Well folks, Dredging season is over in California, as I pulled my dredge out of the Klamath River on Sept. 28th. I found lots of good flood gold most of it fine stuff with some small flakes. But no nuggets....

So since I was done dredging I decided to get out the GTI 2500 and try again to find some nugs, after 12 or so disappointing nugget shooting trips I decided to go far up Thompson creek about 7 miles up in the forest from the Klamath. I knew there was a gold mine up that way.

After parking I walked 1.5 miles before even detecting to find area near the mine which is on private property, so finally saw some diggings and decided to detect while still on BLM land.

Long story short....I FOUND ONE! WOOHOO!

As you see in the first pic, I got a signal in a crack in exposed bedrock that was shooting up out of the creek. It came in at #7 on GTA scale...I got excited, could be a bullet or nugget...figured it would be bullet..but nooo!, it was a 0.6 DWT nug.
First thought in my head was ...finally got one again with a detector...geez that took awhile...ahh but is sweet.

I like to use the 9.5 coil instead of the 10x5” DD coil, it is much noisier and hot rocks drive me nuts but the 10x5” DD coil is not very sensitive to small nuggets unless the detector has a higher frequency. The GTI 2500 probably would have heard this one with the DD coil but anything smaller might not, but it handles hot ground MUCH better.

The crack that I cleaned out with screw driver to locate my target. The nugget was at 4 inches, exactly what the GTI depth scale said it was at size A.

Tags: Hunting for gold nuggets in California