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X-Terra 70 Forest Trip with a little Gold Panning

nero_design

New member
My wife and I drove out across the mountains three days ago and caught up with a couple of friends. Rena's girlfriend was feeling under the weather but we took her boyfriend, Matt, with us and continued over to the goldfields for lunch and a little time spent Prospecting.

Now Matt (The young man who joined us) is an actor whom we became friends with some years ago and he's agreed to play a part in a Prospecting themed short film I wish to make later in the year for an annual competition here which is run by the Sony corporation. We drove down to the water and followed the off-road tracks along a river to get to a new area which was ideal.

We arrived at a place where I could park my car and took our deck chairs down to the water's edge to set up a sort of base camp. The 15 meters or so between the car and the water was peppered with diggings and shafts from the old gold miners and I was really surprised to see this since I knew the area had been gold bearing in the past but didn't know there was still evidence of the old diggings. I brought everything with me that I thought I might need and set up where my wife and our friend could chat and catch up whilst I scanned the creek to see what I might find.

First panload was a quick pan of about 20 seconds and there was a large flake of gold visible so I scanned upriver to find a dip where gold should be more concentrated. I scraped away the rocks and used my home made crevice sucker to draw up the fine gravel. This was panned and produced more of the gold but it was finer.
I brought out the gold concentrator bucket (AKA Rotapan) and stepped into the creek to shift rocks and get down to the bedrock and eventually spent three hours in one small spot that appeared ideal. I panned out the concentrates and the wash contained a dozen small pieces but they didn't make the effort worth the time. I wasn't too impressed with the amount of labor involved compared to the amount of gold I was able to retrieve. Not even a gram of gold in total. The sun was getting low and I stopped to save a very large dragonfly which was caught on the incredibly sticky thread from a type of Bolo-Spider. Now I saw a few of these spiders walking towards the creek when I was setting up and thought they looked very similar to the web casting spiders here. They had an elongated tan-colored body with extra long black legs. One managed to snare a VERY large dragonfly from an overhead fallen tree which had lodged on the near-cliff on the other side of the water. I used a stick to drag the Dragonfly from the web and put him on my knee so he could bite my jeans as I removed the sticky web. It was the stickiest globule of web I have ever encountered but I got most of it off and let the critter go. Half an hour later, he flew up to me again and hovered in my face as if to say 'Thank You!' and then flew off again. It was bright green with red banding and about as long as my hand. Really a brilliant insect. My wife, Rena, came up to me with some tiny jewel-like beetles she'd found and was photographing. They had bodies that looked like polished blue metal. I'll post a pic below so you can see what I mean.

original.jpg

[size=small]A couple of the tiny yet immensely pretty blue-metal beetles which Rena found.[/size]

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[size=small]That's me in the blue shirt cleaning out the Rotapan in the creek with our friend.[/size]

I stopped for a sugar fix and water and then decided to make a final stop a little further upstream where the bedrock was raised slightly and the water had eaten crevices into the quartz veined rock. I took the time to carefully vacuume all debris from each of the ridges and depressions. I dropped all the extracted material into my pan and gave it a quick swirl. There were some bright little bits of gold there. I was about to begin panning it when Rena came over to us. As I was looking up, she slipped on the slick moss on the rocks and slowly fell into a crevice filled with icy water. She was fine and returned to our equipment further down the creek but as I followed with my pan filled and ready to process from the contents of all the crevices, I too slipped on the same section of slippery rocks as Rena... and slowly slid sideways into the cold river water. I had handed Rena my car keys earlier which had my alarm switch on them so I was lucky that everything else I was carrying, (including a new Pulse Induction Vibraprobe 570 from Kellyco) was waterproof.

I had Iost the contents of my gold pan into the icy waters and my friend made some comment about the river reclaiming its gold.
When I returned to our little base camp, I changed the coil on the X-Terra 70 and placed the waterproof 6" DD HF coil on it and began to scan the crevices in the creek. I picked up a strong signal within seconds and removed the rocks from the section. The target was small, loud and ideally placed. Probably a gold nugget or a small clump of fine gold, I thought to myself. I had to use the Vibraprobe to carefully pinpoint the exact spot and then gently extracted the target. It was actually a needle. And it was so rusted and corroded that it was literally as thin as a single strand of hair with oxidized metal on one end and a fine, sharp curling point on the other. I wasn't disappointed though: The coil was doing exactly what it should. So did the Pinpointer. To detect a target so small, so fine, and under water, under rocks and soil.... was good enough to reassure me.

I had spent way too much of my day panning fruitlessly for gold with my pan and the concentrator and it wasn't until the sun began to draw close to the horizon and twilight began to set in that I threw all the gear into my car and began to do some ground prospecting after changing the coil again and putting my hiking shoes back on. I walked over to the mounds of soil and holes in the ground and imagined men slaving hard to find the gold layer all those generations ago. There were several targets which registered sharply and I dug one at the base of at tree with our friend looking on. It was small and sharp in signal so I guessed it was close to the surface and it was. The target was extracted after using the Pinpoint Mode on the X-Terra 70 and the digging was assisted with the Vibraprobe and proved to be a mushroomed rifle bullet which looked like .223 caliber round. It had a slight fold on one side where the metal petals had moved at the time of impact so the bullet had tumbled. It had probably hit a small tree and had gone right through it after tumbling and entering the dirt at the base of the tree it was dug from.

Some more scraps of foil and junk near the road kept me hovering over the mulloch heaps and each mound had signals in it.
I dug only after determining that the TID was showing a Positive signal and approached each target from more than one direction. The advice given to me on this forum before I left was applied to assist me with experimenting and testing that newly suggested technique of switching on ground balance tracking numbers to see if the signal is stable or animating wildly between numbers.

This seemed to work because I got a stable signal between two slight mounds and in the middle of four distinct trench holes and I dug out a small 2.8 gram nugget and a tiny quartz specimen nearby. Rena and our friend gathered around as I dug around in the shallow ditch and were impressed to see the nugget brought forth and Matt photographed it in his hand with his mobile phone camera. He was pretty impressed as we'd only just started using the X-Terra 70. I didn't put it into my mouth to clean it as so many Prospectors do because of parasitic worms in the soil and, most importantly, the fact that miners in the area used to use Cyanide and Mercury to extract gold and many people have told me of gold nuggets they've found which were coated in both. Again, the pinpointer assisted in finding the target in the fading light after the sun had set and I used the tip of the Vibraprobe to avoid damaging the nuggets (small as they were) with my pick axe. I was under a thick tree canopy which blocked the remaining light in the sky and the spiders were starting to weave their webs between the trees.

The light was dropping to the point now where the eyes are unable to properly see. It's a bit like looking at a black-light at a club. There's no apparent color or shadows to determine depth. Rena found an interesting scattering of quartz further into the forest near our car and we went to investigate. Sticking out of the ground near the quartz was a distinct thigh bone. I poked at it with the pick and it appeared to be complete and still attached to a pelvis. Whilst all three of us agreed that it looked human, we also pondered if it was kangaroo in origin. No decision was reached and we continued on our way. In the thick of the forest we found a massive clump of mushrooms including deadly nightshade. It was brilliantly red-colored in the dim light and I wished I'd not left the camera in the car.

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[size=small]Some of my quartz & volcanic rock samples along with two bits of gold and a Threepence Coin. Note the small, corroded .22 caliber case next to the mushroomed .223 bullet.[/size]

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[size=small]The same Threepence with a Morgan Dollar for scale to show how small it is. (Morgan Dollar was purchased & NOT found by me).[/size]

We returned to the track and made our way towards the vehicel and I detected a strong signal on the dirt track which shifted when I scraped the dirt to one side. It was small but I was determined to see what it was. We all crouched down and took turns dropping handfuls of soil onto the elliptical coil of the 5x10. Eventually, I spotted the tail end of a .22 caliber bullet which was nicely camouflaged and looked like a small stone (see it in the picture above). A bit closer to the car, I also found another 1946 Three Pence coin which had been left by a visitor in the predecimal days. I've photographed it sitting on a Morgan Dollar which I bought a little while back. I didn't find the Morgan Dollar. Would have been a little out of place in Australia if I had.

Back in the car, my still-wet clothes from my creek mishap earlier meant that my side of the car kept fogging up from the humidity. Mosquitoes had followed us into the car and cause problems for a while until we eliminated them all and on the way back to the main road, we stopped to observe several wild rabbits which Rena always likes to see. Some kangaroos bounded over the car as we cut through the side of a ravine and we stopped again to see them by torchlight. I spotted some great undug quartz veins on my side of the car each time we stopped so I'll have to return and spend a day detecting those areas. It's not a fruitless effort either since the largest 'nugget' found there weighed in at over a few hundred ounces many years ago.

Took a few hours to get home and a few days to start planning another trip. It's nice to get out of the city when you can.


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[attachment 85059 TuckerCo.BottleNuggets.jpg]
To follow up from a previous trip in January to Ironbark:
That Bottle which I mentioned in another thread some time back containing four small nuggets, was traced to the Tucker & Co Pty Ltd company which was based at Botany Bay in Sydney Australia. It began to produce Liquor back in 1830's. The bottle that the nuggets were in (don't get excited, they only amounted to a few grams) was likely a Whiskey Bottle and had probably been lost or buried back when the early gold Prospectors were set up in the area in the 1850s. Tucker & Co only recently went out of business and were bought out by another company which has also changed hands recently. Pictures and information have finally been forwarded to the Tucker family which is still around today. No word back yet via the staff member who requested the material.
 
Nero:
I hope you are keeping copies of all your e-mails. Compiled at a later date, they would make a nice book for publication; I'm sure you thought of that already.
Keep the post coming!!!!
RR
 
Nero:
I just read some other posts of your where you mention the 1 inch long Jumper Ants!!!!!
MY GOD Nero...how can you guys survive down there with so many things aiming to
kill you?:shrug:

RR
 
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