Metal Detecting & Drywashing a Small Wash "can" be rewarding!


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Hello All,

   I came across a really old Youtube video I made back around 2008 here in Arizona.  There are only a number of places in the last 25 years of metal detecting that I can say were honestly rewarding and worth all the effort to drag down a drywashing/vac-pac, set it up and run it all day or weekend.  This happen to be one of those locations where we found a number of very rough gold nuggets using metal detectors, but the amount of smaller pickers and fine gold was unreal.  

Practically ever nugget my partner and I dug up, we saw a half dozen or more small pickers and a good amount of fines.  You honestly don't find this too often, but they are out there and it does happen.  We worked the small gully (as seen in the video) for several weekends, getting whatever we could metal detecting with a VLF and PI's.  We then started down lower in gully and drywashed/vac from side to side, digging all the cracks and crevices up the best we could.

The wash wasn't too long, nor very wide, maybe 3-4 foot in the widest spots.  However, after about 2-3 weekends, we had the entire gully down to bedrock and ended up removing about 3 ounces of very small nuggets, pickers and fines.  I believe we did so well due to the nature of this type of gold being very crystalline in nature.  The source was probably weathered away as we never were able to locate any type of real vein or source.  

Overall, with all the gold, fines and gold nuggets, we ended up with about 6 ounces of really nice placer gold.  There are hundreds, if not thousands of these locations still to be found, so a good metal detector can lead you into one of these hidden gems!  Heck, at todays gold prices, just over $1900 per ounce, that's a nice $11,400 payday.  It probably took about 5-6 days to recover it all.  

Wishing you all a bedrock-gold rich gully.

Rob

 

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Love this video Rob, probably watched it 50 times in the past 2-3 years as well as all the others!  Keep up the Great work on posts and videos, much appreciated!! 

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