February trips are usually to warm destinations free from snow and ice where me and the guys can break off some winter rust from the golf swings.

This year is different with the golf guys scattered from England to Illinois to Utah.

So this years mid-winter trip headed south to one of the GPAA mining claims in Arizona for a more formal attempt at some gold nugget hunting.

We were worried about the weather this weekend but found a blue skied gap between storms on Friday and Saturday. Friday we familiarized ourselves with the area and worked on getting tuned with the detectors. I was sporting my 800 with 6” coil in gold 1 mode. I settled on a sensitivity level of 20. The rest were factory defaults.

I approached it like ghost town hunting as I worked my way towards the wash. I picked up a few tiny pieces of lead from spent bullets when I came upon a hard hitting high conductive target up under a thorny bush. Several inches deep was a freshly buried state quarter courtesy of a previous visitor. How thoughtful. My friend Sid found a couple new nickels in similar places.

Hunting continued for a few hours with more tiny bits of lead. As we finished the day I found two minuscule lead pellets from a shotgun, quail and dove sized. Impressive the 800 found them without any trouble. The sun was dipping below the horizon so we headed to the accommodations to return in the am.

Next morning on our way to the claim we explored around what appeared to be an old stamp mill. Nothing much there but dig holes from an earlier detectorist. We headed back to the claim for more exploring of the large area.

As we worked to a small wash, we came across signs of drywasher activity and did some detecting around the area. On an embankment I picked up a zip zip signal and did some more investigating. Brushing away some surface rock I centered in on a 2 signal with a nice clean zip zip sound. I scooped up the dirt and proceeded to sort till I ended up with a small amount of powdery dirt in the bottom of the scoop. A little tilt of the wrist and the dirt spread out revealing a little gold nugget. I believe picker is the size category. About the size of a grain of rice.

I walked over to show Sid and we marveled how small the target was compared to the coins and tokens we’ve hunted for so many years. This was my first piece of native gold with a detector.

We continued searching the area without any further keepers until the storm front rolled in and the drops of wind blown rain started on us indicating time to head home. We had a great time and became more familiar with how to improve our efforts for next time.

I’m looking forward to some more gold related outings this year hoping we can get some of us together.


Rich

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Just one more good target before I go.


Detectors - Manticore / 800 / Axiom / CoRe / ProPointer AT / MI-6
Hunting Buddies - Best bunch of guys EVER