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This winter I stayed home and Ice fished, but the last 3 years I have spent my winter's in Meadview, Arizona by Lake Mead metal detecting for gold and meteorites. I Use a Minelab gpx 4000 and a Monster 1000.
Here in idaho, at least my side, the gold is to small to detect so I like to hunt for outlaw gold stashes. Box Elder Co. Utah is a great spot also. Almost all the gold that got mined in Idaho and Montana got shipped out by stage coach through Salt Lake City. And they were robbed a lot. I haven't found the outlaw gold yet, but here are the gold nuggets I've found.
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Nice, sounds like a fun hobby.
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Nice gold nuggets. I tried panning for gold back in 2006 after the huge floods in southwest Utah. My son would have been 8 at the time. We found gold in every pan our first try on Beaver Dam Wash. But the problem was the gold was so darn small that we couldn’t grab it. I think it would have taken thousands of those fine pieces to equal 1 of your nuggets..
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Beaver dam Wash huh. If you can find gold in every pan you should set up a sluice. Do you have a snuffer bottle? You need one to collect the small stuff. I have belonged to the GPAA for many years. The Gold Prospectors Association of America have a local chapter here in Blackfoot, ID. We have an outing every year in Blackfoot and they show you how to get the fine stuff. It is so small here, the flower gold, that you need a magnifying glass to see it in your pan.
This year should be a flood year aging.
There is a great book: A Guide to Gold Panning in Utah. second edition
By Alan J Chenworth
It is awesome with good directions and GPS readings of where all the gold is in the whole state. With the size of what you will find and the best way to get it. He says there is only two places with big enough gold to metal detect.
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Fast Randy - you might know a few folks I know that metal detect - Myron Curtis up in Idaho falls sells metal detectors and my close friend that passed away lived in Chubbuck - Greg Manos -- both are and were into tokens and coin hunting not so much gold nuggets unless it was in coin form. Where ever we went fishing or driving around,they always have their detectors and searched for buried treasure.
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No, sorry to say I didn't know them. And KENT, I have been thinking about how to respond to your "sounds like fun" qoute. When you have done as much as I have, it's more like a habit than fun. Anything to do with gold is hard work. Panning, dredging, slucing, drywashing or metal detecting. To do it successfully it is just plain hard work. Because gold, brass and lead all look about the same to a gold metal detector. So you have to dig hundreds, maybe thousands of them for every nugget you find. You have to bury or cover back up every whole you dig. Your whole body is hurting at the end of the day. It is awesome when you find something good. Hence the habbit. But fun???
I had a lot more fun this winter ice fishing, then the last 3 or 4 years spent metal detecting for gold in Arizona.
But that and my other outdoor recreation is why l look like I'm closer to 45 than my real age of 65. I'm getting gold fever again now the ground is thawing out.
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[#0000ff]My wife and I did some detector swinging a few spots out by Wickenburg in Arizona, while we lived in Phoenix. Got some decent nuggets in the Congress/ Gold Hill area. Amazing that area still produces some good finds every year in spite of being overrun with treasure hunters.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]We also did a lot of coin hunting around the beach areas of popular lakes. Found all kinds of stuff, like coins, rings, keys, etc. But my wife earned the title of "pop top queen" for her ability to help clean up the beaches from that scourge. She was also a champ at collecting black sand and garnets when we went panning. But she once found a pretty good sized glob of mercury that left behind some gold when we retorted it.[/#0000ff]
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[#0000ff]Fun stuff.
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TD, I have a girlfriend with a place in Wickenburg and I have metal detected there and Stanton. Yes that gold hill is a fascinating place. And story. The side and draws of Gold Hill are still producing. Like anywhere else that has gold, the good spots are claimed. But you can join clubs and detect and drywash there. I myself belong to three clubs that have claims near Meadview and the Gold Basin by LAKE MEAD. That gives me hundreds of acres of land to mine. There are a few miners that I have made friends with out there that join the club's just so they can live for free and camp all winter.
I never have done much coin or relic hunting yet that does look a little fun. Tiny, shallow holes.
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[#0000FF] I knew a couple of guys in Arizona that took off every weekend to "coin-shoot". They often hit school playgrounds with sand under the swings and monkey bars...because kids loose coins. And another place they did well was around mailboxes that had been in place for a few decades...along rural roads. Seems that folks used to put outgoing mail in their boxes for postage and sometimes the coins would fall into the snow and mud and be lost...until a coin shooter showed up years later. Those guys had lots of old Indian head pennies.[/#0000FF]
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[#0000FF] I like the stories I heard about someone finding several glass jars full of silver dollars hidden on the property of some former doctor or whatever...I think in Tennessee...and he saved all the dollars he got for quick office visits. That's what all us "swingers" lust after.[/#0000FF]
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[#0000FF] And in northern California there have been and still are caches of gold taken from stage robberies and stashed by thieves who were killed or jailed before they could return for the loot. Saw a collection a guy had that included rotted old leather  dle bags full of gold dust and nuggets hidden during the gold rush days. Drool, drool.[/#0000FF]
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[#0000FF] I was in the rural real estate business the last few years I lived in Sacramento. We sold land all up and down the foothills of the Sierras. It was rare to have a piece of property of any size without evidence of previous prospecting. And some actually had formerly producing mines. Acquired lots of nice mineral specimens...including gold ore. Plus, found some old dumps full of valuable bottles.
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There was a gold mine (Gold Strike, I believe) upstream of the wash until the 1990s plus there is at least 1 gold panning club with rights to a stretch of Beaver Dam Wash. Where we panned is dry 90 percent of the time most years.That year the wash flooded tremendously. There was debris 30 feet up in trees where the wash is hundreds of yards wide. We panned just above the Utah Arizona Border as the water retreated from tens of thousands of cfs down to maybe 20 cfs over a couple months. I own the land and we bought the pan as a spur of the moment ideal just knowing gold would likely have come down with the extreme flooding that year. After those floods was also a very good time to find exposed petrified wood in Washington County at about 5000 ft. Opposite problem there. I’d find whole petrified trees sections from 5 to 50 feet long. Most where too hard to crack with a slugde hammer. Only sparks would fly with each strike. Did find a single weaker trunk that got through with about a hundred strikes. Took home a hundred pound trunk of petrified tree.
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I love the idea of finding that outlaw gold. There are hundreds of verified stories of them holding up stages and because the gold was so heavy they had to quickly bury it to get away from the pose. I read that the stage from Idaho that went through Kelton, Ut. Got robed weekly and sometimes dailey. And the stage from Montana mines got robbed regularly. As they had to pass through a couple of spots called Robber Roost and Hells Half Acer where the stage coach had to slow way down. But all the gold at that time had to be shipped through S.L.C. Probably on to San Francisco.
Then gold bars are out there.
To me coin shooting is like fishing for planter trout. It can be fun I guess. Lol
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Riverdog, don't you think this will be a flood year again? I have a sister in St. George and get down your way a lot. I have a new Keene sluice I'm wanting to try. I'll come down and show you how if you want. We split the gold 50-50. You do know the gold will find bedrock. So if you have good bedrock on your property it should trap the gold washing down from above. it could still be there from the last flood. And that's cool about the petrified wood.
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For a lot of years I lived in Sacramento and when the floods would hit I would hear about prospectors hitting the American Rivers that flowed into Folsom Lake. This is a favorite area after a fresh flush of the rivers along with other river sites. When the runway of Mather AFB in Sacramento area was first constructed the rumors of gold was found. At that point the gov't did not want this word out and construction continued to finish. Now that Mather AFB is close, the runway has converted over to commercial use as a FedEx hub along with other commercial companies. Since, encroachment of aggregate companies surrounding the former military base have been mining with tall can't see through fencing along many of the bordering roads.
As a kid in the early 60's we moved to a small community 25mi east of Jackson, Calif to Railroad Flat. My mom loved antiques and dad love to explore. They would take us kids on backroads rarely visited to old ghost towns that were once mining camps. We would search finding old bottles/jars, found an old Chinese meat cleaver, some small mining tools, some coins, & some other relics such as broken furniture of the era.
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[#0000FF]Yeah, I tried to take full advantage of the prospecting and antiquity collecting potential of the Sierra foothills when I lived there. Did a lot of panning and sluicing...and rolling rocks in dry streambeds looking for nuggets. Found quite a few and got a HEAVY 50% price bonus for the nuggets when we sold them to a couple of area jewelers that made nugget jewelry.[/#0000FF]
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[#0000FF]Got lots of bottles and old timey items out of dumps during my years as a rural real estate agent. But my best haul was being given unlimited picking rights on an old barn full of old farm supplies and tack. Plus, we even got to sell the rights to a barn wood salvager to take the barn down.[/#0000FF]
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[#0000FF]Even better was getting fishing rights on the old ponds and cattle tanks on some of our new listings. The owners would often say "Sure, go ahead and fish it. But I don't think there are any fish in it." Most times our first checkout trip resulted in some bodacious bass and bluegills...and big bullfrogs on steroids.
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Roger, sounds like you and I spent some time in same general areas, at different times. I spent about 2 years living in Sacramento (corner of 34th an Y Street) at age 5-7. Then got stationed at Beale in 1975. Used to hear about the Yuba County Gold Fields just north of Beale old SAC alert area. Never made it out to them, but was told you could pay a daily fee, and either pan gold or fish.
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Yea, I spent time living in the bay area as a kid moving to the mountain community in 1964. My military time was from 72-80' with Travis AFB(73-76) as my first assignment & Hill AFB(76-80) as my 2nd. McClellan AFB 82-97 DOD civilian, Tinker AFB(97-99). Retired from Hill 99-11'.
Always loved the mountains and exploring like my dad did. I have that antique mentality mom passed on also.
Sounds like we need to cross paths for some reminiscing time.
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