VicGoldHunter said:
Im not in the golden triangle but where I live theres plenty of old mines and deep deep shafts around. A lot of gold was pulled out in the day. Is the gold on the surface or only deep in the ground? As Im aware areas around Bendigo you can detect for surface nuggets would this be the same around where iam to? Is there anything I should be looking for as telltale signs of gold?
Gday
As stated you will have to put in some time in research to see what information you can come up with in regards to what the old timers were getting the gold from, by this I mean that were they working alluvials or were they hard rock mining?, very often you can tell this by the workings themselves and having a walk around the area to see what they have been up to and to look for signs of how they were working the place, if there were just mines and little stone to be seen on the surface then its safe to say that they were probably taking the stone removed from the mine for crushing so it may have been more or less hard rock mining.
If for instance there are vast amounts of what looks like overburden gravel and sand then they were likely to be working deep leads, ancient riverbeds which means once digging down through the overburden and reaching the old riverbed they would have been processing the gravels for the gold nuggets, they could also be working the clay and you may see signs of puddlers and maybe old constructed water races were they could have been sluicing the material for the gold, some areas were heavily surfaced where they would take away all the surface soils and wash it out for the gold, the chinese were particularly good at this as it was very labour intensive.
If in these areas you find areas that have been scraped by a dozer or whatever you could probably assume that this was done for alluvial gold and for the the purpose of detecting the ground or removing the soil for dryblowing or washing, this is probably more common over here in the west mainly due to the lack of water supplies here in the early days.
The best method is to get on the ground with your detector and work the down slopes and flats beneath where the mines are located, also around the overburden with a small coil as you might ping some specimen nuggets as well as the old timers could only visually inspect the rock brought to the surface and often gold contained inside the rock was not seen and the rock discarded, you may or may not do any good in the area but at least you will get the answers you were looking for, just for the record some of the best areas I have worked were never known for alluvial gold by the old timers and were only discovered to have detectable gold in later years, and some of the best gold I have found was in areas that you would walk through to get to somewhere else, so its always worth the effort to spend the time in a place as you will find out one way or another.
cheers
stayyerAU
