A Golden Dream Come True Part-2
The sun was out and in full force, and it had to already be 60 degrees when we took a break for lunch. The snow was melting rapidly, which was great. By the end of the day, we had recovered 11 gold nuggets. With the spring-like weather we were getting and knowing we had a new hot-spot, we decided to drive to the nearest town and stay in a warm cozy motel. With the dreams of more gold to be found, it was hard to get much sleep that night. We were both up and ready to go before any bird had eaten a worm that morning, and we were back on the road to our new spot.
It didn’t freeze that night, and most of the snow had melted off throughout the night. We realized that we had to start heading home by noon, and that gave us just a few hours for detecting. Our shallow ravine was almost completely free of snow, so that is where we
started detecting. Almost immediately I found a nice nugget just under a half ounce that was close to a foot deep. Then I rechecked my hole, and guess what? There was another target in there! I dug out another couple inches of soil, only to find a 4.5 gram nugget. Yes! I had found two nice nuggets in the exact same hole. Unbelievable!
We picked up a couple smaller pieces, and the out of nowhere I heard it! It sounded like big broad mineralization, but just a little different. It wasn’t very loud, but I felt like I could pinpoint a center of this area from every direction I swung the coil and it would repeat every time. It was time to get serious now, so I starting digging. I was down about a foot and the signal was getting louder, but I still just wasn’t completely convinced I had a metallic target yet. This ground was very hard and I was tired of digging. So I took a break, with plans of returning to investigate it further.
I left the hole and moved up the ravine a little bit and, “Bingo” I heard another sound much like the target I was just digging on, but this one was much louder and I could tell for sure it wasn’t just ground noise. My tired body managed to dig down about 14 inches and out popped a gorgeous nugget well over a half ounce. I stood there in shock, trying to catch my breath, and thought “Holy Cow! If that hole I was previously digging also has a nugget in it, it’s got to be that once-in-a-lifetime, one-ounce-plus-size trophy nugget.”
I went back to the previous hole I wasn’t sure about and dug another 4 inches out of it. I stuck my trusty 16” round mono coil in the hole. What do you think it did? That’s when I really got excited. I knew then that it had to be a nugget because it was really singing now, which got my legs to really start shaking. I was now down near a foot and a half, I’m not joking. I decided to walk back to the truck and get my smaller detector to see if I could pinpoint it. The last thing I wanted to do was hit my soon-to-be largest nugget ever with my pick and put one heck of a signature on it. I had heard of that happening and did not want to do the same.
I kept telling myself that this nugget had been patiently waiting there for thousands of years, so it could easily wait a few minutes longer. There was no need to get in a hurry, right? I can’t explain the excitement and rush that was coursing through my body because I knew this was gold! This was the moment I had been dreaming about for years and the anticipation of getting it in my hands was killing me. They nugget may be able to wait, but I surely couldn’t wait any longer.
So I put the search coil of the smaller detector in the hole and as I had hoped, it was there. But the signal was pretty faint, which told me it was still a ways down. The best part is that the detector was not discriminating out the target, meaning it wasn’t a hunk of iron. That was a big relief. I dug some more, and was down nearly 20 inches now and the detector was really screaming.
I finally nudged it off the bedrock and pulled it out of the hole at close to 2 feet deep. It was by far the largest and best gold nugget I had ever dug. It weighed 44.6 grams, or just a hair under 1.5 troy ounces! You want to talk about excitement? I thought for sure that it would remain my biggest nugget for a long time, but I was happy to have that proven wrong. No more than 20 feet from that one I found and 89-gram nugget at over 2 feet deep! This huge nugget was even more exciting than the previous nugget because I could tell from the signal it was even bigger, and I would have bet my paycheck that it was a nugget.
By the time we had this patch cleaned out we had recovered almost a pound of pure, adrenaline-rushing Nevada high desert gold nuggets. We had found several trophy-class nuggets, plus a nice vial full of smaller ones to boot. It truly was a golden dream come true..
