with the gold right now or you guys are going to be in a lot of trouble!”

Dave: I looked him right in the eye and told him he could have all the gold we found. “It’s all right there in the bucket of concentrates,” I told him. Everyone present knew we were lying. They declined to take our bucket of concentrates.

Brian: By now, it was pretty late in the day, and the officials from Whitehorse had a long way to go to get home. There is no doubt in my mind that they would have forced us to follow them back to the impound-yard in Whitehorse right then and there, but one of our leaf springs was missing off the trailer. We could not go anywhere. It really turned out lucky for us that we broke that spring!

Dave: After some discussion on his hand-held radio, the local RCMP officer ordered us to get our spring repaired and go to Canadian Customs on the following day. He was talking to me. I was listening very closely, “You will repair that spring and be at Customs tomorrow in Whitehorse.” I said, “Yes sir.”

Eric: You could have picked up their disappointment off the ground when they all drove out of there. They really expected they were going to make the mega-gold bust; it was going to be big news on television!

Brian: As soon as they drove up the road, I tore the production graph off the wall and used the propane stove to burn it. Everyone else just looked on with disbelief that the officers had overlooked it.

Dave: I wasted no time grabbing the bucket of concentrates and flushed them into the lake. That, just in case they changed their minds and decided they wanted to use them against us.

Eric: We didn’t like the way they were always holding their walky-talkies out in front of themselves. It was like they had someone else listening in all the time. We were actually a little worried that they might have bugged the trailer and truck, and perhaps just went a little ways up the road to listen in on us. So we met quietly out in the middle of the campground and made our plan.

Brian: The most difficult part to work out was what to do with all that gold. It was far too much to effectively hide anywhere in the truck or trailer. We strongly considered the idea of hiding it really good and then return to retrieve it later, once the heat was off us. But ultimately, we decided to take the risk of getting the gold up into Alaska that very night where it would effectively belong to us. This was the largest risk we took on the whole trip!

Dave: Seal Team 101: When being stalked in enemy territory, sometimes it can be better to take an unexpected, bold initiative. It was already late in the day and we had a broken trailer. They did not expect us to depart until the following day. We would leave as quickly as we could!

Eric: The trailer was already jacked up so we could put the spring and wheel back on once Jim arrived. So we hooked up the truck to keep the trailer from rolling, and we just started loading our mining gear as fast as we could. We had already done it enough times by now to know exactly how everything had to fit back in.

Brian: We were very worried about Jim arriving back with a spring. This was a really old trailer frame, and we were not sure if we could even find a replacement spring in Whitehorse!

Jim: I was so cold from driving the motorcycle all that way that I could barely talk through my shivers when I drove into camp!

Eric: We cheered like it was a sports event when Jim arrived back with the replacement spring. I installed it while the others finished loading the trailer and filled Jim in on the latest events and our departure plan.

Dave: The plan was to have Brian and Jim lead the way with the truck and Trailer. Eric and I were going to follow behind a ways on the motorcycle. We had all the gold in a heavily reinforced back-pack. The back-pack was heavy. But that was nothing compared to the weight on our shoulders with the worry of getting caught with all that gold! I was 90% certain that the Canadian authorities would anticipate our move, or perhaps be notified of our changed location because of some kind of location beacon attached to our truck and trailer when they were in the camp. So we were expecting an ambush (road block) somewhere between camp and the main road.

Brian: We went over the plan several times just to make sure we all had it right: If we came up on law enforcement or a road block with the truck and trailer, I would turn on the emergency flashers.

Eric: If we saw the emergency flashers on the truck, Dave and I would back-track with the motorcycle and find a place to stash the back-pack full of gold.

Dave: And if law enforcement came up behind us on the Honda, we would haul-butt ahead of the truck and trailer and get up out of sight so we could stash the back-pack.

Brian: If Dave and Eric came up on us quickly with the motorcycle, it was going to mean law enforcement was coming up from behind. Once Dave got past us with the motorcycle, I was going to take the middle of the road, blocking anyone from chasing Dave and Eric on the motorcycle.

Eric: That would allow us time to hide the gold.

Jim: We would all stick to the same story that we did not pack the trailer with enough room to load the motorcycle. So we had to drive it to Whitehorse.

Brian: We waited until 11 PM to depart, believing it was less likely the cops would be waiting for us somewhere along the road. Actually, we were on pins and needles for the first 20 miles or so of our trip, figuring that was most-likely where they would be waiting for us. But they were not there!

Dave: It was the best plan we could come up with under the circumstances. The only thing we didn’t take into consideration was how cold it was going to be out there on the motorcycle! After about an hour on the road, my shivers turned into shakes that were threatening to crash the motorcycle. Eric was holding on behind. He was freezing, too!

Eric: Dave was so cold; he was shaking in big convulsions! We still had a long way to go. There was no way we were going to make it all the way! I was also freezing. It had to be below 10 (F) degrees out there. Plus, that heavy weight of the back-pack was getting to my back. It felt like I had the full weight of a 70-pound weight belt on my shoulders!

Dave: Knowing that Eric and I could not make it all the way on the Honda, I decided the only thing to do was catch up with Brian and Jim in the truck and talk them into taking a shift.

Brian: Everything was going along just fine. We only had about another hour to go before we reached the main paved road to Whitehorse. It was unlikely we would encounter any law enforcement after we reached the main road. Jim and I were in the truck with our fingers crossed.

Jim: Then I noticed in the rear view mirror that Dave was coming up on us fast.

Brian: I saw Dave speeding up on me and about had a heart attack. “Oh crap,” I thought. “Here come the cops!”

Jim: Dave and Eric went by us fast, then slowed down and stopped right in the middle of the road. Both of them got off the bike and walked back to the truck.

Brian: I was still trying to figure out if the cops were coming. I remember thinking, “What the heck?”

Jim: Totally shivering through his words, Dave told Brian that he and I needed to take a shift on the Honda. Those were the last words I wanted to hear; I had spent the whole day on the Honda. But it was clear that Brian and I were going to take a shift, or we were going to have a fist fight right there in the middle of the road.

Brian: I was so relieved that the cops weren’t coming, I didn’t even argue!

Eric: The transition took place fast, and soon we were on our way again. I remember that the heat was on full blast in the truck, and I was so cold I could hardly feel the warmth! That last leg of the dirt road was the only time during the entire trip that Dave Allowed Sadie up in the front seat. I put her in my lap to collect some of her heat. Good old Sadie was just happy to finally be up in the front seat with the boys!

Jim: Brian agreed to drive, since I was already dog-tired. Riding on the back of that bike, I looked up and the entire sky was on fire with the northern lights. The weight on my shoulders felt enormous. I’ll never forget how dramatic that was under the circumstances!

Dave: While it was not part of the original plan, we stopped just short of the main road and loaded the Honda in the trailer. Not being able to figure out any better places to hide such a big load, Jim and Eric removed the door panel on the front-passenger side of the truck and hid the gold in the door. There was hardly enough room, and the window would no longer work. But it was the best we were going to do under the circumstances. We needed to keep moving.

Brian: We were some tired puppies when we pulled into Whitehorse about an hour later. It was sometime in the middle of the night. Dave, Eric and I were dredging that morning, had removed two dredges from the river, had our whole confrontation with the law, broke camp, and here we were in Whitehorse. It had been a long, long day. But it wasn’t over, yet!

Dave: Our plan was to have Brian and Eric drive all our gear and the gold up into Alaska before the start of business on the following day. Jim and I were going to wait in a hotel room until they called us from Alaska. Then Jim and I would go to the Customs office and try to resolve our problems with the Canadian authorities.

Eric: I was envious of that nice warm hotel room (with two beds) as Brian and I drove out of Whitehorse. We were on our way to Tok, Alaska.

Brian: We must have looked at the map wrong when we were making our plan. As Eric and I were driving up the road, he started looking at the map to estimate our progress, and we realized we had a lot further to go than we thought. It turned out to be over 500 miles between Whitehorse and Tok, more than double the distance we had planned on. Even today, when the roads have improved a lot, Google Maps says that is an 8.5 hour drive in a car (without a trailer).

Dave: As nice as it was to lie on a bed in the room, I was too nervous and worried to sleep. There was not going to be any way to know if Brian and Eric made it up into Alaska until they called us. If they got caught, I was sure we were not going to hear from them at all!

Jim: What if they got caught? Dave and I were going to be stuck in that hotel room in Whitehorse until we got some word from them!

Dave: The following day was a Friday. We had to get in to resolve matters with Customs before the weekend, or we were going to be stuck there over the weekend and have to deal with Customs on Monday. They ordered me to be there on Friday!

Jim: We were still waiting for a call at breakfast-time in the morning. I went out and brought some take-out food back to the room. Dave made a short call to the claim owners in Atlin to tell them what had happened. We were planning on leaving their cut of the gold with Dave’s friend, the gold buyer.

Dave: But the claim owners told me to hold onto the gold for them, because they were going to drive into Whitehorse and help us with the authorities. They told us to wait for them at the hotel. Reinforcements were coming!

Jim: We were still waiting for a phone call from Brian and Jim when the claim owners arrived just after noon. They understood our desire to wait a bit longer. After waiting around a while, they gave us a local number where we could reach them when we were ready.

Eric: Brian insisted on driving all the way. Sometimes, to stay awake, he opened his driver’s-side window for a blast of cold air. That sent me into shivers every time. It was like the road to hell! We had the music blasting, but neither of us were listening to it.

Brian: Our hope was to have all our stuff out of Canada before the start of business on Friday morning, but we still had hours and hours to go. I knew Dave and Jim had to get the business done, so I was pushing it along as hard as I dared. The road was really rough in places.

Eric: I was dozing off into more unconsciousness when Brian hit a really deep hole in the road.

Brian: I remember seeing the hole too late and thinking, “This is not going to be good!”

Eric: That poor, overloaded truck and trailer hit that hole in the road, and babooom; it sent us jack-knifing down the road something awful! Brian was wrestling back and forth with the steering wheel, and I was sure he was going to lose it and we were going to dump our whole load right there on the road, only about 50 miles away from Alaska.

Dave: By 2 O’clock on Friday afternoon, I was really sweating it. No word at all from Brian and Eric. What to do? What to do? Should Jim and I go in and try to resolve with the authorities before we were sure our stuff was out of Canada? I decided to give it another hour. I was absolutely exhausted.

Brian: I came very close to losing the truck and trailer; as close as you can come. I mean if we jack knifed an inch further, there would have been no saving the day. It was sooooo close! But I managed to regain control and applied breaks. Something was broken bad. We could hear and feel it dragging on the road. This was awful! The rearview mirror showed the trailer listing forward at a sickly angle.

Eric: The big bump had caused both bumper bolts on the left side to completely sheer off the truck frame. That side of the bumper was dragging on the road. It is a miracle that the trailer ball was even still connected to the bumper! Dragging it down the road caused the bumper to bend out of shape really bad! It was going to be hard to fix out there alongside the road.

Brian: Eric and I got right to it. It was about 2 PM on Friday afternoon. It was only going to be about an hour to reach Alaska if we could get going, again. There was still enough time…

Eric: We had to unhook the trailer. Fortunately, we had taken to leaving all our tools, extra parts, the tall jack, and even our splitting maul in the back of the truck. We had also bought extra bumper bolts from when we had trouble earlier on the trip.

Brian: So there we were, Eric and I, out on the side of the Alcan Highway using the tall jack to try and force the mangled bumper back up so we could get some bolts back through the left side of the truck’s frame. It was hard! The jack slipped off several times, but we kept at it from slightly different directions, each time getting a little closer. When we got the first bolt through the hole in the truck’s frame, we had to tighten it down to pull that part into alignment. Then it was clear that we were not going to get the second bolt to go. It was not even close to lining up!

Eric: So Brian says, “Let’s just hook up the trailer and go!” I said, “Are you crazy; it’s never going to hold!”

Brian: We just needed to make it to the first pay phone over the border. I decided we would get there sooner if I just drove slower. I know it was risky. But there was no way we would make it on time if we had to take the whole bumper off the truck and try to straighten it out by banging on it with a splitting maul Road to Alaskaright there on the side of the road.

The road to Alaska; beautiful, but it was heck on wheels and bumpers!

Eric: I was holding my breath every inch of the way once we got back on the road. Every bump in the road, and I was thinking, “That one is going to do it.” Brian was pushing it up to 45 or 50 miles an hour in places. If we lost the bumper again at that speed, there is no doubt in my mind that we were going to lose the entire trailer!

Brian: If the trailer gave us any more trouble, I was prepared to park it somewhere and just drive up into Alaska with the gold. The gold was worth many times more than the entire trailer package. The gold was also the one thing we had in Canada that would have gotten us into very serious trouble!

Dave: At 3:30 in the afternoon, I was on the edge of a panic attack. Then the phone rang. It was Brian. They had made it into Tok, Alaska. No problems. He gave me the name of an RV park where they would be waiting for us. Before he hung up, he said, “Good luck with the heat, brother!”

Jim: Man. I cannot tell you how much of a relief that was!

Dave: But we were not out of trouble, yet! I called the claim owners, who were not far away. They came over to pick up Jim and I; and we arrived at Customs at about four O’clock on Friday afternoon. I was expecting fireworks!Jim

My younger brother, Jim, is a really nice guy. He was supposed to help bring these angry Canadian officials around to feeling good about us.

There’s something important here about the chemistry between the McCracken brothers. Brian is the oldest; so he is the one who followed most-closely in our father’s foot steps. He is the smartest of the three of us in book learning. He always got straight A’s on his report card, graduated from the U.S. naval academy; he’s the intelligent one. As the second in line, I have always been the nonconformist; strike out on my own, “get er done” kind of guy. I am an organizer. Jim, as the youngest, turned out to be the nicest guy in the family. Not just nice; he truly cares. When he smiles at you, you naturally want to like him. When you talk, he actually listens to you and you get the feeling that he cares. Jim is a really nice guy!

And that’s why I asked Jim to stay back in Whitehorse with me and help try and reconcile things with the Canadian authorities. Up to that time, I was not able to do anything to break through with the officials there. In fact, I had been yelled at during every single encounter with the Canadian authorities! None of us wanted to be “Wanted” by the law in Canada. We had to fix this!

Jim: So Dave’s plan was for me to allow him to do all or most of the talking (lying). My job was just to be there, smile a lot, try and build understanding with the people we were going to see; I was supposed to establish something friendly on a human level.

The truth is that I was scared as hell we were going to jail!

Dave: When we arrived at Customs, we were pleasantly surprised that the claim owners had also arranged for the Mayor of Atlin to be there, along with their crack-shot mining attorney, to provide us with support. It felt really good to have friends right at that moment!

We all walked in the front door of Customs together. The lady that I got the compressor from thankfully was not present, so I had to explain who we were to another official. He flashed on it right away and said they had been expecting us. That brought others out of an inner office almost like they had all been waiting back there. Without any delay, one of the officials told me to follow him so he could show me exactly where to park our gear. As I suspected, they had planned to impound everything!

Jim: That’s when Dave came out with the speech that he had been practicing all day long, “To demonstrate good faith, and to prove to you that we have no intention of breaking any laws or rules in Canada, we have already moved all of our gear from your country up into Alaska.”

Dave: Boy that stopped them all in their tracks. Visibly angry, the guy said, “You were ordered to bring everything here to Customs today!” I said, “No; the officer ordered me to be here today. So I am here with my brother, Jim. The others moved on to Alaska with all the gear that everyone was objecting to. It seemed like the correct thing to do, to show you our good faith in not wanting to break your rules.”

Jim: They were mad as hell! One of them suggested that there wasn’t enough time for us to get the gear up into Alaska and they could put out an all points bulletin for our truck and trailer on the highways. I just kept trying to project a friendly calmness unto the officials, “We are your friends. We don’t want to break your rules. We are good guys. This is no big deal…”

Dave: But it was a big deal to them! My best guess is that they intended to confiscate all our stuff and send us back home on a bus. They were going to make an example out of us!

Jim: That’s when the claim owner spoke up and asked what the problem was? He told them that he owned the property and had given us permission to play around on a recreational scale – and that’s all we had been doing.

Dave: The Customs guy answered that we were not playing around, “They were doing serious mining!”

Jim: That’s when the lawyer asked them how they knew what the Americans were doing? “You guys never even saw what they were doing!”

Dave: “But we heard,…” the official started in. He was cut off by the claim owner who was getting more heated up by the moment, “You heard what? A bunch of bar talk? Nobody goes through the gate on my property without my permission. I was down there watching what these Yanks were doing. Compared to what we are doing on the claim, I can get testimony from every miner in Atlin that they were just playing around!”

Jim: Then the lawyer reminded the officials that Americans are allowed to prospect around on a recreational scale without having to notify anyone. The Customs guy that was doing all the talking certainly was not convinced.

Dave: It was about then that the Mayor of Atlin spoke up in anger, “We are in an economic recession! Why the heck are you guys chasing away the only tourists Atlin has seen all summer? These are nice people. They have spent their money in our community. They have attended our events. How can we ever expect to attract visitors if you guys are trying to make criminals out of them over this kind of nonsense?”

Jim: That was the winning argument. The older official who was listening in quietly stepped up and said, “Never mind! This is over. If your gear is not yet up in Alaska, please see that it gets there without further delay. If you intend to use it again in Canada, make sure you declare the gear properly at the border before you enter into Canada. If you intend to mine for gold in Canada, please contact our mining department in advance of your arrival and make your formal declarations. This meeting is over.”

Dave: Yes; that was the same supervisor who told the lady to give me our compressor several weeks before. He was a nice guy.

But they also had no witnesses, no pictures, no gold, no concentrates, no dredges, nothing!

Jim: I smiled at him a lot!

It was exactly 5 PM on Friday afternoon when we walked out of Canadian Customs. Dave and I were so relieved; we were falling all over ourselves to thank the lawyer and the Mayor of Atlin. The Mayor told us to come back anytime, “You guys will always be welcome in our town.”

Dave: The claim owners dropped us off at our hotel. As we had already passed their share off to them earlier in the day, our immediate business was over. They invited us to come back whenever we wanted, and we said our goodbyes. We all felt a little sad that this part of our adventure had come to an end.

Jim: When you make friends with them, Canadians will stand right up and stick by you. Those guys were really concerned that we did not get into trouble with the authorities!

Dave: While it was late on Friday afternoon, there was still plenty of daylight left; so Jim and I gathered up just the few things we had and checked out of the room. The hotel was right there alongside the main road which led in the direction of Tok, Alaska. Eager to put some distance between us and all that trouble, we thought we would try and hitch a ride out on the highway.

Jim: But we had used up all our luck on that day. In several hours of standing out there in the cold, not a single car or truck stopped. Both Dave and I were totally exhausted. So after a while, we went back over to the hotel and checked back into the room for another night. Then we caught a bus to Tok on the following morning.

Dave: Once we boarded the bus, I knew we were free. That was a close one! I’ve been close to trouble (almost caught) many times in my life. This one with the Canadian authorities was one of the most stressful of all.

Jim: Yeah; that’s about the most trouble I have ever been in!Brian

Brian – “I can’t tell you how much better we all felt when we all made it to Tok and still had all our belongings!”

Dave: We met up with Brian and Eric in Tok on the following afternoon. They had already completed the bumper repair and did some other maintenance duties. The rig was ready to go. But we decided to relax for an evening and just catch up with ourselves. We were feeling pretty lucky at the moment. A lot of different things had gone our way when they just might not have.

Brian: “Had anything at all gone wrong, we would have lost all our gear and certainly all the gold.”

Eric: “If they caught us trying to run with that hoard of gold, I’m sure they would have put us all in jail!”

Jim: “No doubt about it!”

Dave: “Yup, we were lucky!”

After notes:

Dave with map making plans

Dave in Tok, looking at maps, working out the next plan.

By the time we arrived in Alaska, it was mid-August and most of the mining season up there was already behind us. To make the best of what we had left, we decided to dredge in a free section of the South Fork of the Forty Mile River, near the small town of Chicken. By “Free area,” I mean there were no mining claims allowed there at the time, so anyone could prospect for gold.

Just within a few days of sampling, we found a location that would produce about an ounce of fine gold per day for a single guy on a 5-inch dredge. This was pretty good. I had set an once of gold as a minimum daily standard long before we arrived in Canada or Alaska. In those days, that was about $270. Today it is many times that. The thing is, I had already discovered from my own painful experiences that you can go around and spend weeks and weeks sampling and not find a deposit that will pay an ounce per day to a 5-inch dredge. Eric, who also had plenty of dredging experience, was also satisfied with the deposit.

But my two brothers wanted more “shock and awe!” An once per day was really poor when compared with what we were finding in Atlin. They wanted more of the really rich stuff! I wanted more of that, too. But the reality was that we were unlikely to find it, because we were on an entirely new river that we knew nothing about. We didn’t have much time left in the season!

In all the time I have dredged, I have only seen one place as rich as Atlin. That was in Cambodia at a later time. Take Atlin out of the equation back in 1982, and an ounce per day was pretty good. Here is the thing about gold mining: Once in a while, you get a really nice bonus. Then, when it is finished, you have to readjust yourself to what an acceptable gold deposit is. In my own experience, a person working alone on a 5-inch dredge, recovering an ounce of gold per day, is good enough. Otherwise, you might spend all of your time and resources looking for something better and never find it!

Brian and Jim ultimately decided that they had already done well enough for the season. So within a week or so of arriving in Alaska, they arranged a bus tour home through the Inland Passage. Later, they both agreed that they were very happy they chose to do that; they said they covered some of the most breathtaking wilderness scenery on the planet. They arrived home with their gold a few weeks later.

Dredges in Alaska

Dave and Eric dredging side-by-side on the South Fork of the Forty Mile River in Alaska.

Eric and I decided to finish out our dredging season on the South Fork of the Forty Mile River. We worked two 5-inchers side-by-side up there, pushing it hard, nearly every day. Sadie continued to keep a close eye on our camp, because we were still in grizzly and moose territory.

We made occasional supply trips into Fairbanks, which we found to be a nice place with friendly people. The river water was about 70 degrees when we first arrived there, but it did not take long for the days to grow short and the nights to grow cold. We finally decided to call it quits on the 4th of October when ice was forming on the sides of the river. The water was 34 degrees; and while Eric was prepared to continue, he readily agreed the season was over the day I decided it was not worth another ounce of gold to suffer through yet another cold water headache.

They got their first heavy snow in Chicken the day after we pulled out!

Knowing that we were going to be driving all our stuff back down through Canada, Eric and I decided it would be wise to mail our stashes of gold down to California in care of Eric’s Mom, Anita. She had already looked into it, and I remember her telling me very clearly, “The only safe way to ship gold through the U.S. Post Office is by registered mail!”

The U.S. Post Office in Chicken, Alaska in those days was in the very same building as the local restaurant and bar. In fact, the very same person who would sell you a draft beer on one side of the counter would do your postal business just by walking a few steps over and helping you across a different counter. In other words, the bar tender was also the postmaster. I’m not making this up!

When Eric and I went in to see the postmaster about sending a registered package, she told us they were not doing registered mail out of Chicken. She told us, “Certified mail is just as good!” We had quite a lot of discussion with her about our package being very valuable and we did not want to take any chances at losing it. Ultimately, she convinced us that certified would be alright. Man were we young and naive!

Eric’s mom still had not received the package several weeks after we mailed all our gold (mostly accumulated from Atlin)! Anita kept explaining to me on the phone that a registered package can be tracked and insured, because it gets signed for every time it changes hands, and it is kept in a locked safe when it is not moving. The only way to track a certified package is when it arrives and someone signs for it. What happens in-between is anybody’s guess! But it was too late to change the way we sent the package!

Eric: Both Dave and I were feeling really foolish having been talked into sending all that gold in a certified package. “Stressed out” is an understatement!

Dave: When the package still had not reached Anita after 3 weeks, I pretty-much decided that the Postmaster never sent it. After all, we had all but told her that the package was full of gold. The box was heavy! The only thing really going on around Chicken while we were there was gold mining. Even the Postmaster’s husband was a gold miner! So she must have had a pretty good idea what was in our package.

It is human nature to adjust yourself to whatever you have, or whatever you don’t have. I had overcome quite a lot to keep that gold; and I had it long enough that it became part of my life-planning. That gold had become a very important part of my life! I was going to take the winter off, rent an apartment and write my two books on Advanced Dredging Techniques. This was my big plan. It was the way I was balancing all the pain I was suffering in that cold water! I was banking on it. Now the gold was gone!

Eric: I personally was not convinced that the Postmaster stole our gold, but Dave felt it was time to shake things up.

Dave: On the verge of another panic attack, I decided I was going to go confront the Postmaster about stealing our gold! On our way over there, we decided to call Anita one more time to make sure the package had not arrived. I didn’t have much hope.

Eric: “Your package arrived!” my mom said, as soon as I got her on the phone.

Dave: I about had a stroke! I also felt bad about suspecting the Postmaster. Good thing we called or I would have really stirred up a hornet’s nest over nothing. After the phone call, we went up and told the Postmaster the package had arrived. She looked about as relieved as I was! We then confided that the box was full of gold. She said she figured as much the way we were so worried about it. Nice lady!

Eric: My Mom said the box looked like it had gone through the wrong end of a machine. She said it looked more like a cardboard bag, than a box. This was probably because of all the weight inside the box!

Dave: Before shipping, Eric and I had transferred all our gold into 35 mm plastic film containers and plastic spice bottles that we spray-painted black. We taped the covers so they would remain closed. We used all sorts of packing to try and stabilize everything inside the box. It seemed fine.

Eric: My mom said there was a pretty sizable hole torn in the side of the box. When the Postmaster in Auburn (California) set the box down on the counter, one of the film containers (full of gold) rolled right out onto the counter!

Dave: So Anita was asking us on the phone how many containers we loaded in the box? When we told her how many, that was exactly how many were still in there. Unbelievable luck!

Eric and I decided to take the scenic route back home through Dawson City, Yukon. There was only a single Canadian official at the border station when we arrived there. He waved us right through (whew!).

Dawson City was about abandoned when we were there in early October of 1982. We drove the historical streets in awe; there is a lot of mining history in that place! We stopped for lunch, but were the only customers in the restaurant. Clearly, the tourist season was already over in Dawson City. We vowed to return there, someday.

Eric and I took it slow and easy on our trip back down to California. By then, we knew the driving limits of our overloaded rig. We were not in much of a hurry, deciding not to depend upon good luck alone to get us home. How much good luck can you depend upon?

My brother Brian returned to San Francisco and started a general contractor’s business which became highly successful. He is still doing general contracting there today.

Jim got involved early in the High Tech revolution and worked his way into a partnership in a very successful company that installs and maintains administrative software programs for municipalities all across America.

While both Brian and Jim have spent time visiting with me in the gold country, our trip to Alaska was the end of their mining careers.

Eric and I mined together as partners and best friends for quite a few years. He helped me start The New 49’ers, and we even did a mining adventure together in Borneo, Indonesia. Later, he put himself through professional welding school; and as a result of a lot of hard work, Eric has become a Project Supplier Quality Supervisor at Bechtel Oil, Gas and Chemicals. That is a really good job, and he will likely stay with it until retirement. He is happily married and raising three sons in Weimar, Texas.

I have spent most of my adult life involved with gold mining, and am still out there getting my share of the gold. Last summer, I nearly made my “ounce per day,” every day, along the Rogue River in Southern Oregon.

Final note: You will notice that I have not included any images of all the gold recovered together, or even of our clean-ups during the final 10 days or so that we were dredging in Atlin. This was deliberate. When I tell this story to others, the most common question I am asked is, “How much gold did you guys recover in all?” Isn’t that what you have been wondering? And I always roll my eyes up and answer that it was a lot, but it was not as much as I make it sound, “You know how these gold stories get exaggerated over time!”

As I said earlier in the story, making sure the adventure turned out as a winning experience for my brothers and Eric still remains a responsibility that I take seriously. I don’t want any of us to be in trouble with the Canadian authorities, especially after all this time has passed. In fact, my existing dredging team and I have recently been invited by a mining company to return to British Columbia. I would like to be able to go up there, again without fear of being tossed in jail for past misdeeds. With that in mind, my best answer is, “Most of this story was the way we would have liked it to have played out, rather than the way it really did.”

What do you think?

 
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This story first appeared in Gold & Treasure Hunter Magazine Nov/Dec, 1989 on Page 20.
This issue is still available! Click here.

By Dave McCracken

The efficiency with which the over-sized material is moved out of the way has a direct impact upon how much gravel and gold will be directed up the suction nozzle!

Dave Mack

 

 

Dredging technique in gold-bearing streambeds mainly is focused upon removing the over-sized rocks (any rock which is too large to be sucked up the suction nozzle) from the work area of the dredge-hole. In most hard-packed streambeds, this removal of the over-sized material is the bulk of the dredger’s work. From a production stand­point, a large portion of this work has to do with freeing and removing the over-sized rocks from the stream­bed in an orderly fashion.

Hard-packed streambeds are laid down in horizontal layers during major flood storms. Generally, the streambed is put together like a puzzle, with different rocks locking other rocks into place. Usually, because of gravity, rocks higher up in the streambed (laid down later) are locking lower rocks (laid down earlier) into their position within the streambed.


Because of this, we have found the best means of production is to dredge the hole down a layer at a time. We call this a “top cut.” If you take down a broad horizontal area of the streambed all at once, you uncover a whole strata of rocks which are interconnected like a puzzle. Then, you can see which rocks must be removed first so that you can free the others more easily. This really is the key to production dredging!

Generally, there are two things that drastically slow down the production of less-experienced gold dredgers: (1) plug-ups and (2) “nitpicking.”

The time and energy spent freeing plug-ups from the hose and power-jet cuts directly into how much progress will be made in the dredge-hole.

Plug-ups are caused by rocks jamming in the dredge’s suction hose or power-jet. Everyone gets a few of these. Inexperienced dredgers get many! This comes from not understanding which types of rocks, or combination of rocks, to avoid sucking up the nozzle. Basically, this knowledge comes from hard-won experience in knocking out hundreds or thousands of plug-ups until you reach the point where you become more careful about what goes into the nozzle. I have covered this area quite thoroughly in my “Gold Dredger’s Handbook”

During the past several years, some dredge manufacturers have started building dredges using over-sized power-jets. This means that the inside-diameter of the jet-tube is not reduced in size from the inside diameter of the suction hose, helping to greatly reduce the number of plug-ups a dredger will get while in production. Because of this, an oversized jet would be high on my personal priority list if I were in the market for a dredge!

So, the combination of some practice in learning which types of rocks to avoid sucking up the nozzle, and the over-sized power-jet on modern dredges, will eliminate most of the plug-ups that would otherwise hinder production.

The other main loss of production, which we are all guilty of to some extent, comes from a poor production technique which we call “nitpicking”. Nitpicking is when you are trying to free rocks from the streambed which are not yet ready to come out. Nitpicking is dredging around and around rocks which are locked in place by other rocks that need to be freed-up first. Nitpicking is when you are doing things out of the proper order!

When you find yourself making little progress, the key is almost always to widen your dredge-hole.

Production dredging means moving gravel through the nozzle at optimum speed. This is accomplished by making your hole wide enough to allow the over-sized rocks to be easily removed. As soon as you find the rocks are too tight to come apart easily, it is usually time to widen the hole again or take the next top cut. “Top cut” is the term we use to describe when we take a bite off the top-front section of a dredge hole to move the working face forward. “Working face” is the portion of the excavation that we are mining.

An underwater dredging helper can be a big help to remove over-sized material from the dredge-hole. Basically, there are two completely different jobs in an underwater mining operation: (1) nozzle operator (N/O) and (2) rock person (R/P). The nozzle operator is responsible for getting as much material up the nozzle as possible during the production day. Therefore, it is his or her responsibility to direct how the dredge-hole is being taken apart. The rock person has the responsibility to help the nozzle operator by removing those rocks that are immediately in the way of production.

Since there are plenty of over­sized rocks that can be removed from a production dredging operation’s work area, it is important that the R/P have some judgment as to which rocks ought to be moved first. Ideally, he will pay attention to what the N/O is doing, and focus his or her efforts primarily on those rocks which are immediately in the nozzle’s way.

The rock person should be moving the very next rock that is in the nozzle’s way.

Silt is usually released when a rock is moved out of the streambed. So an R/P must be careful to not “cloud-out” the hole (loss of visibility). This can be avoided by concentrating on (a) moving those rocks that are near to where the N/O is working (this is the first priority), or (b) moving those rocks that have already been freed from the streambed, but not yet removed from the hole.

On occasion, an R/P unwittingly takes over the production operation by randomly moving whatever rocks he or she happens to see. This then causes the N/O to have to follow the R/P around, sucking up the silt which would otherwise cloud-out the dredge hole. This generally results in slowing down production. We have found that it is much better if the R/P accepts the position of being the N/O’s assistant, which allows the latter to direct the progress of the dredge-hole.

The nozzle-operator should communicate with his helpers where he wants to take a cut off the front of the hole.

Since production is controlled by how efficiently rocks can be removed from the dredge-hole, it is important to understand that they must also be strategically discarded in a manner which, if possible, will not require them to be moved a second or third time. Generally, this means getting each rock well out of the hole–as far back as necessary. Good judgment is important on this point. You only have so much time and energy available. How far that over-sized rocks will need to be removed from the hole is somewhat dependent upon how deep the excavation is going to go. Early on, we often must guess about this. Sometimes, the streambed turns out to be deeper than we thought it would be. Then, we find ourselves turning around and throwing all the cobbles further back away from the hole. This is not unusual.

We also must use our best judgment to not waste our limited time and energy resources. We really do not want to move all those tons and tons of rocks any further than necessary to allow a safe, orderly progression in the dredge-hole.

As we move our hole forward, and as we dredge layers (“top cuts”) off the front of the hole, we try to leave a taper to prevent rocks from rolling in on top of us. This is an important safety factor. Also, since the N/O’s attention is generally focused on looking for gold, the R/P should be extra vigilant in watching out for safety concerns. Any rocks or boulders that potentially could roll in and injure a team-mate should be removed long before they have a chance to do so.

The rock-person’s attention should always be on safety. If there is danger, he or she should point it out immediately to the Nozzle-operator.

Some rocks will be too large and heavy to throw out of the hole. Therefore, it is good technique to leave a tapered path to the rear of your hole so that boulders can be rolled up and out. If you cannot remove boulders from your hole, the hole may become “bound-up” with over-sized material. This can create a nitpicking situation. It is important to plan your excavation to allow you a certain amount of (safe) working area along the bottom of your dredge hole so you can stay in balance while working.

If you see boulders being uncovered which are too large to roll out of the hole, you should immediately start making room for them on the bedrock at the back of your hole. You normally accomplish this by throwing or rolling other rocks further behind. This takes planning in advance.

Winch Operator Watching Closely For Diver Signals

Boulder In Sling

Sometimes winching is necessary to remove large boulders or an abundance of large rocks from a dredge-hole. However, because winching takes additional time, the pay-streak usually must contain more gold to justify the time and effort that is required.

The amount of streambed material that you are able to process through a gold dredge will determine the volume of gold that you will recover. Actually, this volume-to-recovery ratio is true of any type of mining operation, whether it is a large-scale lode mine, a small-scale miner using a gold pan, or anything in-between.

The smaller the amount of material that a dredging program has the capacity to process, the richer the pay-dirt must be to recover the same amount of gold. Consequently, a smaller-volume operation often needs to invest more time and energy into sampling to find the more-scarce, higher-grade pay-streaks. For this reason, smaller-volume operations generally spend more time sampling, less time in production; and, therefore, usually recover less gold. But not always!

Having said that, I should also say that successful gold recovery depends upon more than the size of the dredge. A lot has to do with the skill of the operator(s).

As a general rule, gold mining on any scale is volume-sensitive. If you can dredge twice the volume of streambed material, not only can you recover twice the amount of gold, but you may find (many) more lower-grade gold deposits which can be productive when developed. You can also dredge deeper sample holes. This allows you to reach deeper pay-streaks. This is why we always advise beginning gold dredgers to go out and find an easy location where they can practice their basic gold dredge production techniques to improve their speed before they begin a serious sampling program.

It is a good idea to practice your dredging skills, so that you can operate the nozzle efficiently while moving your own oversize material out of the way.

An inexperienced dredge-miner will sometimes be so slow in volume-production, that he or she may miss valuable pay-streaks simply for lack of being able to process enough gravel, or lack of ability to dredge his or her sample holes large or deep enough during sampling. An inexperienced dredge operator also may not even be aware this is the problem.

When you dredge a sample hole, you must evaluate how much gold you recover against the amount of time and work it took to complete the test hole. If you are only moving at 20% of your potential production speed, you easily can make the mistake of walking away from excellent pay-streaks just because you will believe they are not paying well enough.

When we run larger-sized (8-inch or larger) gold dredges, we almost always have at least two divers working together underwater. The reason for this is because running an eight or ten-inch dredge in six feet or more of streambed material requires that an overwhelming number of over-sized rocks must be moved all the way out of the dredge-hole by hand. This varies from one location to the next. But generally, in hard-packed, natural stream-beds, somewhere between 60 and 75 percent of the material is too large to process through an eight-inch dredge. This is where second and third persons become a big help. A sole-operator in this type of material, when it is deeper than five or six feet, is going to spend a great deal of time throwing rocks out of the hole, rather than operating the suction nozzle.

The smaller the dredge, the shallower the material that a single operator will be able to manage efficiently. Also, some hard-packed streambeds require that most of the over-sized rocks be broken free with the use of a pry bar. This further decreases the amount of nozzle-time on a single-person dredging operation.

In the final analysis, it is the volume of material that is sucked up the nozzle (in any given location) that determines gold production. However, the efficiency with which the over-sized material is moved out of the way has a direct impact upon how much gravel and gold will be directed up the suction nozzle. So, gold production ultimately is controlled by how well the over-sized material (rocks too large to pass into the suction nozzle) is managed. The nozzle-operator’s focus, therefore, should be on directing the nozzle to suck up the gravel that will make it easier to free more over-sized rocks, rather than indiscriminately sucking up any gravel in the hole. In other words, the Nozzle operator should be actively pursuing a plan that keeps the Rock person busy right there where the action is happening!

If a rock person(s) is added to the operation, he or she must increase the program’s efficiency by at least as much as the percentage of gold which he/they is going to receive. This is not difficult to accomplish if conditions are right and the dredging team is organized.

On the other hand, if you are operating a dredge in two or three feet of hard-packed streambed, adding a second person may not increase your production speed enough to make it worthwhile to pay him for his time. This is because the material is shallow, and you may not have to toss the over-sized rocks very far behind in the dredge hole (less effort required to make progress).

When I am operating a production dredge in five or six feet (or more) of streambed material, I can literally bury a rock person with over-sized rocks, and make my helper work like an animal all day long. I also have to work like an animal to accomplish this. The result is a good-paying job for my helper and a substantial increase in my own gold recovery.

When I find myself working in eight or ten feet (or more) of material, I must have at least one or two (or more) rock person(s) to help me. Otherwise, I will be completely buried with cobbles and over-sized rocks all day long and will get in very little nozzle-time.

All of this also applies to smaller-dredge operations. Your ultimate success will be directly proportional to how much material you can get up the nozzle of your dredge in the right locations. The more efficiently you can make that happen, the quicker you will get your nozzle into pay-dirt.

Large-rock management is important! Since most of the material in a natural, hard-packed streambed will be too large to go through the suction nozzle, the progress and speed of your operation will directly depend upon how quickly and efficiently the oversize (cobbles and boulders) materials are moved out of the N/O’s way. Dredging is not just a matter of sucking up some gravel; at least not in the places where most pay-streaks are found.

As shown in the following important video segment, in most pay-streaks, the only gravel that gets sucked up is that which is found between the over-sized rocks. So the key to continued progress depends upon management of over-sized material:

A cutter-head consists of a rotating series of hardened-steel blades that are designed to cut into sand, clay or classified gravel. It does not have the capability to cut through hard-packed streambeds that are made up of over-sized rocks and boulders.This is the reason that cutter-head dredges do not work well in hard-packed streambeds; because they are continuously up against rocks that must be moved out of the way by divers. But it is too dangerous to put divers in a dredge excavation where a cutter-head is operating.

So, there is a lot of good to be said about organizing a system to get the rocks moved out of your way as quickly and efficiently as possible. This is true in dredging on any scale and regardless of whether you are working alone or with a team.

The reason why larger dredges can get more accomplished in gold-bearing streambeds is usually not because they will suck up more gravel. It is because a larger hose and nozzle will suck up a bigger rock. Every rock that can go up the nozzle is a rock that does not need to be packed out of the dredge-hole by hand. This is the primary factor that speeds things up with a larger dredge.

Another major advantage of a two-person team is the substantial amount of emotional support which a second person can add to the operation—especially when you are dredging in deep material, or when you are sampling around for deposits and have not found any in awhile.

On the other hand, the wrong person can inhibit the operation, either physically or emotionally. So, you must be especially careful to select teammates who have work ethics, moral standards and emotional endurances that are similar to your own.

In my own operations, we have found that the key to good teamwork is in establishing standard operating procedures for nearly everything we do. We also work out standard underwater signals. This takes quite a bit of planning and communication in advance, and it is an ever-continuing process. We have standard procedures for removing plug-ups from the hose and jet. We have standard procedures for moving the dredges forward and backward during operation. And, we have standard procedures for every facet of the underwater work — from moving the raw material that is in front of us, to the placement of tailings and cobbles behind our dredge-hole.

As noted above, volume is the key to success—at least to the degree of success. We take this aspect of the work quite seriously in my own operations — to the point where every single moment and every single physical effort is regarded as important to the operational-moment while we are dredging. You will never find the members of my team socializing or goofing-off during the underwater production hours. We allow ourselves to relax during the off-work hours and lunch break. But during production-time, we are entirely focused on the needs of the operation. We treat the dredging-portion of the operation like a competitive team athletic sport. We are not competing against each other. In a team effort, we compete against the barriers that Mother Nature has constructed for us to overcome so that we can recover volume-amounts of gold. To us, our teamwork is kind of like running a relay race. It is rewarding this way when we really synchronize our efforts.

We try to spend a minimum of six hours doing production-dredging or sampling each day. In our operation, this is normally done in two three-hour dives. Other commercial operators prefer three or four shorter dives. I know one commercial dredger in New Zealand who prefers a straight six, seven or eight- hour dive. What an animal!

I like lunch. But, I also agree with the concept of long dives; the reason being that it takes a while to get a good momentum going underwater. Every time you take a break, you need to get that momentum going all over again. What do I mean by “momentum?” Momentum in dredging is very similar to the beat of the drum in driving music. It is the continuous flow of gravel up the nozzle, with the over-sized rocks being moved out of the way in their proper order at just the right moment so that the flow of material into the nozzle is never slowed down. It is everyone doing whatever is necessary to keep that flow happening. It is about synchronizing the right rhythm at optimum speed, and keeping the beat going!

In fact, team-dredging can be kind of like an art form. It is similar to playing music. Only, instead of notes being played on several instruments to form a harmonious melody, the team produces a stream of coordinated effort, using their bodies to move the suction nozzle and the over-sized rocks, in concert, so that all of the effort works together to achieve optimum momentum and harmony.

In his or her initial enthusiasm, an inexperienced R/P may, rather than move the next rock in the path of the N/O, instead, move the wrong rock and cloud-out the dredge-hole with silt. This causes the N/O to be slowed down (1) because of the decreased visibility, and (2) because he or she must now take the time to move the proper rock out of his own way. This is the equivalent of “playing off key,” or playing the wrong musical selection. Everybody else is playing one song, while the new guy is doing something entirely different. The bottom-line for your dredging operation: less volume through the suction nozzle, and less gold at the end of the day.

On the other hand, there is enormous personal and team-satisfaction to operating within a well-structured team-dredging system. Such a system functions best when the N/O is the conductor, and the R/P plays a supporting role, anticipating in advance and taking every possible action to contribute to the N/O’s momentum.

Four-man team on Author’s commercial operation. Notice how everyone is involved up where the action is happening at the suction nozzles.

This is not just about the next rock which is in the way of the nozzle. It is also about moving the dredge forward a bit as necessary to give the N/O a little more suction hose when it is needed. It is also about the dozen or so other things that are necessary to keep the flow going without a lag.

Volume-momentum is lost every time the N/O has to put the nozzle down to take care of something. That will impact directly upon the success of the operation. Every effort should be made to keep this “down time” to a minimum.

Since volume is really the key, in my own operations, we try to treat dredging pretty-much like a team sport – competitive and physical! When I give my R/P the plug-up signal, he races to the surface to quickly clear the obstruction. He doesn’t just mosey on up there. He moves up there, like running for a touchdown or rounding the bases for the winning home run. This is also the sense of urgency with which he returns to the hole as soon as the plug-up is free. When he sees that rocks are stacking up in the hole, he doubles his pace to catch up. When caught up, he looks around to see where other cobbles might be moved out of the way, without clouding the hole. Or, he might grab the pry bar and start breaking rocks free for the nozzle operator. At the same time, when I am operating the nozzle, I am doing my own job—getting as much material through the nozzle as humanly possible while uncovering new rocks to be moved by the R/P, with the minimum number of plug-ups. And, I do not stop for anything if I can help it. If something else needs to be done, I delegate it to my R/P or other helpers so that I can keep pumping gravel up the nozzle. That’s my job! Everyone’s gold-income depends directly upon how much material is sucked up.

While this statement is also true when you work alone, every effort counts for something in production team dredging. Therefore, everyone needs to pay attention to what is going on in the dredge-hole. R/P’s particularly have to be able to switch gears quickly. At one point, there may be a pile of rocks which needs to be thrown out of the way. The next moment, even before the R/P has moved many of those rocks, he or she may notice something else that is directly impeding the N/O’s progress—like a boulder that needs to be rolled out of the way, or a particularly-difficult cobble which needs to be broken free with the pry bar. The main objective in everyone’s mind should be to support the N/O’s progress. Whatever impedes his progress should be the priority and get immediate attention.
The key to a productive underwater support person is having him or her work to help keeping gravel flowing into the suction nozzle.

The only time I intentionally slow things down is when I am uncovering the gold. I have to keep an eye on that to follow the pay-streak. However, as explained in the following important two video segments, you can also slow down too much by looking. You have to find the proper balance between looking and getting volume up your nozzle:

If the pay-streak is good, I also point out the gold to my helpers as I uncover it. There is emotional gain from this. Everyone deserves the boost. The gold eventually gets spent or hidden away. The memories last your entire lifetime! As demonstrated in the following video sequence, there are few things in life that will give you a bigger emotional boost than finding one of Mother Nature’s rich golden treasures:

As the following video segment demonstrates, once you locate a high-grade pay-streak, it is also very important to invest enough time to locate the downstream and left and right outside boundaries of the deposit. This is to make sure that you are able to develop the whole deposit without burying part of it under tailings or cobbles:

When things get too confused inside the dredge-hole, sometimes the N/O must put down the nozzle and help organize in the hole (move cobbles and boulders out of the hole). But, everyone should be keenly aware of the operational situation that actual production momentum (gravel up the nozzle) has stopped and that it needs to get underway again just as soon as possible.

As noted earlier, and demonstrated in the following video sequence, we take top-cuts off the front of the dredge-hole in production dredging, and we take the material down to the bedrock in layers. We do this because it is the fastest, safest, and most organized method of production dredging:

Sometimes, when conditions are right for it, an R/P may be working right next to the nozzle, breaking the next rock free and quickly throwing it behind in the hole. However, on every top-cut, there comes a time when the N/O decides to drop back and begin a new cut to take off the next layer. The R/P has to pay close attention to this and follow the N/O’s lead. Otherwise, he or she might finish breaking free a rock up in the front of the hole when there is no-longer a nozzle there to suck up the silt. That would be an error.

In other words, the R/P has to keep one eye on what the N/O is doing all the time. Because, if the N/O is a dynamic and energetic person, he or she certainly will not be following the R/P around the dredge-hole. The N/O has to orchestrate the effort. So all of the support-players should be paying close attention and assisting in the N/O’s next move. A good nozzle operator takes apart the hole with an organized method that is easy to follow by the others.

Teamwork also extends up to the dredge-tender on the surface, if you have one. The dredge-tender should continuously monitor the water-volume flowing through the sluice box. If it visibly slows down, he should suspect a plug-up and take steps to locate and clear it. Sometimes, the water-volume has been reduced simply because the N/O has temporarily set the nozzle down over a large rock in the hole. But, on the occasions when there is a plug-up, it is a mark of great teamwork to have a tender handling the problem immediately without having to be told. Volume through the sluice box should also be continuously on the tender’s mind. When gravel stops flowing, he or she should be thinking that something might be wrong.


When the flow slows down through the recovery system, the tender should just assume there is a plug-up that needs to be freed up from the surface.

That same level of anticipation and teamwork should also apply in other areas, as well. When the tender sees that the dredgers are moving forward in the hole, he should ensure that the dredge is being moved forward accordingly. This is so the N/O will always have a comfortable amount of suction hose to work with. As demonstrated in the following video sequence, different-sized dredges require different lengths of suction hose to allow the nozzle operator a comfortable amount of movement and flexibility:

Good teamwork involves a lot of close observation and timely anticipation to minimize the number of actual orders that need to be given and the consequent amount of down-time. Most of the activity is handled by standard operating procedures which require some planning and communication in advance.

As you might imagine, there are some different opinions about all of this. Some people are simply not running any races. This is fine; but they must understand that they do not have the same gold-recovery potential as others who are working at a faster pace—or, with a more organized system.

Generally, you will not hear anyone on my team complaining—especially when it is time to split-up the gold that we have recovered.

There is not anything difficult to understand about successful gold dredging techniques. The process is quite simple. Serious dredging on any scale is a lot of hard work. Volume is the game! The faster, deeper and more efficiently you can dredge the sample holes, the faster you will find the pay-streaks—and, the better you will make them pay. Even with smaller dredges.

At the times when you are not finding commercial amounts of gold, there is at least the satisfaction of knowing that you are accomplishing optimum performance. And, when you do locate the deposits, the sky is the limit!

 

 

By David R. Toussaint

Professional Gold Hunter’s Strategy Leads to Pockets of Gold

 

PrestonPreston poses with his collection which came from a pocket in northern Nevada.

A professional electronic gold prospector in Arizona has developed a gold-hunting strategy that has led to the discovery of more than 100 ounces of gold during the past few years. Preston Vickery, 42, of Kirkland, Arizona has used his gold-hunting strategy, which he calls “pocket hunting,” to find in-place gold in hard-hunted areas that have only frustrated other electronic prospectors. Now he’s ready to share his strategy with the world:

“Most others are stuck in the (placer) nugget mode,” says Vickery about other electronic prospectors. “They should be doing the whole area when they hunt for gold. You do placer and you do hardrock hunting.” Vickery has the right credentials to create his own method of gold hunting. While not a graduate of any mining school, Vickery got his education in prospecting from real-life experience and a family tradition. He’s been a professional gold prospector since his early-20’s and has also worked every facet of mining. “I’ve made a living,” Vickery says modestly. “I haven’t gotten rich, and I haven’t been on welfare.”

You might say prospecting is in the Vickery blood. Preston’s father was also a professional gold prospector and miner. The elder Vickery taught his son all he could about prospecting, including the geological indicators associated with gold formations. Now in his 90’s, Preston’s father is too old to get out much, but he still has a few things to teach his son about gold prospecting. Tracing the Vickery bloodline back even further, Preston’s grandfather was also a professional miner and prospector. Grandpa-Vickery spent much of his life working in lead and gold mines, and he wasn’t shy about passing on his knowledge to his son. Thus, Preston’s grandfather started a family tradition that has created three generations of prospectors and miners.

Now, when Preston goes prospecting, he uses the accumulated gold-hunting wisdom of three generations. Preston has been fairly successful over the years, but his gold-finds began to dwindle during the mid-1980’s. Most of the good nugget-hunting areas were being hunted-out, and it became harder and harder to make a living as a prospector.

It was about that time that Vickery bought a Fisher Gold Bug metal detector. “Once I saw what a Gold Bug could do, it wasn’t long before I bought one,” he remembers. One time out on the Arizona desert, Vickery watched a famous nugget shooter amaze a group of electronic prospectors. This top-notch nugget shooter waited until the other prospectors in the group were satisfied that a nugget patch they were hunting was thoroughly cleaned out. After asking permission, he swept the patch one more time with his Fisher Gold Bug, finding another two or three small nuggets. “He was the best I’ve ever seen,” says Vickery.”He worked quickly but thoroughly. He taught me how to clean out a nugget patch.”

Even though Vickery learned how to clean out a patch in the late ’80’s, fewer and fewer nugget patches needed cleaning out. It seemed like every place the old-timers found gold had already been hunted to death. Vickery could spend all day hunting and only find one or two nuggets. These finds might excite a weekend prospector, but they were not enough for someone whose livelihood depends upon finding nuggets. There had to be a better way. Contemplating his predicament, Vickery began to piece together things his father had taught him and things he had learned himself. The result was a new approach to gold hunting that he calls “pocket hunting.”

Using this new method, Vickery’s luck began to change; and he soon found three nice pockets of gold. What is a “pocket” of gold? “To understand this, you must first understand how gold ‘makes,’” says Vickery. The story begins thousands, maybe millions, of years ago. First, the earth splits, forming cracks and fissures. These fissures form an intricate structure of veins that sometimes reach a hundred miles across the earth’s surface. A second movement of the earth, such as an earthquake, is required to create the right conditions for gold to form within this system of cracks. If this second movement occurs, an “intrusive” can be formed, allowing chemicals and minerals to enter the crack. Gold forms if the right chemicals and minerals are present in the right concentrations. “Gold is just a quirk in the way nature works,” says Vickery. “All it is, is a big break in the earth’s surface. These cavities are usually cracks that develop into veins. Small veins sometimes pocket-out into kidneys. These fill up with solutions and sometimes gold is formed.”

These “kidneys” or “pockets” along the cracks in the earth are what Vickery looks for when he hunts for gold. He says that it is possible to predict the location of these pockets by visualizing the structure of cracks in which gold has a chance to form, or “make,” as Vickery says. These pockets of hardrock gold do not usually contain as much gold as the main vein that the old-timers mined, but 30 or so ounces of gold is nothing to sneeze at.

These cracks in the earth’s surface, which develop into veins, usually form along parallel lines, all traveling in roughly the same direction. To find the pockets of gold, Vickery extends the boundaries of his search area away from the historical diggings. He tries to visualize the system of cracks that gave the gold places to “make.” Many small pockets of gold could have formed along this system of cracks, sometimes up to 500 or more feet away from the original outcropping. “You go in the area where gold has already been found. Then you look for the way the structure (of veins) is running,” Vickery says. “You just try to put yourself in the area where gold has a chance to’ make.’”

“Smaller veins that formed parallel to the main vein were difficult for earlier generations of miners to find, especially without metal detectors,” Vickery says. The old-timers followed a vein by digging. If they did not see any more gold in their pan, they gave up and stopped digging the vein. If the vein picked up again farther on, or if a splinter vein made a small pocket of gold away from the main vein, the old-timers had no way to find it. “The old-timers would have dug along the vein for some distance to see if it would ‘make’ again,” Vickery explains. “The old-timers couldn’t get all the tiny splinter veins. Sometimes they were too far away. They didn’t have the technology to find them like we have today.”

Using his metal detector, Vickery found a nice pocket of hardrock gold on a prospecting trip to northern Nevada. But the trip did not start out on a happy note. Two days of hunting a well-known area near some historical diggings had produced only a few small nuggets. Putting his pocket-hunting strategy into service, Vickery found a 30-ounce pocket of in-place gold just a couple-hundred feet away from the hard-hunted old-time diggings. About four feet deep, the pocket had formed along a smaller vein that ran parallel to the primary vein which the old-timers had mined. Hidden four feet below the surface, the pocket gave off a strong signal when he passed his detector coil over it.

So what is the first step when pocket hunting for gold? The first thing Vickery does when he starts hunting an area is to climb a hill. Using binoculars, he studies the entire area and draws a map with reference points to provide bearings while he hunts. Next, he looks for gold indicators, cubes or clods of iron oxidation that form an “oxide zone” around the historical diggings. Patterns in the oxide-zone, like strings of red earth, that suggest a crack in the earth where iron formed, can also indicate a vein. Often times, if iron formed in a crack, gold also could have formed in another nearby spot along the same crack.

In particular, Vickery looks for any place that the red oxide lines shifted, forming a broken line. This shift could have created an intrusion that allowed gold to form a pocket within the crack. Visualizing the system of veins in the earth, he starts hunting, by searching right on top of the main vein, tracing about 400-to-500 feet to see if it picks up again in a spot unknown to the old-timers. If it doesn’t, he then drops downhill about 20 feet from the main vein and begins hunting in a line parallel to the main vein, now attempting to discover any pockets in splinter veins. Again, he hunts to a distance about 400-500 feet away from the original diggings. If his detector remains silent, he drops down another 20 feet and repeats the process.

If he finds any gold nuggets while searching, Vickery marks the spot and searches uphill to find the in-place pocket where the nuggets originated. If he finds a concentration of gold nuggets, he carefully works out where the concentration begins, where it occurs in the highest concentration and where it thins out. Then, using the edges of the concentration as two points of a triangle, he knows the third point of the triangle will be somewhere directly uphill where the nuggets originated. So he begins searching directly uphill from the highest concentration of nuggets. Vickery says he picked-up this method of triangulation in “Gold Canyon,” a novel by Jack London.

Pocket hunting for gold takes considerable concentration; it isn’t as easy as simply locating an old-time mining operation and swinging your metal detector around. You have to keep your hopes up, and not let yourself become discouraged. Pocket hunting provides the electronic prospector with a strategy for gold hunting that can result in more than an occasional placer nugget.

 

By Dave McCracken

You have a substantial prospecting-advantage with a modern gold detector!

Dave McCracken

 

 

woman with a gold nuggetI highly recommend The Fundamentals of Electronic Prospecting be read before reading this article.

All the rules of placer and desert geology apply to gold nugget hunting, and this knowledge should be utilized to establish where gold deposits and nuggets are most likely to be found.

Particular attention should be paid to locations which have little or no streambed or other material present, so the detector’s coil can search as closely as possible to bedrock or false bedrock layers. Also, exposed tree roots along the edges of the present streams, rivers and dry-washes have been proving successful, especially along the smaller tributaries in the higher elevations of known gold country.

Some of the most productive areas for electronic prospecting in the dry regions are in the near vicinity of old dry-washing operations. The old-timers were only able to make dry-washing work in very high-grade areas. They seldom recovered all the high-grade gold out of an area, because they did not have the means or equipment to prospect extensive areas. You have a substantial prospecting-advantage with a modern gold detector. Natural erosion over the years has likely uncovered more high-grade in the immediate area, or concentrated other spots into new high-grade gold deposits.

When prospecting old dry-wash workings, it is always worth a little time to rake back some of the old tailings piles and scan them with your detector. Dry-washers, today and during the past, almost always used a classification screen over the feed area. The screen was commonly around half-inch mesh. An operation shoveling onto the screen at production speed in dry high-grade gravel might have missed larger nuggets as they rolled off the top of the screen. Sometimes, when working a layer of caliche, if the material was not broken-up well enough, it would roll off the screen with nuggets still attached. A metal detector reads out strongly on these kinds of targets. Make sure to ground-balance to the tailing pile. One nice thing about prospecting in these tailing piles is that they usually are not filled with iron trash targets.

When dealing with natural streambeds above the water, you generally do not find too many other reading metallic objects besides gold, unless the spot which you are scanning is near an inhabited location, like a park or an old dump. So it is reasonably safe to dig any target that gives off a metallic reading in a streambed.

However, some locations have lots of trash and small iron targets. Sometimes, iron targets seem to accumulate heavily in the same areas as gold. This presents a big challenge! Once you have been scanning a particular area for a while, you will gain an understanding of how much “trash” (metallic objects of no value) exists within the vicinity. With some experience on gold objects, you will learn to distinguish the different tone changes between most gold objects and most trash targets. Pay particular attention to the very faint readings, as is often the case with natural gold targets.

One of the main keys to successful electronic prospecting is to slow down your sweeping action. You cannot do it fast like when hunting for coins. You almost have to crawl across the ground. Remember, you are listening for even the faintest whisper of a sudden increased threshold hum. A gold target may sound like a coin—only a quieter signal.

Different types of detectors have special non-motion or pinpointing settings which allow the coil to be moved very slowly and still pick up targets. This means you are able to slow down your sweep to almost a standstill and still hear a target as the coil moves over it. On the other hand, these settings may be too sensitive to use for nugget hunting on some detectors, depending upon field conditions and how fast you are sweeping. When in doubt, experiment while using a test-nugget on or in the ground you are searching.

Another important point is to overlap your coil sweeps. The area covered by the search-field under your coil is similar to a triangle. Directly underneath the coil, the search area is about the same size as the diameter of your coil. The search area becomes narrower as it penetrates the ground further away from the coil.

However, the size of this triangular search-field is not constant underneath the coil. It changes as mineralized conditions change in the ground below your search coil. If you do not overlap your search strokes, you can leave as much as 50 percent or more of the area below the search coil behind, without being adequately searched.

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You have to use your own judgment about how to discriminate between which targets to dig, and which to leave behind. This comes with practice and experience. Discrimination of any kind, whether by electronic circuitry or the audio sounds given off by the target, has limited accuracy. The depth of a target and the degree of ground-mineralization in that particular location can confuse any discriminator. In some places, you will want to dig every target. In other places, where there is lots of trash, you may find it more productive to discriminate your targets by sound and/or in combination with electronic discrimination features on your detector. In this case, you have to balance the need to leave some small pieces of gold behind, with not wanting to dig a bucket full of trash and valueless iron targets; and therefore, less gold.

When in doubt, dig! Or at least toss your sample nugget down and get a comparative reading.

With lots of practice in the field, you will eventually reach the point where your metal detector is like an extension of your arm—like an extension of your perception and knowingness. You will gain the ability to look down into the ground and have a pretty good idea of what is there.

Big nuggets are generally not too difficult to find. In most areas, however, there are hoards of smaller gold targets in ratio to each large nugget found. Small pieces of gold are your bread and butter! Most gold is small gold, but it has to be large enough to be worth your while. Some of the modern gold detectors will pick up pieces of gold so small that you could be finding them all day long; and at the end of the day, not have accumulated very much gold by weight. In this case, you may want to move to a different area.

Just like in other forms of gold mining, electronic prospectors have to set standards for themselves. Someone pursuing the activity to make money will be motivated to recover volume-amounts (by weight) of gold. Another person pursuing electronic prospecting as a part time activity may receive his or her best thrills by recovering the smallest-sized targets.

One interesting development in the electronic prospecting field, which I have not seen happen in other gold mining activities, is the tremendous emotional success gained from finding extraordinarily-small pieces of gold. Normally, in gold prospecting, we get excited to find a big nugget or a rich deposit. These are easy to locate when scanned over by a metal detector. The big challenge with a metal detector is in locating the smaller pieces. Experienced prospectors know that if they are finding the small pieces, they will easily-find the big pieces.

When scanning, keep your coil as close to the ground as possible. It takes a coordinated arm and wrist-action to keep the bottom of the coil parallel and close to the ground throughout the full sweeping action. Allowing the coil to move one or two inches away from the ground during the outside of a sweeping motion will also reduce depth-penetration by one or two inches. This will certainly result in lost gold targets. You have to practice keeping the coil close to the ground. Shorter sweeps is usually the answer.

Sometimes it helps to kick rocks out of the way, or use a garden rake to remove multiple smaller obstructions before you search an area. This allows you to keep the coil close to the ground with minimum obstructions.

During your prospecting activities, it is possible that you may find occasional targets which could potentially be classified as artifacts. The Archaeological Resources Protection Act defines just about anything you might find as a “protected” artifact. There are criminal penalties for disturbing or removing artifacts. What constitutes a protected artifact is primarily up to the judgment of local bureaucrats. Searching for natural gold targets is legal. Messing around with old junk and trash may be illegal. Sometimes, it is better to just leave old items where they lie. You will have to decide.

The main suggestion I commonly give to beginners about electronic prospecting is to not give up. With practice and by working in the right area, you will surely find some gold!

PINPOINTING

When you do have a reading target, its exact position in the ground should be pinpointed. This can be done by noting when the detector sounds out while scanning over the target in fore and aft and left to right motions. A steel or iron object can be often be distinguished by noting the size and shape of the object during the pinpointing process. Sometimes trash objects are large and/or lengthy in size.

Sometimes a stronger-reading target will seem to cover a larger area than it actually does. If you are having trouble getting an exact location, continue to lift the search coil higher off the ground while scanning with an even back and forth motion. As the coil is raised higher, the signal will become fainter; but the position of the metal object will sound-out at the very center of the search coil.

PINPOINTING WITH THE GOLD PAN IN WET AREAS

Once you have pinpointed the exact position of a target in an area near water, one way of recovering the object is to carefully dig up that portion of ground, using a shovel or digging tool, and place the material in your gold pan. Here is where a large plastic gold pan comes in real handy. Be careful not to cause any more disturbance or vibration of the streambed than is necessary while you are attempting to dig up a target. It is possible to miss the target on the first try and cause it to work further down into the streambed because of its greater weight in the wet environment. Sometimes you can lose the target, and not be able to locate it again with the detector.

Sometimes the ground is hard and needs to be broken up or scraped with a small pick. Keep in mind that a sharp blow from a pick can destroy a coin or disfigure a gold nugget, reducing its value. Digging and scraping is better than pounding, if possible. In hard ground, sometimes it is easier to loosen the material up and shuffle it into several small piles. These can then be flattened out and scanned to see which contains the target.

Once you have dug up that section of material where the target was reading, place it in your plastic gold pan and scan it with your detector. If the contents of the pan do not make your detector sound-out, scan the original target area over again. If you get a read in the original location, pour the contents of the pan neatly into a pile out of your way, pinpoint the target all over again, and make another try at getting the target into your gold pan. Continue this until you finally have the target sounding out in your pan. If you cannot see the target, and water is immediately available, pan-off the contents until the target is visible.

There is a good reason why you should not ever throw away any material from the target area until after you know for certain exactly what the reading target is. If you are looking for placer gold deposits and it happens that your detector is sounding out on a gold flake or nugget, the chances are pretty good of additional gold being present in paying quantities within the material which has been dug out of the hole, even if it does not sound-out on your detector. Remember, small particles of gold often do not make metal detectors sound-out. Therefore, the possibility exists that there could be hundreds of dollars worth of gold in a single shovelful of material not tightly-concentrated enough to cause your detector to sound-out. So wait until you have seen the reading target before you start throwing any material away.

If you dig for a target and then cannot get any further reads on the detector from either the pan or in the original target area, quickly pan-off the pan’s contents. There is always a possibility of a concentrated gold deposit which is no longer concentrated enough to read-out on your detector. In this case, you are most likely to have some of the gold deposit in your gold pan, which will quickly be discovered when you pan off the contents.

There is also another reason why you save the material from a hole until you have recovered your target. Because of the shape of a gold pan, and depending upon the size and shape of the coil you are using, if the gold target (especially a small target) ends up in the bottom of your pan, your coil may no-longer be able to scan close enough to the bottom of the pan to sound-off on the target. Because of this problem, gold pans have limited workability as a pinpointing tool in electronic prospecting. Sometimes, you can have better luck scanning the bottom-side of a gold pan.

DRY METHODS OF PINPOINTING

There are several popular methods of pinpointing reading targets in the dry regions where water is not available for panning. Some prospectors use a plastic cup. Material from the target area is scooped up and passed over the coil. If the contents of the cup do not sound-out on the detector, the target area is scanned again until the target is located. Take another scoop, pass it over the coil for a signal, and repeat until the target is in the cup. Then pour some of the contents into your hand. Pass the cup over the coil, then your hand, until you locate the target. Put the rest away in a neat pile, and repeat the process until you recover the object.

One important point to mention is that most search coils have equal sensitivity to targets both above and below the coil. In other words, during pinpointing, you can pass material over top of the coil and obtain the same results as if you turn the detector upside down and pass the material across the bottom of the coil.

Your handy magnet can be a big help when you are having difficulty finding a faintly reading target. Sometimes it is just a small piece of iron.

There is also the hand-to-hand method of pinpointing a target. You can reach down with your hand and grab a handful of dirt or material. Pass your hand over the coil to see if you are holding the target. Continue until you have the target in one hand. Then pass half the material in that hand to your other hand. Use the coil to find which hand has the reading target. Discard the material from the other hand and pass half the material from the reading hand to the second hand, again. Keep up the process until you only have a small amount of material in the reading hand. Carefully blow off the lighter material to locate the target.

Another procedure is to grab a handful and pass it over the coil as explained above. Once you have a reading handful, toss it in a pouch for later panning.

Some prospectors prefer to sprinkle a handful of reading material slowly on top of the detector’s coil. There are different ways to do this. One effective way, which requires some practice, is to sprinkle material over a slightly slanted coil while you vibrate it so that material slowly sweeps across and off. When the target drops onto the coil, the detector will sound-off with a distinctive bleep. Then, all you have to do is gently blow the dirt off the coil, or recover the target from the top of the pile where the material is landing. This method is nearly impossible in wet material.

One important thing about using your hands to pinpoint and recover gold targets, is that some of today’s most sensitive high frequency gold detectors react to the salt (mineral) content on or in your hand. When this occurs, your hand will give a reading when passed over the coil by itself, sometimes even a strong signal. This makes hand pinpointing methods more difficult. In this case, the plastic tray or cup works just fine, or the method of pouring material onto the coil.

If you find a gold target, be sure to scan the hole again. Sometimes it is worth doing a lot of digging and/or raking, with alternate scanning of the immediate area. Gold targets almost never travel alone! I have seen dozens of gold flakes and nuggets come from within a one-foot square area on bedrock. Many times!

HOT ROCKS

Sometimes you get soft or strong signals from your metal detector when the coil is passed over rocks which contain heavy mineralization. These rocks are called “hot rocks.” This needs to be clarified. It isn’t necessary for a rock to have an extraordinary amount of mineralization to sound-off as a hot rock. It just needs to have more than the average ground which your detector is ground-balanced to. The opposite of this is also true. A rock containing less mineralization than the average ground will change tone on a detector in the opposite way. These are called “cold rocks.” A hot rock from one location could be a cold rock in another location containing higher mineralization in the average ground.

Put another way, when your detector is properly ground-balanced to the average ground, it will sound-off on rocks containing condensed heavier mineralization. Often, the signals given off by these hot rocks can be mistaken for signals which might be given off by gold targets in the ground. Some locations have lots of hot rocks. Naturally, since gold travels with other heavy mineralization, you can expect to find hot rocks in the various gold fields.

Hot rocks come in all sorts of colors and sizes. A big hot rock, depending upon the degree of mineralization over the average ground, can sound very similar to a gold target. The same goes for small hot rocks.

Quite often, most of the hot rocks within a given area will be similar in nature, color and hardness, but not necessarily in size. After searching an area for a while, you will know what most of the hot rocks look like. This makes pinpointing targets a little easier, especially when dealing with small hot rocks. When receiving signals from rocks which are dissimilar to the average-looking hot rock of the area, check them out closely, especially when they have quartz. Some of these may not be hot rocks at all, but gold specimens.

If you are finding hot rocks on top of the ground, you will almost always find them buried, as well.

Metal targets gradually lose signal-strength in proportion to the increased distance from the coil. Hot rocks rapidly lose their signal-strength as they are scanned further from the coil. Also, a metal target tends to create a more specific, sharper signal as the coil is passed over. The signal given off by most hot rocks is not as sharp. It is more of a mushy sound which doesn’t have as clear a change in tone-intensity as the coil passes over the target.

When uncertain about a reading target, one way that some hot rocks can be identified is by passing the coil over the target from different directions. If the target only sounds out when being swept from one particular direction, then it is nearly certain that the target is not a gold nugget.

Sometimes, when lowering the sensitivity on your detector a few numbers, the signal given off by a nugget will continue, but weaker. A hot rock signal will quickly disappear by lowering the sensitivity. You can get a better idea how your detector is reacting to sensitivity changes by running it over your test-nugget.

Another test is to slowly raise the coil further away from the reading target as you are scanning. The signal of a metal object will become progressively fainter as the distance is increased. The signal given off by a hot rock will rapidly die away as just a little distance is put between the target and the coil. Most hot rocks in a given area will have a very similar sound, the intensity depending upon size and distance from the coil. Sometimes, you will find that a gold nugget gives off a much sharper signal. But not always. Much also depends upon the size of a gold target, its distance from the coil, and the amount of mineralization interference in the ground that is being scanned.

Each area is different. The hot rocks in some areas are reasonably easy to distinguish. In other areas, it is necessary to dig every signal.

Larger hot rocks are easier to detect. Many can simply be kicked out of the way. It is the smaller pebble-sized hot rocks which create faint signals. In some locations, these signals are so similar to the signals given off by gold nuggets that you have no other choice but to dig them up.

If lots of hot rocks are making it difficult for you in a particular area, you might try experimenting with smaller coils. Smaller coils are more sensitive to smaller pieces of gold. Therefore, the sharpness of the signal over gold targets is also intensified. This may give you the needed edge in distinguishing the slightly-different signals being given off by hot rocks in that area.

Some gold prospectors go so far as to ground-balance over top of a hot rock until it no longer gives off a signal. This will eliminate a large portion of the hot rocks in the area, but it is also likely to eliminate a large portion of the small and marginal signals given off by gold targets. This procedure may work well in areas containing just large nuggets. However, most areas I am aware of have dozens or hundreds of smaller pieces of gold for every larger piece that you will find.

Since cold rocks are made up of a lesser-concentration of iron than the average material which your detector is balanced to, they give off a negative reading signal on your detector. Ground-balancing over a cold rock will cause your detector to react positively to the average ground within the vicinity.

PRODUCTION

Once you find a location which is producing gold targets, you will want to thoroughly work the entire area. This is commonly accomplished by carefully gridding the site. By this, I mean creating parallel crisscross lines on the ground, usually about four feet apart. You can do this by drawing light lines in the sand with a stick. Grid lines allow you to keep track of where you are, and what has already been searched.

If there are obstructions in the producing area (“nugget patch”), they should be moved or rolled out of the way if possible. The smaller rocks and materials on the ground can be raked out of the way. This allows you to keep the coil closer to the ground. In a proven area, this will surely mean more recovered gold targets.

Some areas produce quite well on the surface. Then, by raking or shoveling several inches off the surface and scanning again, sometimes you can find even more targets. I know of numerous small-scale mining operations in many different parts of the world, using metal detectors as the only recovery system. They use a bulldozer to scrape away material which has already been scanned, two or three inches at a time. A layer is removed; the area is scanned thoroughly with metal detectors to locate all of the exposed gold targets. Then, another layer is removed and scanned. This process is done all the way to bedrock. They make good money at it!

I have heard of others doing the same process on a smaller-scale by attaching plow blades to four-wheel drive vehicles. Some even do it using ATV’s!

While hunting over a proven nugget patch, be sure to keep your detector properly tuned all the time. Otherwise, you will certainly miss gold targets.

PROSPECTING OLD HYDRAULIC MINING AREAS

Perhaps the most productive areas of all to prospect with metal detectors are areas which were already mined by the old-timers using hydraulic methods. Many of these areas are left with a large amount of bedrock exposed. This allows immediate and easy access for search coils to get close to old gold traps. Sometimes, the exposed bedrock has been further-deteriorated because of direct exposure to the elements. Once a nugget patch is located, raking away decomposed bedrock sometimes can produce remarkable results.

While searching such areas, pay attention to the color of dirt which covers and surrounds nugget patch. You might discover a pattern. In our area of operation, it is a white powder which often signifies the possible presence of a good spot. Perhaps in other areas, it might also be this white powder, or something else.

PROSPECTING OLD MINING TAILINGS

It is usually possible to find piles and piles of old mining tailings throughout most proven gold-bearing country.

Many of the larger earlier gold mining operations (the ones that were set up to move large volumes of material), concentrated on recovering only the fine and medium-sized values from the material being processed. This meant that the larger material was classified-out so the smaller material could be processed through controlled, slower-moving recovery systems. On the larger operations, classification was usually done either with mechanical vibrating classification screens, or with the use of a “trommel.” A trommel is a large circular screening classifier which rotates and tumbles material through, allowing the smaller classification of materials to pass through the outer screen and into a channel which directs them to the recovery system. The larger materials are passed down the inside of the trommel to be discarded as tailings.

In many of the larger operations, there were no means to recover the larger pieces of gold which were screened-out along with the other large materials. As a result, larger nuggets were sometimes discarded along with the waste material as tailings.

Anywhere you see large tailings piles, especially near the present waterways, it is evidence of a large volume operation where it is possible that the nuggets were discarded with the waste and are likely to still be there. Some large tailing piles still have large goodies inside them, which sing out very nicely on the proper metal detectors. One way to distinguish the right kind of tailing pile to be looking through is there should be a pretty wide range of material sizes in the tailing pile. Tailing piles which consist only of the larger rocks (cobble piles) were most likely stacked there by hand during a smaller surface-type operation.

Scanning tailing piles with a metal detector is proving to be highly-productive in some cases, and should not be overlooked as a possibility for finding nice specimen-sized gold nuggets. VLF ground-cancelling detectors are usually best-suited for this, because tailings almost always also contain a large quantity of mineral content, which is likely to cause interference on a BFO-detector.

PROSPECTING OLD MINING SHAFTS

Even the most experienced cave explorers shy away from entering declining mine shafts because of the dangers involved.

CAUTION: The first thing to say about prospecting in old mine shafts is that they are dangerous! There are different things that can go wrong when prospecting around in such places, one main danger being a potential cave-in. The shoring beams in some of these old shafts may have become rotten and faulty over the years. So it is best not to lean up against or bump any of the old wooden structures situated in old mine shafts. Loud, sharp noises should also be avoided.

Shafts which extend down into the earth on a declining angle are particularly dangerous; because if the ladders or suspension systems are faulty and collapse while you are down inside, you may not have any way to get out again. It is never a bad idea to bring along a caving rope, and use it, when exploring declining-type old mine shafts. Caving rope is different than mountaineering rope in that it is made not to stretch nearly as much. But I suppose, when going down in dark holes, any rope is better than no rope at all!

Another potential danger involved with exploring old mine shafts is encountering poisonous or explosive gasses. Entire mines were shut down because of such gasses—even when they were good-producing mines. These, however, were usually caved in and closed off to prevent unsuspecting adventurers from entering at a later date and getting into trouble.

Before you enter any old mine and start sorting through its low-grade ore piles, or pecking samples off the walls of the mine, it is a good idea to make sure the mine is not already owned by someone else. Or, if somebody does own it, it is wise to get the person’s permission first. There is probably nothing more dangerous in a mine shaft, cave-ins and poisonous gases included, than some old cantankerous miner who catches you, uninvited, in his mine and thinks you are stealing his gold!

There is probably more danger in prospecting old shafts than in any other gold prospecting activity.

After all that, just in case I have not succeeded in scaring you out of the idea of entering old mine shafts in your prospecting adventures, here are a few pointers about how and where you might find some rich ore deposits, or rich ore specimens, with the use of your metal detector:

But first, let me recommend that if you do go into such places, you bring along a buddy and leave another one at the surface with explicit instructions to not enter the shaft under any circumstances, but to go get help in the event that you should get into trouble within. It is also a good idea to let a few others know where you are going, just in case your outside-man doesn’t follow orders and you all become trapped inside.

There are two main sources of possible gold and silver in an old mine:

1) High-grade ore specimens that may have been placed in the low-grade ore piles and left as waste material.

2) High-grade ore which has yet to be mined.

With the exception of the largest production hardrock mines, there is always a certain amount of rock (ore) which has been blasted away from the wall of the tunnel that was not milled and processed. This was because some ore is of such apparent low-grade value that it is not worth the expense to process.

Sometimes the vein being followed into the mountainside was not as wide as the tunnel needed to be in order to progress into the mountain. Therefore, that rock material which was not part of the vein itself, or the contact zone, that looked to be of lower-grade value, was also discarded into the waste piles.

Crushing and milling ore is, and always has been, somewhat of a timely and expensive process. For this reason, a good many mines only processed what appeared to be the highest-grade ore that was blasted from the ore body. The rest was usually piled out of production’s way inside or outside of the shafts.

In the smaller operations, the kind where the ore was crushed and milled by hand and then processed with a gold pan to recover the values, only the highest of high-grade ores could be processed at a profit. The rest was usually laid aside out of the way.

The sorting of a higher-grade ore from lower-grade ore has always been a matter of judgment on the part of the person who was doing that part of the job. And, until the more recent breakthroughs in electronic detecting equipment, sorting needed to be done by eye or by feel (weight). There simply was no other way.

The interior of mine tunnels was often poorly lit with miner’s candles during earlier days, and the air inside the shaft was often foul after the powder explosions used to blast ore from the interior of the mountain. As a result of all this, it is not difficult to imagine that some higher-grade ore was likely discarded as waste material in most mines.

How rich the ore was in a mine will have a lot of bearing on whether or not a present-day prospector will find high-grade ore in the waste piles of that mine. The size of a mine does not necessarily have anything to do with how high-grade its ore was, although it may have a bearing upon how much waste ore will be available to test.

County reports can be looked over to locate the old mines within an area. Many of these reports also include information about the grade of ore being extracted from some of the mines.

When you are testing ore samples from a mine with a metal detector, and you do not come up with any specimens, try a few different piles. If you still do not come up with any specimens, it was probably not a high-grade mine. Try another.

Keep in mind that the floor of a mine shaft is likely to have some iron, brass and other metallic objects which will cause your detector to read-out.

One of the fastest and most effective ways of thoroughly checking out samples of ore is to lay the detector down on the ground or upon a makeshift bench with the search coil pointing upward so individual ore samples can be quickly passed by the most sensitive portion of the coil. The 3-inch diameter search coils are probably best-suited for this kind of work, because of the increased sensitivity, and because there is seldom great need for increased depth-sounding when testing ore specimens.

The most sensitive portion of the search coil is usually located near the center of the coil. It can be easily pinpointed by passing a coin back and forth across the coil while the detector is in tune, and by finding that spot where the coin causes the loudest and sharpest reading. The most sensitive area should be marked brightly with a Magic Marker so it will be easier for you to move ore samples directly past it. It is worthy to note that the top of the coil should have similar sensitivity to targets as does the bottom.

Ground-balancing would probably best be achieved by tuning to the overall ore pile. But, you may need to experiment. A lot will depend upon the grade of ore you are looking for. High-grade gold specimens will require the surrounding mineral to be cancelled out. On the other hand, sometimes high-grade ore is full of fine particles of gold which would not sound-off on a detector. In this case, the high degree of mineralization in the ore specimen might sound-out like a hot rock. Therefore, you would not want to ground-balance out high mineralization. So, depending upon the nature of the ore in a mine, you will need to use your own best judgment regarding the proper way to ground-balance.

Bring along a bucket, canvas bag or a knapsack so you will have something to carry your specimens as you find them.

Both BFO and the VLF ground-cancelling metal detectors can be successfully used to locate high-grade ore specimens. For the individual who is interested in finding a wider range of high-grade ore specimens rich enough to be worth milling on a small-scale for the gold and silver values, perhaps a BFO is the better type of metal detector to be used for the job. This is because the BFO does exceptionally well at picking up highly-mineralized ore. When you are dealing with hardrock veins, high mineralization is a good index of gold being present, especially when you are working with the ore that was blasted out of a previously-successful gold mine. Ore which contains large amounts of locked-in values or lots of fine gold that is thoroughly dispersed throughout the ore is not likely to read-out as a metal on any kind of conventional metal detector, although the high degree of mineralization which usually goes along with such ore probably will sound-out on a BFO-detector as a mineral. So the BFO-detector is handy in finding rich ores which might otherwise be undetectable.

By placing a BFO-detector on its mineral setting and keeping the pieces of ore which sound-out, you can accumulate a lot of good-paying ore. With the use of a BFO as such, the perimeters of ore piles can be scanned first to find a pile that has a lot of mineralization.

Portable rock crushers and mills and processing plants are available on the market. Perhaps by combining these with the use of a good BFO-detector to pick out the highly-mineralized, discarded ore, a small operation could be quite profitable without having to invest the higher costs associated with developing a lode mine from scratch.

LOCATING RICH ORE DEPOSITS

When prospecting around in an old mine with a metal detector, don’t discount the idea of searching the walls of the various shafts to locate rich ore deposits which may have been overlooked by the miners who originally developed the mine. With today’s market value of gold and advanced milling techniques, a small-scale mining operation can be run profitably in ore producing about ½-ounce to the ton in gold values, or perhaps even less. Abandoned mines which will pay this well and even better are scattered all over the west. If a person were really interested in locating a lode mine that he could work at a profit, one way would be with the use of a BFO-detector to prospect the various abandoned mines within the area of his or her interest. In using the BFO to scan the walls of such mines, highly-mineralized ore deposits can be located, samples can be taken for assay, and a person could find the mines having the richer-paying ore deposits. When prospecting like this, it is a good idea to bring a can of spray paint, a pen and paper and some zip-lock bags, so samples can be accurately marked as to where they came from, along with their respective deposits being marked with the spray paint.

If you are not interested in starting up a lode mine, but are just prospecting around for a bonus, again, the VLF detector is good for looking through mineralization and detecting the richest deposits. If, however, you do locate a reading metal inside the wall of a mine shaft with a VLF detector, and you have determined that it is not some falsely-reading mineralization, it could be well worth your while to investigate further. This is because the chances are pretty good that you have located some bonanza paying ore. I know of one highly successful high-grade gold mine in the Mother Lode area of California that is using VLF detectors as its sole method of determining where to blast. At this writing, they have located and recovered millions of dollars in gold during the past two years, in a mine which was failing prior to the use of metal detectors.

MEDICAL

Bring along some mosquito repellent during electronic prospecting ventures. Otherwise, if bugs are around, sometimes it is difficult to put your full attention on listening to what your detector is trying to tell you.

In some areas, you also have to be careful of ticks. Some ticks carry Lyme disease. Some insect repellents will keep ticks off of you. DEEP WOODS, TECNU 10-HR INSECT REPELLENT, and OFF seems to work pretty well. Spread the repellent on your boots, pants and other clothing.

In the hot climates, you should bring along the proper sunscreen and apply it to exposed body parts.

It’s always a good idea to bring along a good first aid kit, and at least leave it in your vehicle in case of emergencies.

Extra clothing and water is also a good idea. You can leave it in your vehicle. You never know…

 

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By Dave McCracken

“Good organization always comes back to having some understanding in advance of what conditions you will encounter when it is time to complete the mission.”

 

Assuming legal access to the property has already been arranged, and company executives intend for us to proceed in this way, here are the primary objectives that we try and accomplish during the preliminary evaluation of a potential mining project:

1) Meet with company executives to gain an understanding of what the mining program is about, what the overall objectives are, the timing and the budget. Review the information which they have accumulated so far. Make plans for a departure-date.

2) Obtain the very best maps of the area that we can get our hands on.

3) Locate and study as much information as we can find concerning the mining history of the area, and the areas surrounding where the project will take place. Plot this information on the map. This includes finding out the type of mining methods that were being used, and what kinds of values have been recovered.

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4) Study background information about the geology, weather, culture, politics and economics of the area. This includes a look at the public information released by the U.S. State Department . Follow up with Internet research to see what others have to say about the people, events and mining activity within the area – and anything else of interest.

Is the political situation stable?

5) Establish a preliminary idea of how and where the potential project-area is located in relation to local communities, potential sources of supplies, emergency support, political structure and access. Bring together an early idea of what we want to see when we get there.

6) I always recommend that at least one representative (preferably one of the company directors) of the company accompany us through the full preliminary evaluation of the area where the potential project would take place. It is in the company’s best interest to have someone from existing management present to confirm our observations, and to help evaluate our conclusions.

7) Travel to the potential project area and:

A) Get a feel for the local politics in general, and in relation to the potential project. Will the locals ignore, support or object to the program? Are there pre-existing problems that will need to be fixed before beginning a sampling program? For example, the following video segment shows local campaigning on political issues within Madagascar that soon thereafter evolved into civil strife that disrupted all productive activity in the country for at least 6 months:

B) Find out the different ways of gaining access to the project site. Try and make contact with those people who would provide the transport service (if needed), and establish timing, cost and dependability. How can we make contact with them from the field? For example, the following video segments demonstrate boat transport services we needed to rely upon to support a dredging project in Cambodia :

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C) Locate sources of food, fuel, supplies and personnel to support the mining program. This would include any special needs, like local guides and boat operators out at the project-site. Establish the cost of things and dependability of the supply and/or services. Are there periodic shortages of supplies or services?

    

 

D) Locate the nearest place for competent medical assistance. Do they have any kind of emergency evacuation service? If not, perhaps they can provide a referral to the nearest large medical facility which does provide such a service. Develop a viable plan to provide competent medical care in the event that it may be needed, and how to mobilize the service from the field.

E) Establish support in local communities within the vicinity of where we would conduct the mining operations.

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F) Locate local miners and gain as much information as possible from them about what is being done, where and what results are being accomplished. Purchase samples of the values if possible and carefully log where they came from. Take a hard look at the gold, gemstones or other values being recovered. It is important to verify the activity and results. Look at how much value the locals are recovering, in relation to the volume of their production. Relate that back to what can be accomplished in production with suction dredging or other modern equipment.

    

 

    

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For example, the following video segment demonstrates a primitive hand-mining program that I stumbled upon along the border of western Viet Nam just a short while ago. These miners were breaking very small volumes of hard-rock ore free from the surrounding country rock with a hammer and chisel. The pieces of ore were being crushed by hand, and then surprising amounts of free gold were being panned in the river where we were sampling. While the amount of gold actually being recovered was not a lot, it was very rich compared to the very small amount of ore that was being processed by their primitive methods. Modern equipment and technology would turn this into an extremely valuable deposit:

The best local mining operations to observe are the ones that are actively processing the gravels within the waterway where our dredging would be done in a follow-up sampling operation.

For example, I captured the following video sequence where active gold mining was being done by local miners alongside and inside of the river where we were considering a suction dredge program in Africa several years ago. As the local miners were recovering a lot of gold in proportion to the volume of river gravels being processed, we decided that a follow-up dredge sampling program was justified:

G) Find out if there are special concerns about dangers in the water, within the surrounding area, sanitary problems, health concerns, or security worries. How will they be dealt with? Will there be any special needs for this?

For example, the following two video sequences were captured during a dredge sampling project that we completed in Cambodia several years ago at a time when there was an active (brutal) civil war in progress. The dangerous situation at the time required us to bring along a substantial contingent of security forces and also arm each of the specialists on our team:

Is the waterway full of big rocks that will require specialized equipment to winch out of our way?

    

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H) Free-dive in the river and/or probe from the surface to gain a good perception of what equipment will be needed to perform a preliminary sampling program. How deep and fast is the water? How deep is the streambed material to bedrock? Is there a lot of material too large to move by hand? Are submerged trees going to interfere with the sampling process? Are there excessive amounts of mud or sand that will overwhelm the recovery system?

It is often possible to bring up smaller-sized samples to pan from the bottom of the river, to get a better idea what a dredge sampling program will find.

I) Decide if special recovery methods will be required to perform a preliminary sampling program. If conditions present will mean that more portable equipment will be required, this may require a floating container be constructed to fully catch the samples, so they can be carefully processed on shore.

Or it may be that you can refit your sampling dredge so that it will effectively capture the fine gold from your samples. Here is a substantial explanation of the system which we have developed to effectively recover more fine gold on our conventional suction dredges. It combines two classification screens to more-effectively separate material-feed into three size-fractions, each which is directed into a different recovery system. The smallest gold particles (which are most difficult to recover) are directed into low-profile riffles along the bottom of the sluice box which have long been proven to be very effective at trapping fine gold.

  

J) Establish the potential for a commercial mining opportunity, based upon evaluation of pre-existing information and direct observation of ongoing local mining programs, along with whatever limited sampling can be accomplished using the resources that are immediately available.

K) Document all important details as well as possible by logging names, phone numbers (or email addresses) and locations of important contact persons, along with how much things will cost. Obtain digital images of everything important..

L) If appropriate, conceptualize a preliminary sampling program. This includes how the sampling program would be performed, supported, and how long it would take to complete. The concept should be consistent with the company objectives and budget.

8) Write a report which includes all of the important details of our findings. Include a photo-library with explanations for each image. The report should conclude with a recommendation. For example, Here is an example of the non-proprietary portion of a completed Report.

For a better understanding of why a preliminary evaluation is so important, I strongly encourage you to read about some of the sampling projects that we have accomplished in remote locations outside of America. The full list of the adventures I have written about can be found here . When reading these stories, it should become very clear to you that the potential success of any sampling program will largely come back to how well it is organized in advance. Good organization always comes back to having some understanding in advance of what conditions you will encounter when it is time to complete the mission.

 

 

By Roy Lagal

 

Nugget hunting in the desert.The term “nugget hunting” is so ambiguous that no description of it could ever be complete. Countless books have been written about this method of searching. Weekend prospectors generally find their instructions too complicated. By condensing descriptions of target areas and summarizing the easiest searching methods for beginners to use, I offer you instructions that are simple but that employ methods proven successful the world over. Tools you may include:

  • Gold pan or gold panning kit
  • Waders
  • Gold tweezers
  • Rock hammer
  • Small bar
  • Shovel
  • Metal detector (suitable for use in mineralized areas)

The metal detector will unquestionably produce the best results in areas where gold abounds and large nuggets commonly occur, such as the western United States deserts, certain “mother lode” areas, Australia, New Zealand, China, Africa and other parts of the world where sizeable nuggets appear in nature. Fantastic finds with metal detectors are regularly reported.

Nugget Hunting Instructions

An electronic metal detector can be used effectively because gold is conductive and its presence will be indicated.

Unfortunately, so-called “hot rocks” contain an iron mineral content that is either greater than or less than the levels for which the ground-canceling detector has been adjusted. They present a constant nuisance to prospectors because they register as metallic (conductive) on a detector. Calibrated circuits used in modern metal detectors that allow easy identification and rejection of “hot rocks” are an absolute necessity in helping a prospector determine whether a rock contains gold or a predominance of iron. Make certain that your detector is a ground-canceling type that contains these special circuits.

In wet areas, start your search near water.

  1.  Adjust your detector to the magnetic iron content of the area according to manufacturer’s instructions.
  2. Pinpoint your target.
  3. Slip a shovel under the target and place it into a plastic gold pan. If the target is located in a bedrock formation, use your rock hammer and small bar to dislodge it. Then place the dislodged target into the pan for examination.
  4. Check the contents once again with your detector. If a “hot rock” is suspected, use the detector to determine if it is ore. If not, discard it.
  5. When the detector indicates gold is present, inspect the contents visually or follow panning procedures.
  6. When the detector indicates no gold in the pan, repeat Steps 3-5 until the target is located.

Metal detectors used for prospecting will also indicate large concentrations of black magnetic sand. Shovel the sand into your gold pan. Inspect for gold nuggets and save the black sand discards for later separation.

In dry areas, the procedure will vary only slightly. Locate the target with your detector, and dig carefully using your hands or a small tool, while being careful to not damage the nugget.

Metal detector headphones are an advantage in most areas, since small nuggets usually generate only a faint response. It is best to dig and visually investigate all targets unless they can be identified absolutely as “hot rocks.”

Electronic discrimination is a valuable aid but should not be relied upon entirely.

Dry areas with small, loose material make visual identification of targets more difficult. When searching such areas, shovel targets into a plastic gold pan or small plastic cup and check for electronic responses. When your detector indicates that a metal object is in the pan, use dry panning first to reduce contents. Then grasp a handful of the pan’s remaining contents with your hand (which must be free of rings and other metallic jewelry) and pass your hand across the search coil’s detection area. The material can be inspected in the same manner if you use a plastic cup. Make certain your detector is tuned correctly and move your hand containing the material across its coil. Continue until you get a response. Then place the contents which generated the response into another pan to avoid loss of the target.

Cracks and other sections of bedrock where gold may be trapped can be inspected in a similar manner. This is called crevicing.”

In desert areas where medium-to-large nuggets occur, and water for testing them is scarce, the metal detector provides the easiest method of recovery. The introduction of VLF metal detectors has brought with it fantastic success stories. Natural elements continually erode mountains, allowing rich deposits to surface. Once a gold nugget of sufficient size becomes exposed, it can be discovered by a metal detector. These nuggets are rarely detectable by sight alone and the absence of water leaves electronic detection as the surest and most effective method for small-scale prospectors.

Gold is too fine for electronic detection in some areas of the western United States, so dry washing machines or dry panning must be employed for recovery. Almost all areas where gold is now located once contained an original vein or concentration of ore that weathered over the ages into a placer deposit. This means that nuggets may still be present even in areas where the gold has been too fine to register on metal detectors. Presence of such valuable nuggets is continually proved as successful searches are conducted with detectors in the dry washes, arroyos and canyons of arid locations.

Streams can be a valuable source of nuggets. In heavily-mineralized areas where productive mines are located, rich ore specimens are often deposited in streams by natural erosion. All targets should be carefully examined before assuming that one is merely a “hot rock.” Valuable coins can often be found in streams of old mining districts. The silver- producing areas of Mexico also produce large nuggets that can be easily recovered from creeks and rivers. Small streams created by the melting of large glaciers in Alaska and western Canada often contain nuggets easily found with detectors.

Searching underwater for nuggets with a metal detector is often not as profitable as in above-water areas. Considering the small amount of labor required, however, especially in comparison with dredging or panning, underwater exploration can be well worth the time and effort. Search slowly and carefully. Even though metallic junk is usually present in streams and rivers, you pretty-much have to examine all target responses from your metal detector. Hot rocks are present in water just as on land.

Very often, companions of dredge operators use their spare time to search streams for nuggets. Persistence and patience are the keys to success here.

Large nuggets encrusted with a black or dark coating have been found particularly on mountain tops. It is believed that volcanic action or oxidation of other minerals and materials encrusted gold with the black coating.

Such discoveries commonly called “volcanic gold” or “black nuggets” represent a rare opportunity for the prospector, and are almost impossible to locate except by electronic detection.

Literally millions of dollars in gold nuggets are being discovered all over the world. Metal detectors enable gold-bearing areas to be searched in a manner never before possible. It is reasonable to state that more nuggets have already been discovered with metal detectors than were ever discovered in all the old gold rushes. The use of a metal detector will provide the weekend prospector with many enjoyable and rewarding hours of activity, and have the potential to detect riches beyond anyone’s wildest imagination.

Editor’s note: The preceding article is a chapter reprinted from WEEKEND PROSPECTING by Roy Lagal, used with permission of the author and Ram Publishing Company, copyright owners. For further information about the book, contact Hal Dawson, Editor; RAM Publishing Company, P.O. Box 38469, Dallas, TX 75238 (214) 278-6151.

 

Article & photos by David Lawler, Consulting’ Geologist

 

Placer deposits image 1Placer gold deposits represent the most attractive targets for small-scale miners and prospectors, since activities can be carried out with reasonably small costs, and encouraging prospecting results can be obtained rapidly. A small-scale miner has the opportunity to exploit small, rich accumulations of gold which larger-sized mining companies might pass by, due to reserve-size and overall ore-grade. In other words, because of the higher costs involved with a larger mining company, they will not be interested in some types of gold deposits which can be quite lucrative for a smaller-scale mining program.

Placer deposits have been exploited by man since early historic times and have remained an important source of gold on the world market into the 20th Century.

Placer deposits have yielded over 60% of the world’s gold production. Placer gold production in California alone during the height of the Gold Rush has been estimated at $81 million dollars. (Dollar-value in terms of $18/ounce in 1849, prior to 150 years of inflation).

While many texts and articles have been written on the subject of placer mining, the purpose of this article is to provide a brief overview of the subject and to introduce relevant facts which have practical application for the small-scale miner. The less common types of placers, e.g., Glacial, Aeolian, Bajada and beach placers will not be covered in this article.

Alluvial Placer Gold Deposits

Placer deposits image 2Definition: Alluvial deposits are the most common type of placer gold deposit. This category includes fluxial (river and stream) placers which formed in well-defined channels. It also includes “bench” or terrace deposits. These are older river or streambeds which formed on the elevated side slopes of drainage valleys. Both ancient (paleo placers) and modern deposits are included in this category and have produced significant amounts of gold.

Characteristics: Good sorting of sediment and gold particles by size and weight.

Sediments tend to be well transported, reflecting significant rounding or flattening of individual particles as a function of distance traveled from its source. The source of gold can either originate from a nearby lode deposit, generally leaving the gold’s surface with a rough texture; or the gold can have originated from distant sources, generally leaving it with smooth, flattened particles, flakes or nuggets.

Ancient Fluvial Placer Deposits

Placer deposits image 3Examples: (Ancient) Tertiary-age Ancestral, Yuba and Feather River systems, Sierra Nevada Mountains, California, Ancestral Klamath River system, Weaverville and Hornbrook basins Klamath Mountains, California. There are also widespread occurrences of other ancient gold-bearing channels in other western states in the U.S.

Prospecting Suggestions: Check areas where modem drainages (rivers, creeks, and gullies) have eroded ancient gold-bearing channel deposits. Many of these areas were worked by miners during the 19th Century, but there is still plenty of gold remaining for the modem-day small-scale miner.

For example, check side slopes of ridges which contain the ancient channel deposits, since these are areas that usually could not be exploited by hydraulic or ground-sluicing mine methods, due to lack of adequate water or water pressure. These virgin (unexploited) areas can produce eroded substantial pockets of placer gold.

Hydraulic Mine Pit areas often contain good prospects for small-scale mining. Check the exposed bedrock floor (representing the exhumed channel base) surfaces both for cracks and weathered cemented gravels. Gold may remain in small fractures and cracks in the bedrock. These areas can be particularly fruitful for electronic prospecting.

In addition, gold may be liberated from previously-cemented gravels after the long period of weathering on the pit floor. Check drain tunnels and tailraces that may have been cut into bedrock or the sides of the channel for several reasons: First, drain tunnels were driven through solid bedrock at the floor of a hydraulic pit to drain excess water and tailings from the working face of a mining excavation.

It is estimated that hydraulic mining methods lost between 30% – 50% of the gold that was liberated from the deposit. In addition, many of the drain tunnels were also used as the primary locations for the placement of elongated sluice box recovery systems. Thus, clean-ups were performed inside the tunnels. Although some of the drain tunnels have become choked with debris or collapsed from weathering, many still carry gold-bearing materials through the tunnels.

Testing and sampling of in-situ (in place) Tertiary gravel placers is one very proven method of locating valuable gold deposits for the serious small-scale mining operation today.

Modem Fluvial Placer Deposits

Placer deposits image 4Examples: Rivers and streams of the Sierra Nevada and Klamath Mountain areas in California.

Prospecting Suggestions: Prospect areas which are adjacent to known ancient channels or lode gold deposits, since modern river deposits will usually become more enriched close to those areas.

Gold-bearing stream and river channels must be examined and studied in detail in regard to their history, habit and special characteristics, in order to better-exploit the placers contained in them. Check available geologic maps of a particular river area or observe the different bedrock types which are present. This information will yield valuable clues to the location and manner of gold accumulation in various stretches of river.

Most modern-day small-scale prospectors are using suction dredges, sluicing gear, vack-mining equipment and/or gold pans to prospect for and develop these types of gold deposits.

Sample bench deposits adjacent to the active stream margin. Although these deposits are not as commonly reworked by stream processes, they often contain high concentrations of placer gold. Thick bench deposits containing gold-bearing material derived from hydraulic mines are still present along the margins of rivers and streams in the Sierra Nevada and Klamath Mountain regions of California.

Residual Placer Deposits

Placer deposits image 5Definition: Shallow mineral deposits forming directly from weathering and chemical disintegration of a gold-bearing quality vein near the surface. Residual deposits tend to be rich, but localized in occurrence, i.e., close to the vein or outcrop area. These are also termed “seam diggings” due to their occurrence in weathered gold-bearing quartz stringers contained in weathered schist and slate fracture-zones.

Examples: “Seam digging”s at Georgia Slide, Spanish Dry Diggings and French Hill areas, Georgetown Divide, El’Dorado County, California, Alleghany and Downieville districts, Sierra County, California, Humboldt Mountains area, Humboldt County, Nevada.

Prospecting Suggestions: Search in lode gold districts characterized by small high-grade gold-quartz vein pocket deposits. Focus your search into specific areas which are along the geologic trend of previously-exploited lode pocket deposits. Recent fires, landslides, or disturbance by logging operations are constantly exposing new virgin areas for prospecting.

Modern-day metal detectors may help in the exploration and exploitation of these deposits, due to shallow overburden and erratic distribution of the residual placer nuggets.

Eluvial (hill-slope) Placer Deposits

Placer deposits image 6Definition: Deposits representing the transitional stages between a residual and alluvial placer deposit (deposits which form in route between the lode erosion and drainage system). Residual gold tends to form accumulations in soil or colluvium by “creeping” along with material down a hill-slope.

Examples: Klamath Mountain region, California and Oregon.

Prospecting Suggestions: A metal detector can be the ideal tool for locating these deposits, since gold distribution tends to be spotty or erratic due to a poor degree of sorting and transportation. High-banking equipment can be very productive where an adequate water source is available nearby. Dry-washing equipment can be productive in places where there is no water available for processing. Mechanized earth-moving equipment is sometimes necessary to excavate thick eluvial deposits. In this case, small wash plants are being used to recover the gold.

Recommended Reading

Averill C. v: 1946, Placer Mining for Gold in California: California Div. Mines Bull. 135, 377 p.

Clark, B. 1965, Tertiary Channels: California: Div. Mines and Geology Mineral Inf. Service, Z 18

Clark, B. 1970, Gold Districts of California: California Division of Mines Bull. 193, 186 p.

Haley, C.S., 1923, Gold Placers of California: California Mining Bur. Bull. 92, 167 p. Jenkins, O.P., 1946, Geology of Placer Deposits, in Averill, C. Z Placer Mining for Gold in California: California Div. Mines Bull. 135 p, p. 147-216.

Lindgren, 1911, The Tertiary Gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California: U.S. Geol. Survey Prof. Paper 73, 226 p.

Whitney, J.D., 1880, The Auriferous Gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California: Harvard Coll. Mus. Comp. Zoology Mem. v. 6, no 1, 569p.

 

By Dave McCracken

The water flow should be just enough to keep the concentrating action going behind each riffle, yet not so much that the riffles are being swept clean.

Dave McCracken

 

As a general rule, the optimum slope-setting of a sluice is around one inch of drop per linear foot of box. This can change, depending upon the volume and velocity of water being used, and/or the average shape, size, volume or weight (specific gravity) of material that you are processing.

There is no exact formula for setting the proper water velocity through a sluice box which will work optimally under all conditions for all the different types of riffles being used today. Therefore, rather than give you a formula, I will attempt to give you an understanding of what affects the proper amount of water velocity will cause in a sluice box, and also what the affects are of too much or too little water velocity. In this way, you will be able to act from direct observation to ensure that your, or anyone else’s, sluicing device will be recovering gold to the fullest extent possible.

In setting up a sluice, if feasible, it is desirable to have enough water flow to move the material through the box as fast as you can shovel (or dredge) it in at full production speed.

Most of the riffles being used today are designed so that a concentrating-action takes place behind the riffles. By increasing or decreasing the amount of water velocity over a set of riffles, the amount of water-action behind each riffle is also increased or decreased—which has an effect on the amount of concentrating action taking place. Water velocity can be increased by either putting more water through the sluice box or by moving the same amount through faster. Optimally, the water flow is just enough to keep the concentrating action going behind each riffle, yet not so much that the riffles are being swept clean (called “boiling”) of their concentrated material.

How much water velocity is directed over the box directly affects how much material will stay behind the riffles. When the correct amount of water force is being put through a sluice, its riffles will run about half full of material, and the material can be seen to be dancing and vibrating behind the riffles (concentrating) when the water is flowing.

If too little flow of water is directed through a sluice box, not enough water force can get into the riffles and they will “pack up” with material. In this case, little or no concentrating-action will take place and gold recovery will be poor. When this happens, little or no visible vibrating action behind the riffles will be seen and material will not be moving through the box fast enough to allow you to feed the sluice at production speed without loading up the entire box.

Too much force of water through a sluice box will put too much turbulence behind the riffles. This will cause some of the heavier concentrated material to be swept out of the box.

When this happens, gold recovery will also likely suffer, because the areas located behind the riffles are not calm enough to allow some percentage of the finer pieces of gold to settle. You will notice in this case that the dancing action is occurring behind each riffle, but less material will collect behind the riffles because of the increased amount of turbulence there. When you have too much water velocity, as material is shoveled into the box, it passes through very quickly and has little time to make contact with the riffles.

All the above points remain true when adjusting to get the proper amount of water flowing over an expanded metal-riffle system. However, when using such a system, it is necessary to remember that the riffles are very short. So it does not take very much water velocity to make them concentrate properly.

This means that the size of riffles affect how much water velocity is optimum through the box, how much classification of material is necessary and how fine in size your effective gold recovery will be.

The correct amount of flow is usually found to be just enough to move the material over the box to keep up with your feed of material. Since gold is around 6 times heavier than the average material that will pass through a sluice, there is usually some margin for error if velocity is a little faster than necessary. But a faster flow (than necessary) will affect how fine in size your effective gold recovery will be, if fine gold is present.

Once you have your sluice box set up the way you think it ought to be, it is a good idea to run a sizable portion of gold-bearing material through the box and then pan some samples of the tailings. If you do not find any gold in the tailings, you are set up properly. If you are finding gold in the tailings, some changes are in order. Another test is to mix some pieces of lead in with some material, run it through the sluice, and see where the lead stops.

Sluice boxes process material best when receiving it from a steady feed. Too much material dumped at once into a sluice box has a tendency to overload the riffles and choke off the concentrating-action behind the riffles. This will cause gold to wash right through the sluice box as if there were no riffles present at all.

On the other hand, it is not good practice to run volume-amounts of water flow over a sluice box without some material being constantly or regularly fed through. This is because the scouring-action from the water flows will continue to further-concentrate materials trapped behind the riffles, causing heavier materials to be washed out of the box. A sluice box operated for extended periods with no new material being fed to it has an increased chance of losing some of its fine gold values. How much gold loss will depend on a multitude of factors, such as the type of riffle design, how much water flow, the type and weight of concentrates and the size and purity (specific gravity) of the gold.

So if you will not feed more material into your sluice for a while, it is a good idea to cut your water flow back to reduce turbulence behind the riffles until you are ready to feed again.

Even when a sluice box is set properly, occasional larger-sized stones or rocks can become lodged within the riffles. These should be picked or flipped out of the riffles with minimum disturbance to the remaining portion of the sluice.

On most suction dredges, the volume of water being moved through the sluice continues at the same steady flow during production speed. So adjusting the water velocity to set up the dredge right is accomplished by changing the slope of the sluice box itself—which will speed up or slow down the flow of water over the box. Then, once you are dredging, if you will stop feeding streambed material into the suction nozzle for any period of time, it is wise to block the nozzle with a larger-sized cobble to slow the water flow through your sluice box.

When placing a sluice box within a stream or creek for its water flow, the water velocity can be adjusted by either changing the slope of the box, by varying the volume of water being directed through the box, or by placing the sluice at different sites in the stream or creek where the water is moving at different depths and speeds. Getting the right flow of water to pass through a sluice box out in the field is not difficult. But it is sometimes necessary to try different ideas until you find what works best in each situation. For example, in a location where the water is moving slowly, you might be able to direct more water through the sluice and gain the amount of water velocity that you need. In a stream where the flow is moving more swiftly, the water velocity through your box can usually be adjusted by changing the volume of water directed into it, and/or by varying its downward slope.

Usually, you will have little trouble arriving at the correct velocity through your sluice box when placing it in a fast stream of water. You can use river rocks to make a foundation within the stream so your box can sit level from side to side. By allowing different amounts of water volume through the box, and by changing its downward slope, you can work out a combination that does the job. It is good to have a length of nylon cord along with you for securing the sluice box to a rock or some other object upstream. This prevents the box from being moved off its foundation by the force of water. Sometimes it is necessary to pile a rock or two on top of the box to hold it in place. This is especially true when you are using a sluice made out of wood. You can shovel gravel into the box while trying the different combinations to see what effects the changes have on water velocity.

In a situation where you must set your sluice into slower water, you will find it is generally more difficult to get the flow you need, because you have to create more water velocity than is presently there.

If the flow of the stream itself is not enough to move material through your box, you will sometimes find that changing the slope of the box within the stream has little or no effect on speeding up the flow through the sluice. In this situation, there are several things that might be done to channel enough flow through your box so that you can run material through at production speed. Sometimes the flow of water within the overall stream itself is enough, so that by setting up a “water director” in the stream, you can move enough water through the box to give you the desired result. A water deflector, or barrier, like this can sometimes be built by throwing river rocks out into the stream to make more water flow into and through the sluice.

In this situation, there are several things that might be done to channel enough flow through your box so that you can run material through at production speed. Sometimes the flow of water within the overall stream itself is enough, so that by setting up a “water director” in the stream, you can move enough water through the box to give you the desired result. A water deflector, or barrier, like this can sometimes be built by throwing river rocks out into the stream to make more water flow into and through the sluice.

Sometimes you can get the water velocity needed by arranging a small water-elevator across the waterway. By doing so, and by placing your sluice where the moving water spills over the top, you might create more than enough water flow through the box to meet your needs. It really does not take very much volume of water through a medium-sized sluice box to get the right amount of velocity, if the water is moved through the box at speed. In the case of a short elevator (dam), the water level might only need to be raised up slightly to increase the downward slope of the box enough to create the needed water velocity. How high the elevator needs to be depends mostly upon how much water is flowing within the stream or creek.

A sheet or two of thin plastic, or a plastic tarp, or some old rice bags, can come in handy when you are arranging an elevator or water director within a stream. Such material helps prevent the water from pouring through the holes in your man-made barriers.

A water director or elevator can most often be used with good result wherever the water in a stream or creek is moving and is shallow enough that the barriers can be built easily.

If the water at the work site is moving too slowly, or for some reason a water director or elevator will not work in a particular location, it will be necessary to either set up your sluice in a different location where the water is moving faster, or use a motorized pump to feed water into your sluice. Or, in some situations, it is possible to siphon water into your box from a higher point upstream. Siphoning can be done effectively with the use of reinforced garden hose(es), other types of heavy-walled water hose or PVC.

 

 
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By Dave McCracken

Any place along the gold path where there is protection from the main flow of water is a good location to sample for gold.

Dave Mack

 

Thorndike/Barnhart’s Advanced Dictionary defines “placer” as “A deposit of sand, gravel or earth in the bed of a stream containing particles of gold or other valuable mineral.” The word “geology” in the same dictionary is defined as “The features of the earth’s crust in a place or region, rocks or rock formations of a particular area.” So in putting these two words together, we have “placer geology” as the nature and features of the formation of deposits of gold and other valuable minerals within a streambed

The main factor causing gold to become deposited in the locations where it does is its superior weight over the majority of other materials which end up in a streambed. By superior weight, I mean that a piece of gold will be heavier than most any other material which displaces an equal amount of space or volume. For example, a large boulder will weigh more than a half-ounce gold nugget; but if you chip off a piece of the boulder which displaces the exact same volume or mass as the gold nugget, the nugget will weigh about six times more than the chip of rock.

As gold is eroded from its original lode, gravity, wind, water and the other forces of nature may move it away and downwards until it eventually arrives in a streambed.

Gold erodes from its natural lode and eventually 
is washed into an active waterway.

There are several different types of gold deposits that a prospector should know about, because they have different characteristics and are dealt with in different ways. They are as follows:

RESIDUAL DEPOSIT: A “residual deposit” consists of those pieces of the lode which have broken away from the outcropping of the vein due to chemical and physical weathering, but have not yet been moved or washed away from the near vicinity of the lode. A residual deposit usually lies directly at the site of its lode.

ELUVIAL DEPOSIT: An “eluvial deposit” is composed of those pieces of ore and free gold which have eroded from a lode and have been moved away by the forces of nature, but have not yet been washed into a streambed. The fragments of an eluvial deposit are often spread out thinly down along the mountainside below the original lode. Usually, the various forces of nature cause an eluvial deposit to spread out more as its segments are washed further away from the lode deposit. Individual pieces of an eluvial deposit are popularly known as “float.”

An eluvial deposit contains those pieces of ore that have been swept
away from the lode which have not yet been deposited by running water.

BENCH DEPOSIT: (Also “terrace deposit”) Once gold reaches a streambed, it will be deposited in common ways by the effects of running water. Most of the remainder of this article will cover these ways. During an extended period of time, a stream of water will to cut deeper into the earth. This leaves portions of the older sections of streambed high and dry. Old streambeds which now rest above the present streams of water are referred to as “benches.” Accumulations of gold and other valuable minerals contained in an old, high streambed are called “bench deposits.”

An eluvial deposit might be swept down to rest on top of an old streambed (bench), but it will still remain as an eluvial deposit until it is washed into a stream of water. A bench placer deposit contains the gold deposited within that streambed before it was left high and dry.

Many benches are lying close to the present streams of water, and are actually the remains of the present stream as it ran a very long time ago.

Some dry streambeds (benches) are situated far away from any present stream of water. These are sometimes the remains of ancient rivers which ran before the present river systems were formed. Ancient stream benches are sometimes on top of mountains, far out into the deserts, or can be found near some of today’s streams and rivers. Ancient streambeds, wherever found, can contain rich deposits of gold.

Most surface placer gold mining operations today direct their activities at bench deposits. The reason for this is that the presence of an old streambed is evidence that it has never been mined before. Any gold once deposited there will still be in place.

STREAM PLACER: In order to discuss what happens to gold when it enters a stream of water, it is first necessary to understand the two terms: “bedrock” and “sediments.” Many millions of years ago, when the outer perimeter of the earth cooled, it hardened into a solid rock surface–called “bedrock” (or “country rock” when discussing the subject of lodes). All of the loose dirt, rocks, sand, gravel and boulders which lie on top of the earth’s outer hardrock surface (bedrock) are called “sediments.” In some areas, the sedimentary material lays hundreds of feet deep. In other areas, especially in mountainous country and at the seashore, the earth’s outer crust (bedrock) is completely exposed. Bedrock can usually be observed by driving down any highway and looking at where cuts have been made through the hard rock in order to make the highway straight and level.

Streambeds are composed of rocks, sand, gravel, clay and boulders (sediments) and always form on top of the bedrock foundation (although they can be later covered up by volcanic activity). Bedrock and country rock are the same thing.

Streambeds are composed of sediments which lie on top of bedrock.

The following video segment will allow you a visual demonstration of these very important points:

A large storm in mountainous country will cause the streams and rivers within the area to run deeper and faster than they normally do. This additional volume of water increases the amount of force and turbulence that flows over the top of the streambeds lying at the bottom of these waterways. Sometimes, in a very large storm, the increased force of water is enough to sweep the entire streambed down the surface of its underlying bedrock foundation. It is this action which causes a streambed to cut deeper into the earth over an extended period of time. A storm of this magnitude can also erode a significant amount of new gold into the streambeds where it will mix with the other materials.

Gold, being heavier than the other materials which are being swept downstream during a large storm, will work its way quickly to the bottom of these materials. The reason for this is that gold has a much higher specific gravity than the other streambed materials and so will exert a downward force against them. As the streambed is being vibrated and tossed around and pushed along by the tremendous torrent of water caused by the storm, gold will penetrate downward through the other materials until it reaches something which will stop its descent-like bedrock. This very important principle is demonstrated by the following video segment:

With the exception of the finer-sized pieces, it takes a lot of force to move gold. Since gold is about 6 times heavier than the average of other materials which commonly make up a streambed, it takes a lot more force to move gold down along the bedrock than it does to move the other streambed materials.

So there is the possibility of having enough force in a section of river because of a storm to sweep part of the streambed away, yet perhaps not enough force to move much of the gold lying on bedrock.

When there is enough force to move gold along the bottom of a riverbed, that gold can then become deposited in a new location wherever the force of the flow is lessened at the time of the storm.

Bedrock irregularities at the bottom of a streambed play a large role in determining where gold will become trapped. A crack or crevice along the bedrock surface is one good example of a bedrock gold trap.

Streambeds are composed of sediments which lie on top of bedrock.

Many bedrock gold traps are situated so that the main force of water, being enough to move gold, will sweep the traps clean of lighter streambed materials. This leaves a hole for the gold to drop into and become shielded from the main force of water and material which is moving across the bedrock. And there the gold will remain until some fluke of turbulence boils it out of the hole and back into the main force of water again, where it can then become trapped in some other such hole, and so on. The following video segment further demonstrates these important points:

Some types of bedrock are very rough and irregular, which allows for many, many gold traps along its surface.

Some bedrock surfaces are very rough and
irregular–which allows for many gold traps.

How well a crevice will trap gold depends greatly upon the shape of the crevice itself and its direction in relation to the flow of water during a flood storm. Crevices extending out horizontally into a riverbed can be very effective gold-catchers, because the force of water can be enough to keep the upper part of the crevice clean of material, yet the shape and depth of the crevice may prevent gold from being swept or boiled out once it is inside.

Crevices running lengthwise with the flow of the stream or in a diagonal direction across the bed can be good gold traps or poor ones, depending upon the shape of the crevice and the set of circumstances covering each separate situation. For the most part, water force can get into a lengthwise crevice and prevent a great deal of gold from being trapped inside. However, this mostly depends upon the characteristics of the bedrock surface, and there are so many possible variables that it is no use trying to cover them all-such as the possibility of a large rock becoming lodged inside a lengthwise crevice, making its entire length a gold trap of bonanza dimensions. There is really no need to say much more about lengthwise-type crevices. Because if you are mining along and uncover one, you are going to clean it out to see what lies inside, anyway.

Potholes in the bedrock foundation of a streambed have a tendency to trap gold very well. These usually occur where the bedrock surface is deteriorating and some portions are coming apart faster than others, leaving holes which gold can drop into and thereafter be protected from the main force of water.

Bedrock dikes (upcroppings of a harder type of bedrock) protruding up through the floor of a streambed can make excellent gold traps in different ways, depending upon the direction of the dike. For example, if a dike protrudes up through the floor of a streambed and is slanted in a downstream direction, gold will usually become trapped behind the dike where it becomes shielded from the main force of the flow. A dike slanting in an upstream direction is more likely to trap gold in a little pocket just up in front.

Hairline cracks in the bedrock surface of a streambed often contain surprising amounts of gold. Sometimes you can take out pieces of gold that seem to be too large for the cracks that you find them inside of, and it leaves you wondering how they got there. Once in a while, a hairline crack will open up into a space which holds a nice little pocket of gold.

Hairline cracks can hold plenty of gold, and sometimes open up into small pockets.

How smooth the bedrock surface is has a great deal to do with how well its various irregularities will catch gold. Some types of bedrock, like granite for example, are extremely hard and tend to become pounded into a smooth and polished surface. Polished bedrock surfaces like this generally do not trap particles of gold nearly as well as the rough types of bedrock surfaces do. Also, polished bedrock, which sometimes contains large, deep “boil holes” (holes which have been bored into the bedrock by enormous amounts of water turbulence), is often an indication of too much turbulent water force to allow very much gold to settle there during flood storms.

Rougher types of bedrock, often being full of both large and small irregularities, have the kind of surface where many paying placer deposits are found. This kind of bedrock can be very hard and still maintain its roughness. Or it can be semi-decomposed. Either way, it can trap gold very well.

Rough bedrock surfaces tend to trap gold very well.

Basically, anywhere rough bedrock is situated so that its irregularities can slacken the force of water, in a location where gold will travel, is a likely place to find gold trapped.

Obstructions in a streambed can also cause the flow of water to slow down and can be the cause of a gold deposit, sometimes in front and sometimes to the rear of the obstruction. An outcropping of bedrock jutting out into a stream or river from one side can trap gold in various ways, depending upon the shape of the outcropping and the direction it protrudes into the stream. An outcropping extending out into the river in an upstream direction is most likely to trap gold in front of the outcropping where there is a lull in the water force. A gold deposit is more likely to be found on the downstream side of an outcropping which juts out into the river in a downstream direction, because that is where the force of the flow lets up.

LARGER GOLD TRAPS: PAY-STREAK AREAS

One of the most common locations within a stream or river to find a gold deposit is where the bedrock drops off suddenly to form a deep-water pool. Any place where a fixed volume of water suddenly flows into a much larger volume of water is a place where the flow may slow down. Wherever the flow of water in a streambed slows down during a major flood storm is a good place for gold to be dropped. And so it is not uncommon to find a sizable gold deposit in a streambed where there is a sudden drop-off into deeper water.

Any sudden drop-off into a deeper and larger volume of water is a likely spot to look for a sizable deposit of gold.

A waterfall is the extreme example of a sudden bedrock drop-off and can sometimes have a large deposit of gold at its base-but not always. Sometimes the water will plunge down into the hole of the falls and create so much turbulence that gold dropped into the hole during a storm can become ground up or boiled out. This is also potentially true of any other lesser sudden drop-off locations inside of a waterway.

On the other hand, sometimes large boulders can become trapped at the base of a falls and protect the gold from becoming ground up or boiled out by the turbulence. In this case the falls can become a bonanza.

In some waterfalls (or lesser sudden drop-off locations) the gold that has been boiled out will drop just outside of the hole, where the force of water has not yet had enough runway to pick up speed again-at least not enough to carry off much of the gold which arrives there.

Waterfalls are usually the territory of the suction dredger, because this type of gold trap usually deposits the gold underwater. Yet, this is not always the case. Sometimes during the low water periods of the year, some of the area below a falls can be exposed. There might be only a small amount of streambed to move in order to reach bedrock-where most of the gold is likely to be. The only dependable way to determine if gold will be present below a falls, or any other sudden drop-off location in a waterway, is to sample around and find out. Usually this is rather easy (unless you run into huge boulders); because if the area has been boiled out and swept clean of gold, often the bedrock will be exposed or have a layer of light sand and gravel on top. Again, this is not always true. Each falls has its own individual set of circumstances.

Another common location where a sizable gold deposit might be found is where the layout of the countryside causes the stream to run downhill at a rather steep grade for some distance and then suddenly it levels off. It is just below where the slope of the streambed levels off that the water flow will suddenly slow down during a major flood storm. This is where you are likely to find a concentration of gold. Areas like this are known for their very large deposits (pay-streaks).

The area just below where a streambed’s slope lessens often contains a good-sized gold deposit.

Boulders are another type of obstruction which can be in a riverbed and cause gold to drop out of a fast flow of water. Boulders are similar to gold in that the larger they are, the more water force it takes to move them. Sometimes during a storm, the force of water can pick up enough to sweep large amounts of streambed material and gold down across the bedrock. When this happens, the force may or may not be great enough to move the large boulders. A large boulder which is at rest in a stream, while a torrent of water and material is being swept past it during a large storm, will slow down the flow of the stream just in front, below and somewhere behind the boulder. This being the case, if the storm’s torrent happens to sweep gold near the boulder, some of the gold may concentrate where the slackening of current is at the time of the storm.

A boulder at rest in a streambed during a large storm might trap gold wherever it slows down the water force.

One thing to know about boulders is that they do not always have gold trapped around them. Whether or not a specific boulder will have a deposit of gold along with it depends greatly upon whether or not that boulder is in the direct path the gold took when it traveled through that particular section of streambed during earlier major flood storm periods.

THE PATH THAT GOLD FOLLOWS

Because of its weight, gold tends to travel down along a streambed taking the path of least resistance. For the most part, this seems to be the shortest route possible between major bends in the stream.

Gold tends to follow the shortest route possible between any major changes in the direction of the stream or river.

Take note that the route the gold is taking rounds each curve towards the inside of the bends in the river. While this might not be the route gold always takes in a streambed, it is true that when it comes to curves, the majority of gold deposits are found towards the inside of bends. In comparison, very few are found towards the outside. Centrifugal force causes a much greater energy of flow to the outside of the bend. This creates less force towards the inside, which allows for gold to drop there.

 

It is important for you as a prospector to grasp the concept that under most conditions, gold tends to travel the shortest distance between the bends of a stream or river, and it also seems to deposit along the inside of the bends. Your best bet in prospecting is to direct your sampling activities towards areas which lie in the path that gold would most likely follow in its route downstream within the waterway. This requires an understanding of what effects the various changes in bedrock and the numerous obstructions will have on changing and directing the path of gold as it is pushed downstream during extreme high water periods. For example, if you are sampling for concentrations of gold around and behind boulders, you are better off to begin with the boulders lying in the path that gold would most likely take. This is likely to be more productive than just sampling boulders randomly in the streambed, no matter where they are located.

WHERE THE STREAMBED WIDENS

Another situation within a stream or river where there is often a sizable concentration of gold (pay-streak) is where the stream runs narrow or at a certain general width for some distance and then suddenly opens up into a wider portion of streambed. Where the streambed widens, the water flow will generally slow down, because the streambed allows for a larger volume of water in such a location-especially during extreme high water periods. Where water force slows down is a likely place for gold to drop.

Anywhere that a streambed suddenly widens enough to slow the force of the
stream during high water periods is a likely place to find a deposit of gold.

Notice that some boulders will also drop where the water force is suddenly slowed down. Boulders are similar to gold in that it takes a tremendous amount of force to push them along. Wherever that force lets up enough, the boulders will drop. So boulders are often found in the same areas where large amounts of gold are deposited. But gold is not always found where boulders are dropped. This is because there are so many boulders within the waterway, and the majority of them probably do not continuously follow the same route that gold generally takes. Nevertheless, it is well to take note that those places where boulders do get hung up, which are on the same route that gold follows down the waterway, are generally good places to direct some of your sampling activities.

ANCIENT RIVERS

About two million years ago, towards the end of the Tertiary geological time period, the mountain systems in the western United States underwent a tremendous amount of faulting and twisting, changing the character of the mountains into much of how they look today. It was during the same period when the present drainage system of streams, creeks and rivers were formed, which runs pretty-much in a westerly direction.

Prior to that, there was a vastly different river system, which generally ran in a southerly direction. These were the old streambeds which ran throughout much of the Tertiary geologic time period, and so are called “tertiary channels” or“ancient rivers.” The ancient rivers ran for millions of years, during which time an enormous amount of erosion took place, washing very substantial amounts of gold into the rivers from the exposed rich lode deposits.

The major changes occurring towards the end of that period, which rearranged the mountains and formed the present drainage systems, left portions of the ancient channels strewn about. Some portions were placed on top of the present mountains. Some were left out in the desert areas. And some portions were left close to, and crossed by, the present drainage system.

Some geologists have argued that most of the gold in today’s river systems is not gold that has eroded more recently from lode deposits, but gold that was eroded out of the old ancient riverbeds where they have been crossed by the present river systems.

The ancient channels, where they have been discovered and mined, have often proven to be extremely rich in gold deposits. In fact, many of the richest bonanzas that have been found in today’s river systems have been discovered directly downstream from where they have crossed the ancient streambed gravels. Other areas which have proven to be very rich in today’s river systems have been found close to the old channels, where a few million years of erosion have caused some of the channel and its gold to be eroded into the present streambeds.

Ancient channels (benches) are well known for their very rich bottom stratum. This stratum is sometimes of a deep blue color; and indeed the rich blue color, when encountered, is one of the most certain indicators that ancient gravels are present. This bottom stratum of the ancient gravels was referred to by the old-timers as the “blue lead”, probably because they followed its path all over the west wherever it led them.

Ancient blue gravels usually oxidize and turn a rusty reddish brown color after being dug up and exposed to the atmosphere. They can be very hard and compacted, but are not always that way.

Running into blue gravel at the bottom of a streambed does not necessarily mean that you have located an ancient channel. But it is possible that you have located some ancient gravel (deposited there from somewhere else) which might have a rich pay-streak associated with them.

Most of the high benches that you will find up alongside today’s rivers and streams, and sometimes a fair distance away, but which travel generally in the same direction, are not Tertiary channels. They are more likely the earlier remnants of the present rivers and streams. These old streambeds are referred to by geologists as “Pleistocene channels.” They were formed and ran during the time period between 10,000 years ago and about a million and a half years ago — which was the earlier part of the Quaternary Period, known as the Pleistocene epoch. Some high benches that rest alongside the present streams and rivers were formed since the passing of the Pleistocene epoch. These are referred to as “Recent benches,” having been formed during the “Recent epoch” (present epoch).

Some of these benches, either Pleistocene or Recent, are quite extensive in size. Dry streambeds are scattered about all over gold country, some which have already been mined, but many are still untouched.

Usually, all that is left of a bench after it has been mined are rock piles. Notice in the picture that part of the non-mined streambed is in the background, behind the trees.

Usually all that is left of a high bench after it has been mined are piles of the larger-sized streambed rocks and boulders.

Most of the hydraulic mining operations which operated during the early to mid-1900’s were directed at high benches.“Hydraulic mining” was done by directing a large volume of water, under great pressure, at a streambed to erode its gravels out of the bed and through recovery systems, where the gold would be trapped.

A hydraulic mining operation. Photo courtesy of Siskiyou County Historical Museum.

So some bench gravels have been mined, but many of them still remain intact. While the Pleistocene and Recent benches are generally not as rich in gold content as were the Tertiary’s, it still remains true that an enormous amount of gold washed down into these old channels when they were active. They are pretty darn rich in some areas, and pay rather consistently in others. Also, any and all gold that has ever washed down into an old bench which has yet to be mined still remains there today.

FLOOD GOLD

A large percentage of the gold found in today’s creeks and rivers has been washed down into them out of the higher bench deposits by the erosive effects of storms and time. A certain amount of gold is being washed downstream in any river located in gold country at all times, even if only microscopic in size.

The larger a piece of gold is, the more water force that it takes to move it downstream in a riverbed. The amount of water force it takes to move a significant amount of gold in a riverbed is usually enough force to also move the streambed, too. This would allow the gold to work its way quickly down to the bedrock, where it can become trapped in the various irregularities.

Some streambeds contain a high mineral content and grow very hard after being in place for an extended period of time.

Sometimes a storm will have enough force to move large amounts of gold, but will only move a portion of the entire streambed, leaving a lower stratum in place in some locations. When this happens, the gold moving along at the bottom of the flooding layer can become trapped by the irregularities of the unmoving (“false bedrock”) streambed layer lying underneath. The rocks in a stable lower stratum can act as natural gold traps.

Flood gold is that gold which rests inside and at the bottom of a flooding layer.

Different streambed layers, caused by major flood storms, are referred to as “flood layers.” The flood layers within a streambed, if present, are easily distinguished because they are usually of a different color, consistency and hardness from the other layers of material within the streambed. That gold found at the bottom of or throughout a flood layer is often referred to as “flood gold.” Sometimes, the bottom of a flood layer will contain substantially more gold than is present on bedrock. Sometimes, when more than one flood layer is present in a streambed, there will be more than one layer of flood gold present, too.

The larger that a piece of gold is, the faster it will work its way down towards the bottom of a layer of material as it is being washed downstream during a storm. Finer-sized pieces of gold might not work their way down through a flood layer at all, but might remain disbursed up in the material.

So you can run across a flood layer which has a line of the heavier pieces of gold along its bottom edge, or a flood layer which contains a large amount of fine gold dispersed throughout the entire layer. You can also run across a flood layer which contains a lot of fine gold dispersed throughout, in addition to a line of heavier gold along the bottom edge.

Not all flood layers contain gold in paying quantities for a small-scale mining program. But in gold country, all flood layers do seem to contain gold in some quantity, even if only microscopic in size.

GRAVEL BAR PLACERS

Gravel bars located in streambeds flowing through gold country, especially the ones located towards the inside of bends, tend to collect a lot of flood gold, and sometimes in paying quantities even for the smaller-sized operations. The flood gold in bar placers is sometimes consistently distributed throughout the entire gravel bar. Sometimes the lower-end of a gravel bar is not as rich as the head of the bar, but the gold there can be more uniformly dispersed throughout the material.

FALSE BEDROCK

Once in a while a prospector will uncover an extremely hard layer of streambed material located just above the bedrock and mistake the layer for bedrock because of its hardness. A hard layer is often referred to as “false bedrock.” Such a layer can consist of streambed material, or of volcanic flows which have laid down and hardened on top of bedrock, or it can consist of any kind of mineral deposit which has hardened over time on top of the true bedrock.

There can be a good-paying gold deposit underneath a false bedrock layer. But when there is, it is usually rather difficult to get at.

Actually, for the purpose of sampling, the top of every different storm layer within a streambed should be considered a“false bedrock” and can be a surface-area for gold to become trapped out of the flood layer which laid down on top.

 

By George Mullen

 

Desert tortoiseMost traditional methods for recovering gold from gravels require an ample supply of water. However, an old prospector’s adage has it that gold is where you find it. In the southwest, the “where” is all too frequently situated miles from even a trickle of water. Dry-washing of gold-bearing soil or gravel provides an effective solution to this dilemma.

Click here for a more thorough explanation of dry-washing techniques.

The Spaniards used a scheme similar to the winnowing of wheat from chaff and straw. Two men would grab the comers of a blanket, upon which a small quantity of classified gold-bearing material had been placed, and they repeatedly would toss it upward into the air. The wind would blow away the lighter fraction, and any gold and black sands, which are heavier, would fall back onto the blanket. Wool blankets worked best, because the static electrical charge generated by the wool tended to attract fine-sized gold on the blanket’s surface.

The modem prospector uses an efficient tool called a dry-washer to extract the ever-elusive gold particles from screened gravels or other material. Dry-washers can range in size and complexity from hand-shovel-fed models, to large machines serviced by wheeled or tracked front-end loaders.

All dry-washing machines require a low-pressure, high-volume source of air. At the low-cost end, this can be provided by a bellows which is linked to a hand-operated crank or motor-driven fly wheel. At the higher-cost end, the air source is typically provided by a gasoline engine-driven blower. The remaining components of a dry-washer combine to construct a sloped classification screen (or “grizzly”), which routes fine-sized material to a pneumatic sluice box, where a mechanically-modulated flow of air accomplishes the separation of gold from the lighter-weight material which contains no value.

Dry-washing for goldA dry-washer for small-scale prospecting might consist of a rectangular screen with 1/2 inch openings over a sloped trough. The screened material would pass from the lower-end of the trough to the head-end of a sloped riffle tray consisting of cotton fabric stretched over an inner frame. The tray includes sides to contain the flowing material, and its surface is interrupted by five crosswise riffles. Under the tray is a hollow box and the mechanism which modulates air flow through the tray at a rate of about 200 puffs per minute. The rate of air flow is designed to be sufficient to lift lighter material over the riffles, while the gold remains trapped. When everything is working right, the flow of material through the riffle tray resembles water flowing through a conventional sluice box.

My dry-washer was built from a plan published by Carl Fischer. It is mostly constructed of wood and is extremely portable. A small gasoline engine drives the air box via a belt and pulley speed reducer, producing the required 200 puffs of air per minute. The end result is an efficient separator which saves even the finest particles of gold. I have checked the tailings on numerous occasions and have yet to find any significant amount gold in them.

Prospecting for gold in the desert uses techniques similar to those that are used to locate placer gold on flowing streams or within old stream channels. You want to sample dry-washes on pediments to mountains, feeder-canyons in the mountains and ancient streambeds.

Another old prospector’s adage suggests that one should look for gold where it has been found before. This is still sound advice!

Very fine gold is abundant at many sites in the northwest, and the usual methods of final gold recovery do not always work very well. I have found that the screening and drying of dredge or high-banker concentrates, and then running them through my dry-washer, really works well. I use a metal detector to monitor both the feed and the tailings.

After processing pay-dirt material for about an hour, I suggest it is usually a good idea to clean-up the riffles to check your recovery. I use a plastic gold pan and small wash tub for the final clean-up and have operated all day on just a few gallons of water.

My wife, some friends and I operate suction dredges and high-bankers on the extensive New 49’er properties near Happy Camp, California during the summer months, where there is always an abundance of water. Our dry-washer allows us to remain active during the winter, usually around Quartzsite, Arizona. These gold prospecting and mining activities provide enjoyable activity, along with an extra source of income when we need it.

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