On 09 September 2022 I had gotten the itch to prospect with my GPX5000 and look for the famed “nugget patch” everyone is so eager to find. I wasn’t 500 feet from my dads doorstep walking behind his house when I got a signal. That signal turned out to be a 2.3 gram nugget of rough gold!
This is where it got tricky, I had a friend of mine come over and examine the area where I found my first metal detector nugget. He had a Minelab GPZ7000 with a GP19 coil. He also knew a whole lot about gold prospecting, hard rock mining, geology, and metal detecting methods. He was the previous owner of the famous Colorado quartz mine. Located in Mariposa California. When he got here we spent three hours metal detecting 100 feet up the slope where the nugget was found; aswell as 50 feet on each side looking for the brothers and sisters of my exciting piece of gold. When he had gotten tired he decided it was time to go down the hill and give up. “That nugget must have fallen out of some poor miners pocket or slipped out of a burlap sack full of gold.” The following week I would spend some time every day walking the hill sides while swinging my GPX5000 which I had finally gotten my college degree to know how to properly tune & use it. One day I had gotten another signal, thinking it was going to be trash again I slowly proceeded to dig it up from the ground. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I pulled out a solid round 1 inch quartz-gold specimen weighing in at 13 grams! The hunt was on.. I could go on and recount every single one of my finds and the excitement that came with them, but I could write a book by then. Long story short, It has been 1 year and 2 months since my first metal detected gold nugget, and my specific gravity gold total is over 15 POUNDS!!!(gold weight only) most of which is coarse-big nuggets and crystalline gold quartz specimens.
