nero_design
New member
[size=small]My prospecting corner at home. Helps me keep my equipment & maps together.[/size]
My wife and I headed out across the mountains for what will be my last trip to the gold fields in a little while. It's still summer here in Australia and I'm afraid that the flies and heat are making it a miserable experience no matter what precautions and supplies we bring with us. We stayed at a friend's house for a couple of days whilst out there although this meant leaving the area I was fossicking on each afternoon and that in turn meant a bit of lost time detecting as well. The first thing I wanted to do was dig out a target signal which peaked my curiosity on one of my last trips.
[size=small]The gold bearing hills which continue to fascinate me as I pass through them on my drive to - where I'm permitted to fossick. These ones (in the photograph) are unfortunately on private leases.[/size]
On the way to the region we wished to explore, Rena spotted a herd (flock?) of Emu which I had never seen before in the wild. The magnificent but hopelessly stupid birds stood as tall as the cows but ignored us in order to stay in the shade of the eucalyptus trees. When I see them at wildlife parks, it amuses me to "accidentally" drop the feeding seed or popcorn onto the heads of unruly children - who are then rather brutally pecked by the huge birds.
[size=small]Emu in the wild. There were seven in their group that I could see. Their mouths are open to regulate their temperature in the sweltering heat. They stand roughly about 6 feet tall. They do not taste like chicken... they're a little more gamey[/size]
When we arrived at our fossicking location, we made a bee-line for the source of the previous signal we'd detected last time we were there. I immediately began to dig, aided with the benefit of a decent shovel. After a depth of over a meter, I struck some quartz stones but nothing was revealed. The X-Terra 70 signal was still visible and strong but only in Prospector mode. In Relic Mode, there was nothing at all. With the hole exceeding a meter straight down, I was stumped because the hole had now exceeded the scanning depth of the X-70 several times over in such soil. I filled in the hole but remain puzzled over the sharp signal that was never revealed. There was a pocket of rusty colored ore at the base of the hole which revealed nothing when panned.
[size=small]The hole I dug - trying to find the source of a strong signal visible on my last trip.[/size]
[size=small]This is a 3D render that I made to better show the creek bed and scale involved.[/size]
[size=small]The region as it appeared back in the 1800's ... I think I found this horse's shoes over a number of visits with the X-70. All five of them. [/size]
[size=small]The very same road today in 2008 - minus a few buildings.[/size]
The following day, stopped in at the local cafe for brunch and then made my way to an area of Crown Land which was once the source of one of the most intensive digs in Australian history. Around me, the soil was rich and red from the ironstone & heavy minerals but the heat was debilitating and I felt ill and grew dizzy within half an hour at the temperature rose above 40 degrees. I had brought two-way radios with me this time and my wife and I would arrange to meet to rehydrate every 40 minutes or so. I had a few faint signals but dug nothing of interest. The few sharp signals were a 5c coin and a 30-30 bullet which was lying in the dirt about 4 inches down. The soil was like concrete and even the dirt required heavy swings with the pick axe to break the surface. I found a tiny scorpion when I rolled over a rock but it scuttled away and I was too exhausted to try to catch it this time for the camera. Mouse Spider holes were everywhere and I needed to be careful where I dug. Not sure if anyone remembers from my last trip here but the Mouse Spider is a potentially deadly relative of the Funnel Web Spider. No recorded fatalities but the venom is more potent. The two are almost indistinguishable side by side if you catch them. I started to dig one out for the camera before my wife reminded me that this was not why we were there.
[size=small]Mouse Spider burrows were everywhere. Spider is the size of a medium sized Tarantula. Caught one last trip. [/size]
The temperature melted the ice in my cooler as it continued to rise and before long, the frozen bottles of soda I'd bought with me had defrosted and were becoming warm - so we stuck with the rather warm drinking water. The many tons of gold found here in the 1800's triggered Australia's first Gold Rush and locals had warned me that the Chinese had arrived in the 1870s when the Irish settlers moved on elsewhere and then systematically removed and washed the top four feet of topsoil from every square mile as far as the eye could see. Perhaps this is why I couldn't find any gold there?
[size=small]Rena relaxing by the waterhole as I panned the soil I'd sampled earlier. [/size]
[size=small]Some of the targets I dug in the area included a 30-30 bullet, an Australian 5c coin, a piece of an 1800s cooking pot and a puddler's horseshoe from last century. Note the iron ore and magnetic soil sticking to my magnet. The glassy rock is probably a sapphire which occurs in abundance in that region. [/size]
We found a body of water but couldn't drink from it due to cyanide leeching methods used to extract gold in the past being present. Plenty of animal skulls around made this obvious. But I had been sampling soils and brought them to the water hole to pan for gold particles. An hour or more later and I realized this was proving to be as fruitless at the detecting. Sitting and panning was better than walking and digging yet when I sat, the large ants would bite at my shoes and jeans. I had tried digging smaller, fainter signals when the X-70 wavered over them - as a result of the advice here on the Forum... but found nothing. The signals would sometimes dissipate as I dug so I deduced that iron ore and ironstone was responsible. For once, the flies were not as bad as the last few visits I'd paid here in the past. I'd brought with me a small 2 gram gold nugget to test the metal detector with and as soon as it went under a few inches of soil, the X-70 would just barely detect the nugget with a slight raise in pitch. Even after Ground Balancing and Noise Canceling to compensate for any radio signal interference. This made me wary of missing targets with the DD HF Elliptical in the highly mineralized soil but there was little I could do other than try to ID the target in Relic Mode when I hit a signal. Jumping numbers usually meant a soda can, a bottle top or even a horseshoe. A stable target turned out to be a small coin. A few jumpy ID targets turned out to be fence wire or similar. I switched back to Prospecting Mode since Relic Mode barely sensed my sample nugget.
[size=small]The area as I photographed it today - 2008 ... nothing but thousands of filled-in holes and ironstone signals. [/size]
I was disappointed and too exhausted to do much more. Each hole dg made me miserable. How retirees can do this with less physical capability, I'll never know. We returned to the car and managed to crank up the air conditioner before heading into town where the locals mentioned in passing that half the town's population had left for the town of Sofala to pan for gold in the river there....since there'd been recent heavy rain. I was told that some of the people panning were residents as old as 85! It sounded like we'd have a more pleasant time by the cool waters of the Turon river so we brought cold drinks, some Ice and headed off to Sofala to try our luck again at a region we'd panned unsuccessfully before. I thought this would yield better results since this time I had a decent shovel with me and would get to the bedrock faster.
[size=small]The Gold Mining town of Sofala as approached from the South. [/size]
We passed through the town, found our favorite spot upriver and I left to find a place where I might hit the bedrock and find gold. I waded into the river until my waist was in the cool water, headed upstream for ten minutes and saw an opportunity on the far bank of the River near a submerged tree trunk. Now usually I avoid tree trunks in the water because that's where critters tend to congregate but I was distracted by the desire to find yellow metal and began to dig the soil from the riverbank until I felt a sharp stinging sensation on my ankle. I ignored it because I was wearing my sneakers in the water to protect from the sharp rocks. But a second sharp pain caused me to drop my shovel and yank my leg out of the water to see what it was. An 8 inch long leech had affixed itself to my bare ankle and only let go when I yanked up the leg of my jeans and exposed it to sunlight. It was brown with two bright yellow stripes and as thick as my thumb. It swam into the silty cloud around me so I grabbed my shovel and fled to the far side of the river where the water was shallow. Whilst distracted by the attack on my leg and not looking where I was headed, I was startled when the ground in front of me suddenly blurred and I found myself within two feet of an extremely agitated and potentially lethal Red Bellied Black Snake which had not noticed my soft-approach in the water until I had almost stepped on it.
The poor snake was magnificent and about a meter long with matt black scales and a bright red underbelly. He'd been spooked so badly that his tail was twitching. Neither of us moved and my wife had the camera so I used my shovel to splash the snake with water and he took off hissing loudly.
[size=small]The Turon River where we fossicked but found nothing. Again. Third visit here. Not going back to this spot again.[/size]
[size=small]A tiny frog I found... the preferred meal of the Red Bellied Black Snake apparently.[/size]
I dug holes in the bank and lifted a mountain of river pebbles from a variety of places but was unable to get to the bedrock. Even after digging holes over three feet deep under the water level. I gave up, counted my blessings for the near miss with the snake and checked my sneakers and legs for more leeches. Found a yabbie (a type of crayfish) and a tiny frog for the camera before leaving. No gold found, no luck with the detector and nothing but bug-bites, migraines and dehydration. On the way back into town, I stopped to take a look at where the Department Of Main Roads was cutting a wider path through the mountains. I ran the X-70 around on the collapsed topsoil and gravel but only found soda cans from the workers buried in the gravel. And then the horseflies found me. Boy do they hurt when they bite. No luck so I moved on.
[size=small]The road was being widened and the machines were exposing quartz reefs below the loose topsoil. I stopped for a sample. [/size]
Now a lot of prospectors find gold just by stopping on the side of the road and detecting but I was interested in taking soil samples this time to pan later and examine for particles of gold. I'd brought containers for this occasion but was later disappointed to discover nothing of interest in the soil after panning.
[size=small]Red gold bearing ore that the roads cut through on the gold fields. Note the quartz pebbles in contrast. [/size]
We had detected unsuccessfully in a region called Capertee once before but I was advised more recently that the creeks I had passed right there in the State Forrest 'gave up good gold' fairly consistently. So this would be my final attempt to find some of the yellow metal that had driven me to the brink of insanity these last few days, months and years. I took just our panning equipment, a large bottle of drinking water and the shovel. We sprayed ourselves with insect repellent and made our way along the fire trails to get to the nearest creek. The entire bank was lined very thickly with thorny briar patches and blackberry bushes and even the trail had been claimed here and there in places by the nasty shrubs. After finding a gap that allowed us to climb down relatively unscathed, we set about to expose bedrock and hopefully see if there is any gold lurking on the bottom of the stream beds.
The air was humming with the sound of thousands of flies and it took them less than a few minutes to find us and make our day miserable to the extreme. Some were bushflies which do not move unless they are physically touched or swatted. Others were blood sucking horseflies which really stung when they bit through my jeans. Then the leeches attacked the moment I lifted some stones from the creek bed. They were larger than usual yet smaller than the one which had bitten me in the river at Sofala. They even attacked the shovel and covered a portion of it when I left the blade portion submerged in the stream. Photographing them was difficult since they wanted to latch on to the softer skin between my fingers. We threw them downstream and continued clearing a small area of rocks and pebbles to get to the bedrock.
[size=small]The view before we climbed down into the creek. [/size]
[size=small]Large-ish leeches which attacked anything placed in the streams. Photographing & handling them without being bitten between the fingers was tedious, painful , and tricky. Talk about hungry! [/size]
[size=small]Rena in the creek in our narrow work-space... . [/size]
[size=small]A rather healthy looking Water Skink came right up to Rena and sat by her, watching us work the creek bed. [/size]
[size=small]A small fresh water crayfish which came out from under his rock to investigate my disturbing of his creek bed. (not a Yabbie) [/size]
I panned a few loads of soil beneath the larger stones but found nothing. It was then when I realized I needed to move a few feet upstream to where the creek narrowed so that I could clear a space of all rocks and debris - and do it properly. As I did so, I struck the bedrock and immediately used my knife to scrape any pebbles, grit and particles from the fissures and into my partially submerged gold pan. I also found some thick moss layers sitting over some of these cracks and squeezed the mud from beneath them into my pan before placing the moss back onto the creek bed so it wouldn't die. Rena called out to me that she'd finally had enough and was dizzy and nauseous from the heat again. I felt much the same so I had to sympathize with her and felt grateful that she'd put up with this misery for as long as she had. I'd blow air over my top lip to deter the flies from landing on my face but all that did was spray the surrounding area with the sweat dripping from my nose and brow. We had a 4 hour drive home ahead of us so I asked her to give me a moment and quick-panned the sample I had in my pan using a technique I picked up on YouTube where the panner shakes the pan forwards quickly to shift the particles out in higher volume (no doubt sacrificing some larger particles due to the over-efficient nature of the technique). When I got the the tailings of the pan, I gave it a quick swirl before looking to see if I had anything. Yes! There was a gleaming glint of Gold in the pan! There were four bright 'micro-nuggets' sitting right there on the black plastic. The metallic sheen was incredible! It was so bright and unexpected that I was really quite overwhelmed as I hadn't expected a thing.
[size=small]Small grains of alluvial placer gold in the bottom of the pan after a quick panning session[/size]
With Rena feeling ill from the effects of the temperature and lack of food, we grabbed our gear and headed back to the car. I did tell her this was meant to be a leisurely trip after all. What you don't see in the above photograph is the first particles of gold which were smaller yet VERY sharp edged when viewed under the loupe for magnification. The specimen was being placed in a small, glass specimen jar at home when the pressure of the water in the jar caused the bottom to blow out and the gold samples flew straight down the sink due to the running water. So I lost my favorite gold sample but had a few of the larger smoother grains to show for the effort.
I expect to return to this creek when there's a little more water and cooler temperatures. This time I'm bringing equipment to enable me to properly excavate the cracks on the creek bed. It's clear to me now that there really is gold to be extracted from these creeks, I just need to devote the time and equipment to the right place. Yes, I'll return with the X-Terra 70 and perhaps I'll consider getting the waterproof 6" HF coil to make a more thorough check of the creek bed.
I'm home now. In air conditioned comfort. And as I look at a truly awe inspiring thunderstorm as it nears my house, all I can think about is how much gold is going to be replenished in the creek I was in yesterday.
Cheers,
Marco Nero
It's pretty neat to see emus in the wild. I got to see a male with his chicks on a friends farm a couple of years back. You're right about them not being too bright. The males have been fooled into to raising the young, while the females shoot though!
Your wife might think that they are quite smart though!