Arizona Mountain Lion Track
Just the other day a good friend and I were doing some nugget shooting in the Arizona desert. We hit the ground hiking just after sunrise and man, by noon, it was hot with the sun baking off the wash walls. Due to the heat we had to hole up in the shade for a few hours around 2 PM. Must have been 105 degrees out.
As we sat, talked and laughed I thought about hard work and luck, and more importantly the amount of good luck coming your way often depends on your willingness to act. And we were in action, getting gold.
Animal tracks are on of my favorite signs of good luck for gold prospecting. Its not that I’m superstitious but I do try to notice patterns in life. Call it what you will, maybe nugget shooters intuition. But when I see animal tracks I do well with gold, coincidence maybe. Coincidence is logical.
Back to the gold, the heavy recent rains had exposed a very short stretch of new bedrock and that bedrock was prime. Cracks full of heavy black sands, hematite and magnetite and perhaps gold nuggets. A few garnets were easy to speck as well in the schist laden wash scattered here and there. We both were using our Minelab GP Extreme metal detectors often referred to as a GPX. I had also hiked in the Gold Bug 2 as a backup detector. I like to bring a backup detector on long hikes, just in case and it was a bit of a drive to Yuma. And the Gold Bug is simply an amazing machine on bedrock. Why not bring it!
We both knew the short new stretch of bedrock would only provide a limited number of targets and nuggets. And the Minelab detectors do cross talk at short ranges. I just wish more of that wash had freshly exposed bedrock. More fresh bedrock means more gold. Next rain!
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