Squishy
Senior Member
- Joined
- Jul 18, 2009
- Messages
- 397
I'm back from my gold prospecting trip to the Black Hills of South Dakota and had a blast!! I met up with a new friend named Randy in Sioux Falls, SD and rode the rest of the way with him and his daughter. We also picked up one of her friends along the way. Both of the girls were great. Very polite and helpful.
We camped at the site and there was a prospecting club meeting on Saturday. I have not camped in many years, and I have to admit that I was not properly prepared. The temperature dropped down to the low 30s F and it even snowed a little one night before it switched to a cold rain. It was miserably cold at night and my sleeping bag was only rated to 40F, so it did not keep me warm at all. The days were beautiful though, so all in all, it was a good trip. Here's my tent!
The Black Hills are beautiful!!! Where we were camped was right at the edge of the forest that had burned several years ago. So behind us was a barren landscape, and in front of us was beautiful forests.
There is a lot of stone pushed up in the hills which makes the landscape very dramatic.
My friend, Randy, and I went metal detecting first; looking for nuggets. No luck with the nuggets but we found a couple interesting sites.
We found what appears to be an old fireplace. We haven't detected the area yet. We found them when we went hiking around and did not have our detectors with us, but we will go back.
We later found a gulch and thought we saw part of an split rail fence so we went up the gulch and found, what appears to be, the site of some old miner's shack. There is no structure, but there is a well. The nails in the fence look small in the picture, but there were as big as tent stakes and very thick.
We set up a sluice and I began digging and classifying the material while Randy ran classified material through the sluice. Here's the hole. You can see we dug to the bedrock.
We ran it through a sluice and when we were done, we cleaned up the sluice and saved the concentrates. It was fun though!!
When we were not panning and sluicing, we metal detected and explored. We found lots of garnets in the stone.
OK.. I need some help with these. While metal detecting I found these. My detector went crazy. As I sweep over the stones with my Ace 250, it hits on many different types of metal, but most strongly on gold.
Randy used his Minelab on it and it completely overloaded the detector. Another guy used a White's on it and it hit hard on gold. It looks like petrified wood to most people who looked at it but it would not make sense to have metal in that.
My first thought was that those black lines were hematite or iron, but my pin pointer does not hit at all on the surface, so that material is not metallic and whatever is metal is inside.
Any ideas?????
Thanks!
-Mike-
We camped at the site and there was a prospecting club meeting on Saturday. I have not camped in many years, and I have to admit that I was not properly prepared. The temperature dropped down to the low 30s F and it even snowed a little one night before it switched to a cold rain. It was miserably cold at night and my sleeping bag was only rated to 40F, so it did not keep me warm at all. The days were beautiful though, so all in all, it was a good trip. Here's my tent!
The Black Hills are beautiful!!! Where we were camped was right at the edge of the forest that had burned several years ago. So behind us was a barren landscape, and in front of us was beautiful forests.
There is a lot of stone pushed up in the hills which makes the landscape very dramatic.
My friend, Randy, and I went metal detecting first; looking for nuggets. No luck with the nuggets but we found a couple interesting sites.
We found what appears to be an old fireplace. We haven't detected the area yet. We found them when we went hiking around and did not have our detectors with us, but we will go back.
We later found a gulch and thought we saw part of an split rail fence so we went up the gulch and found, what appears to be, the site of some old miner's shack. There is no structure, but there is a well. The nails in the fence look small in the picture, but there were as big as tent stakes and very thick.
We set up a sluice and I began digging and classifying the material while Randy ran classified material through the sluice. Here's the hole. You can see we dug to the bedrock.
We ran it through a sluice and when we were done, we cleaned up the sluice and saved the concentrates. It was fun though!!
When we were not panning and sluicing, we metal detected and explored. We found lots of garnets in the stone.
OK.. I need some help with these. While metal detecting I found these. My detector went crazy. As I sweep over the stones with my Ace 250, it hits on many different types of metal, but most strongly on gold.
Randy used his Minelab on it and it completely overloaded the detector. Another guy used a White's on it and it hit hard on gold. It looks like petrified wood to most people who looked at it but it would not make sense to have metal in that.
My first thought was that those black lines were hematite or iron, but my pin pointer does not hit at all on the surface, so that material is not metallic and whatever is metal is inside.
Any ideas?????
Thanks!
-Mike-