Just got back from an exiting weekend, decided to give Coopers Creek and Bruntons Bridge a miss as I realized on Friday it was school holidays and we wanted to camp on our own and avoid the crowds.
Checked over my maps and decided to try a new location away from the traffic and glad we did, even though is was further to drive on a short weekend.
After and early start we arrived at the location midday Saturday (yesterday) and set up camp, after lunch I went down to the creek and found a likely looking spot to try my first ever pan, tried crevassing around a couple of rocks and on my 3rd pan got my first speck, next pan another speck, after a couple of hours, 20 odd pans, 5 spec's and a sore back I decided it was beer O'clock.
We were over the moon to think we backed our judgment for the location of our first ever prospect and actually found 5 spec's in a couple of hours.
Thanks to everyone on this forum for the valuable information and lessons to be learnt through weeks of reading posts and watching your various video's, it really pointed us in the right direction for what we wanted to do.
This morning I took Molly our little Jack Russel puppy for a good walk up a track and came across a lot of quartz veins running through shaeling(?) rock confined to a smallish area of 50 meters or so across, the surface area up the hill has scattered quartz pieces everywhere but only above the quartz vein section, I ran back to camp and grabbed the camera and headed back up to get some pic's. I've taken dozens of photo's and even brought a bucket of samples home to sample. The general area was a gold mining area in the mid to late 1800's so I've posted some pic's and wondering if they are worth pursuing, the rock is quite loose and a pick would make very light work of it to extract from what I can see.
The area is upstream from where I panned so I figger if there's small spec's in one tiny section of the creek then I will probably need to do a few more trips up there to investigate further.
I've also decided that a couple of good sieves and a river sluice will save my back and be a good investment.
Bruntons Bridge and Coopers Creek might have to wait a little longer for a quiet time to visit, mid week and out of school holidays.
Trace found a new way to christen her pan.......hmmm.
The tiny sample area.
Only sampled just above and below the rock crevice, there are a lot of bedrock locations around here that would be great when the water is lower in summer.
The tiny 5 spec's, actually had trouble with 2 of them as they were so small.
A couple of the quartz vein pic's, there would have been about 20 - 25 similar veins in this small area.
3 small samples of what was laying just below these veins, there were plenty of quartz samples with pinks, orange, dark green, honeycomb and small crystals in them, quite a varied sample rate.
On the way home today I was on the lookout for future spots to sample and there are plenty of spots in the creek worth crevicing when the water is lower.
We stumbled on this spot but unfortunately it's in an exempt location, saw plenty more large quartz veins through bedrock in a creek that was exempt but that's the way it goes I suppose.
