We're back! A few vacation pics...

[schrackman]

Okay, now most people think that gold is found in large quantities. That may have been true back in the mid 1800s, but not so true for the recreational miner today, like me.

While these little nuggets, I admit, are not all that big, they are nevertheless the product of a determined and skillful search in an area where most of the gold from the tertiary gravels were washed out and collected via hydraulic mining. One doesn't find gold this small unless he knows how to use his detector well to locate such small targets, as the incoming signal is very faint.

Consequently, it is very difficult to find any gold in this area by metal detecting. In previous years I have found much more by panning and sluicing in the creeks, but this year I was intent to focus just on metal detecting, and give my friend's Pulse Induction detector a good field test. These were not found with his detector, but rather by my White's MXT, an all purpose gold/coin/relic machine.

The fun thing about finding nuggets is that they sometimes resemble things, kinda how we look for shapes in the clouds. The larger nugget, to me, looks like a boxing glove, for which reason I've affectionately named it the boxing glove nugget.