It was a steamy 108 degrees as my father and I sat at his back porch table in Phoenix, Arizona. July is always the most brutal month of year. It’s stinking hot! There is just no other way to describe it, even for someone that was born and bred in the desert.

“Great detecting weather, huh?” he said with a sarcastic smile.

An image of myself crawling through some thick brushy, creek bed instantly popped into my mind. I had done it all too many times in the past. I could almost feel a wet T-shirt, drenched with sweat, clinging to my back and a mob of moisture hungry gnats pecking at my eyes! My stomach churned at the thought. Just as I was about to make a remark the phone rang.

My father answered, and a moment later said “Hey Jon, great hearing from you, how’er things going?”

It was our good friend Jonathan Porter from Australia. This was a bit of a surprise; last I knew he was going out bush and wouldn’t be anywhere near a phone for weeks. I carefully watched my father’s face. His expression looked puzzled, then a wide grin spread out beneath his moustache. He slapped the table laughing, “You are kidding me!!!”

“What! What’d he say?” I pleaded. 

“Here you better talk to him. He’s got something to tell you.” I grabbed the receiver, “How ya going mate?” I asked in the best accent I could muster. Jonathan spoke at frenzied pace. Something big had happened and it took everything in me to decipher the excited Ozzie lingo.

“I’m up in the Cape mate, and I’ve snagged myself a beauty of a patch! I was exploring some new country and I stumbled across a few bits. This gold led me to even more gold, and eventually to…well, the solid 21-ouncer I dug out an hour ago!”

“No way!” I shouted. I understood why he could barely speak; this was indeed an incredible find.

“You have got to get over here mate – and fast! I have barely touched this patch and there are hundreds of acres of virgin country to explore!”  

The Cape; even the name sounded mysterious. I had looked at it many times on the map. It was an extremely remote strip of land in far Northern Queensland that jutted off into the sea towards Papua New Guinea. This was jungle country; harsh and rugged. It was so isolated that even the most die-hard Australian prospectors seldom ventured there; let alone a Yank from Arizona! My heart raced. This was a seriously tempting offer. I’d be a fool to pass it up, it was just too soon. I was no stranger to the Outback, having spent weeks upon weeks living out of a tent on the goldfields, but those trips had been well thought out and planned months in advance. There was no way I could organize an expedition like this on such short notice – it couldn’t be done.

That night I found myself staring at my dresser with something pressed against my ear.

“Window or aisle?” the voice asked. There was a long pause.

“Sir…”

“Excuse me, would you like a window or aisle seat?” the woman from the airline repeated herself.

“Uhh…a window seat will be fine,” I replied stumbling for an answer.

I couldn’t believe it; within a matter of hours of hearing about JP’s big nugget I had booked a flight to Australia and was rifling through my sock drawer in search of those with the fewest holes. I chuckled to myself. This was one of the finest cases of gold fever I had ever experienced. This must have been the same feeling that drove the old-timers to abandon their diggings whenever word of a new discovery drifted into camp.

The 14-hour flight across the Pacific is a long one. I’ve done it several times and it never gets any shorter. It happens every time; about 5 hours into the flight I start going stir crazy. Of course there’s nothing I can ever do about it, but pick up a book and read. I found some relief; and a twinge of guilt for complaining, after finishing the autobiography of James Venture Mulligan, North Queensland’s greatest prospector/explorer. He would have gladly endured this “quick” plane ride; after all, it took him 104 days to reach Australia by boat!

Finally I felt the plane’s tires make contact with the pavement. The entire cargo; myself included, eagerly stood up hoping to somehow speed along our disembarkment. As I entered the airport terminal a large fellow wearing an Akubra hat caught my attention; it was Jonathan. We were excited to see each other, but not wanting to give anyone in the crowd the wrong impression we greeted one another with one of those manly hugs. You know, the kind where two guys pat each other really hard on the back. Pat, hug, or handshake, it was good to see him again.  

He had driven his custom, full-size rig down and informed me that it was a considerable distance back to his camp. How relived I felt when he said arrangements had already been made for a hotel that evening. It had been a long haul, and quite honestly the thought of sitting for another six hours left me feeling queasy. 

Next morning we got an early start, leaving behind the comforts of modern civilization for the wilds of the Australian bush! The conversation inside the truck was nearly as interesting as the scenery that whirled past outside. Jonathan had spent much of his childhood in this part of the country and I quickly learned about the most important goldfields of the region, which included the Palmer, Hodgkinson, Hamilton, Russell River, Starcke, Jordan Creek, Mareeba, and Mount Peter. Together they yielded approximately 1,780,000 ounces of gold! However, the actual amount recovered would be much higher if everything found with modern day metal detectors was included.

I stared wide-eyed out of the window. It was so hard to come to grips with the huge vastness of it all, and the fact that only 24 hours prior I had been standing in Los Angeles. The Queensland landscape was impressive. It had everything from dense rainforest mountain country to vast flatlands and miles of untouched beaches, rivers and creeks; truly an ancient and unspoiled wilderness.

The journey was long; nearly all of it dirt and we didn’t reach his camp until dark. I did none of the driving, but my body was exhausted. I sympathized with how he must have felt dodging suicidal kangaroos on the track all evening. I wearily rolled out my sleeping bag and drifted off to sleep; there would be plenty of time to explore in the morning.

I was awoken by a god awful racket. I sprung upright madly trying to remember where I was. It was still dark out, so it took me a minute or two to realize that the horrid screeching was coming from hundreds of birds above my head. Apparently no alarm clocks needed in Queensland!

Once the sun broke the horizon it was straight into business. We made short work of our breakfast, loaded our detecting gear and set off on the quads. Jonathan was keen to show me where he had recently unearthed his monster 21-ounce nugget. The spot was only a few kilometers out, but it was a slow ride trying to pick our way around the trees and through the grass.

“This is it…,” Jonathan said switching off the engine on his Honda.
“Where?” I asked.
“Over there next to that bank.”
“You mean that small impact crater!” I was joking, but that’s exactly what it looked like.

This was a serious hole. It measured at least 28 inches, punching down through three distinct layers of ancient gravels. I whacked the side of it with my pick; nothing happened. I slugged it again and a few little rocks rolled off. This was hard ground! I could see why it had taken him three hours to dig it out!

This had been the nugget’s hiding place for who knows how many millions of years. And it might have stayed hidden if JP hadn’t swung over it at just the right angle with his Minelab GP3000 & Nugget Finder 20” S.L. coil combo. Pieces at that sort of depth (even if fairly large) don’t give off much of a signal. It would have been VERY easy to walk away, dismissing it as ground mineralization. Deep targets usually won’t produce a definite signal; but rather a waver or disturbance in the threshold. Learning to pick out these “iffy” signals from the moans & groans in the background takes experience – lots of it! JP has been doing it professionally for 11 years now, and even he had to admit it was a close one.

We were barely there 20 minutes when he hollered out "Got one!" He had one all right, and it sounded like it was going to be a beauty. A good foot and a half later he had recovered a solid quartz-gold specimen which later dollied out to 50 grams. The gold fever really took hold then, heading off through the grass I passed my coil over what could only be a piece of QLD gold of my very own, maybe not as impressive as his 50 grammer, but still a respectable 9 or so grams when crushed.

The following morning he suggested we shy away from the known patch and push further out onto the fringes. Working new ground is tough, especially when you go hours or even days without a decent signal. It would be hit or miss, but the rewards of a fresh patch could be sweet!

The Hondas’ really earned their keep. Trying to explore this sort of country in a regular vehicle would be nearly impossible. Revving through a few rutted out creek bottoms caused me to cringe thinking what something like this would do to the underside of my F-250!

“Have you ever been here before?” I asked.

“No mate, I’m not sure anyone’s been here before…”

Covering an area as big as Victoria, but with a population of less than 15,000, the Cape is one of the most remote and sparsely populated areas on earth! It really hit home when Jonathan commented, “There’s nothing from here all the way to the coast. No roads, no buildings, no towns, no nothing. Aside from the ancient Aboriginal, do you realize that we are probably the first “white” people to ever set foot here…”

An eerie and exhilarating feeling tingled its’ way up my spine.  
  
Prospecting new ground is JP’s cup of tea, and not much slips his attention. “Okay, this looks good! You see this reddish colored rock here, and that juicy looking wash on the bank? There’ll be gold here for sure…” he said.

I started off up a lovely little tributary while he dove into the main gully below. The tiny waterway looked good enough to eat, but I discovered it was void of all metal. I turned around and dropped into the lower end of the main gully. Rounding a tight bend I picked up a signal in a mound of sand. I wasn’t expecting to see a shiny 3-gram nugget; usually I just get trash out of loose sand! I finished off the lower end without another beep.

When I got back to the quads I spotted JP coming out of the scrub. He rattled his nugget bottle and rubbed his knee a moment later. It seemed he had managed a dose of both good and bad luck.
“Any luck?” I called out.
“I hit a new run on the bank. I also stirred up a wasp nest and they whacked me good.”

I glanced down at the swollen knee and noticed a tiny red spot; the sting had actually drawn blood!

At least the gold may have eased the pain slightly. He unscrewed the bottle and poured out over an ounce worth of dirty nuggets! With the little piece I found it pushed the tally to 40 grams! His hunch had been right as usual.

The following day JP and I went back to the patch to do a little clean up work. We zigged here and zagged there, managing to pick up 15 grams of small, “iron-stony” type nuggets that we had missed on the first pass through. It was only a tight patch, and after 2 hours of careful gridding we were fairly confident that most of the goodies were gone.

It was still early in the day, so we took another “Bush Blasting Quad” ride! We covered some serious country, plowing through neck-high grass and across some very nasty rutted out gullies. One of the most difficult things about this type of riding is that you can’t always see what is in front of you. Cruising along in third gear and slamming the front left tire into an ant’s nest almost sent me flying over the handlebars! Somehow I kept my backside glued to the seat, but the quick snap of the bars left my forearm sore for hours. If the nest wasn’t bad enough, on the way back I got a serious dose of the real thing!

Green ants – they are horrible little things! Why do I hate them? That’s a tough one…there are so many reasons. Is it because they enjoy crawling up your leg undetected only to chomp away at the sensitive part of the inner thigh? Or could it be because they stink of rotten oranges when you smash them? Maybe because they manage to get into every nook & crannie no matter how well a person thinks he is zipped up. Nope. I think the real reason is because they loved to “dive-bomb” down onto my head from up in the trees!

As I was saying, on the way back to camp JP was riding in the front. He buzzed closely beside a sapling, shaking it on his way past. Unbeknownst to us the little creatures had decided to make this plant their home. He narrowly missed the full assault; I was not so lucky.  They came raining down on me – 1,000’s of them! I felt a sharp pain in the back of my neck, and then another, and another. I quickly spun around and spotted their nest lodged on the back of the quad rack. They were enraged and came spewing out like soldiers! I didn’t even wait until the quad came to a complete stop before bailing off. My partner got a good chuckle out of that one, of course what could I expect with me doing the funky chicken dance!

The next day we found ourselves once again wading through waist-high grass, across washed out creek beds, over fallen trees and down rocky slopes. We parked our quads atop a quartz covered saddle. It was the sort of place that just smelled of gold. Both gullies draining the hill had been completely taken down to bedrock by the old-timers! JP must have read my mind because before I could even get the words out he smiled, “This area was rich mate!!!” These were the most extensive workings I had seen thus far.

He headed off towards the lower, deeper ground while I attached one of Nugget Finder’s new 16” Super-Lite mono coils to the end of my GP3000. I was instinctively drawn to the banks of the gullies, which proved to be a big mistake. The old blokes weren’t afraid of tossing a bit of iron around the place! Not wanting to deal with the trash I wandered out of the main diggings and back onto the saddle. A few steps into it and a faint signal came through. A nice mellow sound, this one had a chance of being gold. The moment I began digging it felt as if the thermostat had been cranked up. It wasn’t long before my shirt was good and wet. Fifteen minutes later I was starring at the source of the noise, and it wasn’t covered in gold. What a disappointment…I jammed the old brass rivet in my pocket, whipped the sweat from my forehead and started to walk away. Of course I had to pick up another target not more than 4 inches away. I wanted to leave it in the ground (I really, really did), but what are you going to do in gold country? It would be foolhardy not to check it

I dug a few inches off and the target remained. “I’ve already come this far, might as well see it through,” I mumbled inside my head. WHACK! WHACK! I really laid into it this time, knowing full well that another piece of junk was waiting for me at the bottom. The digging wasn’t exceptionally hard, but the sweat stung as it dripped into my eyes. At 15+ inches the pick rang as I cracked hardly into a quartz rock. I grabbed it and tossed it out onto the heap. I rechecked the hole only to discover that the target was gone. “It couldn’t be….Could it?” I wondered. I cautiously waved the coil over the quartz fragment and the big ol’ specie let out a squeal! Little blobs of yellow metal protruded from its’ surface. Dry it weighed over a kilo!!! After a beating in the dolly pot, the quartz rock gave up somewhere in the neighborhood of 33 grams.

By now nearly 2 ½ weeks had passed, and I was getting perilously close to the end of my trip. We decided to take a gamble on an area that had been found back in the 1980’s, hoping it had not seen any of the more modern PI machines. It took a few passes, but we eventually found signs of the bull dozer “pushes.” The VLF’s had probably picked up most of the surface gold, but the spot was definitely worth a try.

We wandered around for most of the morning on the scrapes picking up the odd nugget here and there. Things weren’t looking incredibly good, but it is amazing how quickly one’s luck can change with a metal detector! To make a long story short, we had parked the quads on the bank of a sandy gully not knowing what treasures were lurking only a stone’s throw away. There was some celebrating going on that night as we poured out over half a pound of nuggets onto the scale!!! The biggest piece weighed in at 3.1 oz, the smallest just a hair over 1 gram. Enough gold to cover quad repairs and get on the waiting list for some new kidneys!

Coming to an End

Goodbye Land Down Under, hello Arizona! The three weeks I spent In the Cape seemed to fly by, and now I find myself back on American soil trying to figure out which side of the damn road I’m supposed to be on, and getting funny glances from the waitress when I ask for tomato paste instead of ketchup.

This was one of the more challenging areas I have ever detected in Australia; in fact I'd rate it right up there with the Northern Territory. The terrain is rough and grass is a royal pain, but these are some of the reasons why this region still holds so much potential. It was a wonderful experience that I would gladly repeat.

And the gold? Well, we never hit a million dollar patch, but during my relatively short visit, a total of 12 ounces came in. The best patch yielded 6-ounces, the heaviest specimen contained 50 grams, and the biggest raw nugget weighed 3.1 ounces. I left with a good handful; however the real gold was the time I got to spend in the field with a man whom I consider to be one of the top detectorists in the world. His understanding of the Minelab machines never ceases to amaze me. All the laughs, the highs & the lows, the box of wine around the campfire, and of course the cross-country quad rides will stick with me forever,….covering the cost of the airfare with gold was just a bonus. Thanks again mate for the memories!

Anyone yearning for taste of what it is like to go metal detecting in the Australian goldfields; may be interested in obtaining a copy of a brand new 3-hour video starring professional prospector Jonathan Porter. This production titled, Unleashing the GP Series, actually caught the 21-ounce “Cooee” Nugget coming out of the ground on film and is available from the author’s website at: www.arizonaoutback.com.