Hi Guys, Went for a two hour walk to reach some old timer workings.
On my way in I came across what looks like an old stamper shoe plate. Strange as there are no hard rocks mines for miles. These all being old alluvial workings.
Got in to the area & hit a pile of virgin ground that the old timers for some reason hadnt sluiced away but had worked around. There was no bed rock but I worked on the theory that there may be gold hung up in the general face of the material that they had sluiced before they stopped. There were a few iron stone hot rock signals that the magnet sorted out pretty quickly. Then I got a nice hit.
First signal....A small bit of the good stuff.
I got 4 small bits off this pile & then put on the 17 x 11 to get more depth. Nothing more came to light.
I headed on up the small creek flowing down this gully to find some bed rock & to have a drink of fresh mountain snow melt water. Had to walk a fair way up this gully until it started getting a bit steeper & away from the deep ground. There was not much exposed bed rock in the gully & what there was had seen detectors before & I got nothing but remains of old tin cans & old metal match boxes, nails & hob nail boot tacks.
As the ground got steeper I came across some bedrock in the creek bed & on the bank was some exposed bed rock that the old timers had stacked a heap of rocks up on to. I spied a small amount of bed rock that had no rocks on it but was covered in moss & lichen. I wondered up on to it & waved the coil over it. Got a faint sweet signal & scraped away the lichen. Bugger me....a bit of gold came out of that little hollow to the left of my finger.
I was at a bit of a loss as to where to head to next as there was bugger all bed rock for the sadie coil to get its teeth in to. I decided to cut across a few small washed out gullies heading back in the general direction of the walk back out looking for any bed rock. Just waving the coil randomly as I went. On the ridge between two small gullies was some bed rock.....& quite a few old detector dig holes. MMMmmm. The terrain being quite steep I had to be careful not to arse up. I then just specked what I thought was a small piece of gold just sitting in the rubble.....it was.... & not on the bed rock. To cut a long story short I hit on to a wee patch & it was all in this loose top soil loam material & not on bed rock. Weird.
It was on a steep face so I had to be cautious.
This went on & on
I ended up getting 17 pieces in this area but had to make a move on the 2 hour walk back out while I still had day light. We have long daylight hours in the summer as the further south you go the longer it gets. As antarctica has 24 hours daylight in summer. The sun never sets. I started the walk out at 8.30 & being down hill was quicker getting out. Was back at my wagon just on 10 & just on dark. Good timing. Mrs JW would be freaking out, so when I had cell phone coverage I gave her a call.
So all up 22 bit for just shy of 4 grams. Found my smallest gold to date. Two were just .03 of a gram with one at .04 & another at .05. My smallest up until then was .06. 4500 & Sadie coil. Deadly on the small stuff. I have unfinished business back in there.
Cheers guys
Good luck out there
JW :)
Edited by user Thursday, 11 December 2014 6:08:55 PM(UTC)
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