I headed out today to spot I call trash hell. There is gold to be found, but with so much garbage mixed in amongst the dirt, it is mentally a challenging spot. It is not uncommon to stand in place and swing the coil in an arc and hit half a dozen or more targets.
My last three trips to the area have been skunks. I’ve found a pound or two worth of nails, bullets and other rubbish, but not a single nugget. My brain told me to stay away, but my gut said to give it one more shot, so I did, and thankfully I was rewarded with a little color. The first two hours were spent digging the normal junk, but some hiking led me to a place where the old-timers had dug up a feeder gully. They had pulled most of the larger rocks out and stacked them on the bank, so the bedrock was well within reach of the GPX. I dug a few bits of rusty iron, but then got a pleasant shock when a nice size piece turned up in a bedrock crack. At that point I didn’t care how big it was, I was just relieved that it wasn’t another boot tack!
I continued scanning the belly of the gully and the exposed banks and ended up with another eleven targets; one was a tiny nugget and the other was a 1984 dime which I would have bet was going to be a quarter-ouncer. I swung some the ground around the fringes of the gully and encountered a whole lot more trash, probably from their camp. Some of the signals I hit could have been gold, but I decided to be happy with the two bits I had in my pocket and called it a day. Total weight was 4.3-grams, found with a GPX4500 and Nugget Finder 14” Ellip. SL Mono.
