This is a yarn of my recent alluvial exploits embellished with some photos as a result of a request by the FossickingKid to share some Hill End sights/experiences.
The day started with a visit to a spot I had been to before, there are a series of gully's flanked by aluvial working consisting of sections of surfaced areas where the oldtimers have worked down to bedrock and other areas peppered with foxholes where they were chasing small wash layers containing gold.
i have found small bits of gold in both types of workings; a flake of gold trapped in the vertical shale on one side of the creek and a small nugget on the mulluck heap from one of the foxholes. My mission that day was to follow the vertical bank looking for gold that had dropped off the vertical faces as part of 'recent' erosion activity. I have had some success on these steep cutting areas with the SDC on a number of workings and as this creek was readily accessible and free of leaf litter or undergrowth it was a great oportunity to test the potential of this technique on this creek system.
A section of the bank caught my attention as it was uncharacteristically gravelly. A few sweeps of the SDC had me thinking ther might be a target in the gravel. After laying some of the gravel out a small target became apparent and at 0.02g one of my smallest SDC nuggets was in the bottle
Are there any more? Is usually the next question to come to mind followed by How did it get there? Ok, out with the pick and lay a bit more down and see what is what. No joy with the SDC but I was not prepared to give up on it just yet.
The gravel could have filled an old foxhole and have been a byproduct of surface workings but there appeared to be a natural v shaped underlying clay strata indicating it may be natural. So it was the time to get serious, big pick sieves and a bucket.
I have used the SDC to identify honey holes in a creek before by locating bullets and cleaning out he hole for gold and gems. So it was a natural progression to test pan this high and dry potential honey hole. The process involved following the clay layer, confirming a definite v dipping into the bank, dry sieving the material, laying out the stones and running the SDC over for nuggets. Man-o-man that stuff is hard to dig so I was lucky to get 1/4 of a tub of fines to pan off before the sweat had me looking around at he mounds of dirt moved centuries before. Tougher than me I thought :8
The threat of rain and the fact that I had left my rake below a hard rock mine had me sweeping the layed down gravel with the SDC and packing the fines into the truck for panning out at a later date.
As no additional targets were apparent in the layed down gravel I didnt hold much hope of success but it smelt good if you know what I mean.
The result is fair, possibly more than the nugget, when considering the small volume extracted and that the dip of the v was falling away at a reasonable grade. Now I can't stop thinking about the point where the v flattens out
and what goodies it may hold.