Nugget Patches Still Out There!

Chris Gholson

What a weekend! Clear blue skies, wide open spaces, great company and best of all – gold! I spent an enjoyable two days prospecting the deserts of Arizona with my close friend Joe Kauffman. We met up 5:30 AM Saturday morning to try our luck on a secret spot I discovered last summer. It was a new area to me and I did pull a small handful of nuggets the first time I turned on the detector. I had intentions of working it a bit harder, but with daytime temperatures cracking 110 degrees, it was just way too miserable to be crawling around in the gullies. Now that the weather had cooled off I mentioned the place to Joe explaining that I had barely scratched the surface last summer. He agreed, so off we went with our Minelabs and Nugget Finders in hand.

It didn’t take long to realize that there was definitely more gold to be had. Within four sweeps of the coil I picked up a faint, little target in the bedrock. A few chops with the pick released a flat nugget wedged in a crack! That tiny nugget triggered the frenzy. The two of us spaced out enough so our detectors wouldn’t interfere and went to work. Within minutes Joe had snagged a half-gram nugget; a few feet away he picked up two more. I spiraled around combing the bedrock and plucked 4 tiny ones, each weighing not more than a few grains. Things were getting exciting! The monsoon rains had really helped churn up the gully exposing new stretches of bedrock that were previously buried.

The gold was coming in so steady that neither of us could force ourselves to take a break until late afternoon. By that time we had netted over 52 nuggets. It had been quite the day and both of us were starting to feel it, so we planned to call it quits and head back in the morning. The following day proved almost as lucrative. Working as a team, we concentrated on a particularly deep stretch of the gully. With one guy detecting and one guy digging, we were able to quickly pinpoint and recover an additional 33 pieces of gold! A nearby Palo Verde tree provided a nice shady spot to count up and weigh our haul. We finished off with 85 nuggets for a grand total of 30.5-grams. The biggest piece weighed less than 2-grams, but it was a real treat digging up all those small ones.