dave wiseman

Where's the fine gold from that spot ?

Very nice stuff.Looks like you might be on an oreshoot.

Good species,keep sampling.Crush up the other rock in the vein even though it looks barren.You might get more gold out of that.

Did you take samples of the vein?Where are the fines from the vein?....Gold goes in and out in a quartz vein and there may be a pocket or species much deeper,beyond the depth capabilities of any detector.

As Walker mentioned above the veins might have been shallow rich veins that didn't persist in depth and were eroded away over the eons of time.

Is there any chance you can drift in on the bedrock on the side of the hill and clean out the crevices?

CowKiller,I actually used a poll pick for many years while doing my type of hardrock mining here in the California motherlode.The size and light weight of the pick head make it a great tool for quartz vein sampling.My current hard rock protege lost the original,but I still have another pick head minus a handle.

CowKiller,the back end is used like a single jack.In the fourth pic down on the left you can see the back end of a poll pick in this link...http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2633713/Rare-early-flash-photography-images-Cornish-miners-digging-tin-1890s-reveal-perilous-conditions-toiled.html

Looks like a poll pick head.Introduced by the Cornish miners(cousin jacks).

http://golddetecting.4umer.net/t23354-off-and-running-in-2016

Galena is not magnetic...

It is sweet to dance to violins..it is delicate and rare..to dance to lutes and dance to flutes is way beyond compare...but it is not sweet with nimble feet to dance upon the air.....From Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde.

Looks like the species are right out of the vein.Have you found the source?

The thing about BLM ground is that if someone's private property abuts or is up against the BLM ground they think it's their ground to do as they choose...at Least it's that way in the California motherlode.Regarding the Columbia(Tuolomne County) old diggings,it's all private property or the state park ground.Possibly a few BLM parcels somewhere.There are mining claims(or were on Big mountain) on the out skirts of Columbia above Highway 49 as your entering or leaving Sonora.All hardrock I believe.

Most BLM ground in Calaveras county is landlocked by private property.

I can't post a link on Rob's or Bill's forum either.

You can step in horse crap or step on a nugget...but you have to do some stepping.

Great stuff man...

Must have been kicked out with the oversize....

A vein is not always exposed along it's length and some veins never surface at all(blind veins).Perhaps as stated earlier,parts or all of the vein/veins have eroded away or pinched out.Some parts of the vein may be clay seams(gouge).Some veins are all clay,having the wall rock decomposed.Besides sampling and continued sampling,what else can one do?It would be wonderful if veins produced pocket after pocket but that is a very unlikely scenario.Ore shoots come and go in a vein and most of the ore if any is fine gold,not high grade species.Seems to me that since none of your gold has quartz attached the quartz and perhaps the vein itself has dissolved away by whatever chemical interaction.Was the little piece you found 25 feet above in a vein or just the dirt or clay?

Is all the gravel your talking about water worn including the quartz?Perhaps there was a another creek running on the hillside in the older days or the current creek changed course?Sounds like some of the Australian terrain where whole hillsides and mountains have eroded away and people find sunbakers..placer and quartz species but no veins in place.

Could be a manganese coating.Did you crush any of the quartz that doesn't sound off on your detector?A detector will likely not sound off on very fine color.Have you found any veins in place,that is contained within the country wall rock,soft or hard..or is it all float quartz?The vein/veins may have pinched out,dissolved or the quartz may be from a quartz blowout which I believe happens when the uprising solutions are encountering soft ground.Not real sure on that last scenario though there's a hill like that a few miles from me and most of the vein structure is much deeper.You might want to try different coils and even a VLF detector like the GMT or Goldbug.

Have you checked the gold with a loupe?See if there is any quartz attached to the yellow.It;s possible the vein has pinched out.Are you sampling all the veins?The gold goes in and out in a vein and maybe beyond the reach of a detector at this point.....

Np problem getting on at all and I use Internet Explorer...

Killer specie...