Creswick and Wedderburn - Golden Triangle Newbie

[Xadz]

Hey guys,

I know time and time again you get people coming on here expecting people to tell you where you've found gold. But that's not why I'm here.

This Thursday I plan on heading out to Creswick Regional Park, I was tossing up between Creswick and Wedderburn.

I have a Gold Monster 1000 that I bought today and I'm definitely still learning the ropes.

I'm just seeking some advice from knowledgeable people who know where to start, I don't know ground I'm looking for or anything. I really just want a point in the right direction so I can learn what I'm looking for, what I should expect and some guidance to walk in the right direction instead of the opposite way.

Is there any advice you can give me to what to look for or where to at least begin so I can begin my gold journey in the right direction.

Thanks in advance.

James

 

[OzzieAu]

Sorry bud, but after being a member here for 7 years, surely you have read and learnt something to help you get started by now.
Just start with some good gold diggings maps of the area.

 

[Hawkear]

Gold detecting isn't as easy as it might seem and I would suggest you get out to one or preferably both of your chosen places as soon as you can. If I had just one suggestion it would be to buy one of the Tully or Barnham goldfield maps for the area you are going to. Knowledge is what you need and those maps are a very good and cheap source of information. I just wish they were available when I started and could have saved me a lot of time, effort and money.
They will at least show you where the old timers found the gold. Go to the top of any of the gullies shown and dig every signal.
That will be the start of your learning experience. There is probably just too much advice to give here for someone starting out other than to just do it.
We all would love to hear of your experience and then the tips will start coming.

 

[Moneybox]

Your detector is small and has a very limited depth of detection. Stick to shallow ground. Gold is heavy and works its way down to a solid base but if that is far below the surface your detector won't reach it. Ignore the soft deep soil.

 

[Xadz]

Sorry bud, but after being a member here for 7 years, surely you have read and learnt something to help you get started by now.
Just start with some good gold diggings maps of the area.

Hey mate I appreciate the reasoning. I've been inactive for 6 years and 11 months of that time. I didn't have the financial or physical wellbeing when I joined to pursue this passion.

I have certainly looked at some old gold digging maps and appreciate the input

Gold detecting isn't as easy as it might seem and I would suggest you get out to one or preferably both of your chosen places as soon as you can. If I had just one suggestion it would be to buy one of the Tully or Barnham goldfield maps for the area you are going to. Knowledge is what you need and those maps are a very good and cheap source of information. I just wish they were available when I started and could have saved me a lot of time, effort and money.
They will at least show you where the old timers found the gold. Go to the top of any of the gullies shown and dig every signal.
That will be the start of your learning experience. There is probably just too much advice to give here for someone starting out other than to just do it.
We all would love to hear of your experience and then the tips will start coming.

 

[Xadz]

Your detector is small and has a very limited depth of detection. Stick to shallow ground. Gold is heavy and works its way down to a solid base but if that is far below the surface your detector won't reach it. Ignore the soft deep soil.

No problem, I understand the GM1000 isn't an amazing machine. Just hoping it will help me learn before I invest in something abit more powerful and expensive. I appreciate the advise.

 

[20x]

No problem, I understand the GM1000 isn't an amazing machine. Just hoping it will help me learn before I invest in something abit more powerful and expensive. I appreciate the advise.

The gold monster IS a amazing machine when applied to the right scenario..

 

[Xadz]

The gold monster IS a amazing machine when applied to the right scenario..

From what I've watched and read, it really stands out on old mullock heaps and finding missed gold from workings and shallow gold upto about 5 inches. You'll find something sizeable if it happens to be shallow enough which would be luck based out in those areas as they have been worked plenty.

Am I on the right track?

 

[Dave79]

Don't be afraid to scrape a few inches off the top of mullock heaps and thoroughly detect the scrapings and new surface. VLF machines with a small coil like the gold monster and my equinox will find tiny little slivers of gold that PI machines miss, but I've found that they are only really good for the top 2 inches for subgram bits.These little specs came from someone else's scrapings on a recent prospecting association trip.

 

[Xadz]

I'll keep that in mind.

Thanks for the tip exactly what I'm looking for, a little guidance in the right way I really appreciate it.

 

[kiwifred]

Remember, the top of the mullock heap is usually the bottom of the hole.
find any spot with heaps of mullock heaps.....start at one end and away you go
low and slow is the way to go.....as if your shoes are tied together, after your 3rd heap you would have worked a few things out
dig every signal...

 

[Xadz]

So it's official I'm hooked.

Went out to Creswick today. Omg, I actually couldn't believe my eyes, old timers ruined that place in the search for gold. It was like nothing I've ever seen before.

Now I followed some Geovic research and some old gold maps and pretty much explored for 3 hours and detected for 3 hours. I noticed a few things.

1. All the giant workings (near Slatey creek and Hamburg hill) all had GIANT mounds of quartz heaps everywhere, I tried detecting it but came up with nothing. Am I suppose to be detecting the heaps or the actual gullies they've created following gold?

2. There are some complete parts of the forest that haven't been dug at all so I would assume that the old timers knew there was no gold to be had there and I would be wasting my time going through there?

3. Hot rocks are real, everything I found today seemed to be a hot rock, I brought them all home to smash and try my luck but they were lighting my detector up. Is this normal?

4. Is there any good sources of what I should be looking for, particularly for Victoria. I'm just not really sure what im suppose to be detecting, I know that sounds stupid it was just very overwhelming.

 

[Hawkear]

Hi Xadz. Well done to get out and see for yourself the nature of the task. You probably picked one of the more difficult goldfield at Creswick in terms of reading the ground as the ground there is generally deeper and there has been a lot of hydraulic sluicing done to remove the soil overburden and things do seem rather chaotic.
1. The piles of quartz are most likely left over from sluicing and not stuff dug from the bottom of a diggers hole so my advice would be to give them a miss as I would the gullies unless I could see bedrock.
2. I would definitely try the undisturbed parts as the old timers didn’t find all the rich places. Most of the Creswick gold comes from secondary deposits, old creek or river beds which are now exposed on hillsides by subsequent erosion. Look for shallow soil cover and quartz pebbles that indicate erosion of a higher level (possibly now completely eroded away river deposit or lead as we say).
3. No it is not normal to have hot rocks everywhere in Creswick. I am sorry but I can’t help you with any advice regarding setting on the Gold Monster but perhaps others can. No matter what detector you have you have to adjust the ground balance function to be as stable as possible over whatever ground you are detecting.
4 Do get modern detecting maps. They cost $20 - $25 each And are much more specific in areas that should be tried rather than geological publications. I wouldn’t be too discouraged as not all goldfields are like Creswick and certainly not like the Slaty Creek/ Humbug Hill area ( the latter name says something). Try another goldfield in the GT and you may find them easier to read with detecting maps.
Also test out your machine thoroughly, bury targets, lead shot, coins, and some of the hot rocks you found and practice with settings on your machine to the point that you can pick a true target.
You are trying to catch up with 20 - 30 years of leaning that some of us have. So if you see an old prospector be nice to him and shout him a beer it might be worth it.

 

[Xadz]

Hi Xadz. Well done to get out and see for yourself the nature of the task. You probably picked one of the more difficult goldfield at Creswick in terms of reading the ground as the ground there is generally deeper and there has been a lot of hydraulic sluicing done to remove the soil overburden and things do seem rather chaotic.
1. The piles of quartz are most likely left over from sluicing and not stuff dug from the bottom of a diggers hole so my advice would be to give them a miss as I would the gullies unless I could see bedrock.
2. I would definitely try the undisturbed parts as the old timers didn’t find all the rich places. Most of the Creswick gold comes from secondary deposits, old creek or river beds which are now exposed on hillsides by subsequent erosion. Look for shallow soil cover and quartz pebbles that indicate erosion of a higher level (possibly now completely eroded away river deposit or lead as we say).
3. No it is not normal to have hot rocks everywhere in Creswick. I am sorry but I can’t help you with any advice regarding setting on the Gold Monster but perhaps others can. No matter what detector you have you have to adjust the ground balance function to be as stable as possible over whatever ground you are detecting.
4 Do get modern detecting maps. They cost $20 - $25 each And are much more specific in areas that should be tried rather than geological publications. I wouldn’t be too discouraged as not all goldfields are like Creswick and certainly not like the Slaty Creek/ Humbug Hill area ( the latter name says something). Try another goldfield in the GT and you may find them easier to read with detecting maps.
Also test out your machine thoroughly, bury targets, lead shot, coins, and some of the hot rocks you found and practice with settings on your machine to the point that you can pick a true target.
You are trying to catch up with 20 - 30 years of leaning that some of us have. So if you see an old prospector be nice to him and shout him a beer it might be worth it.

Hi Hawkear,

Thank you so much for your invaluable information.


After reading your post I feel so much better positioned for the next time I head out and I cannot thank you enough. It must of taken a while to write all of that

For some reason I didn't realise Creswick is considered a "hard" goldfield. I realised once I got there it has a lot of mineralisation and I was having to ground balance every 20 - 30 meters, sometimes less.

Have you got any tips on a more beginner friendly location that might help me settle into the machine a tad more?

 

[Dave79]

I don't know vic, but as stated above, get a gold map and look for shallow leads and diggings.
No matter where you end up, Slow Down! You'd be be in with more of a chance if you only cover 20-30m in a day and get into all the difficult spots rather than just going over the easy grounds that everyone else has already been over. And ground balancing every meter or 2 will cut down on the hotrocks.

 

[Hawkear]

I drew this diagram for a newbie who I sold a detector to a few years back. It shows a typical if idealised drawing of a goldfields gully.
Usually you will access them from a track that runs along a larger run of diggings (7). The side gully may run some hundreds of metres towards a reef and then peter out.
The reef (1) together with parallel reefs will usually run slightly West of North in most Victorian goldfields and can extend over many metres as well. Usually however only a small section of the reef was found to be rich (2) and is called a "shoot".
This is where most of the gold in the gully probably came from through erosion of many vertical metres of the shoot. The gold spread from the shoot line downslope (3 & 9) ending up in the gully (4)
Early diggers often constructed dams (5) and doughnut shaped ditches (puddlers) (6) in which they "puddled" their diggings to free the gold from clay.
Gullies usually had a rich section where holes were spaced closely together and often corresponded where the gully slope flattened out and were expanded into single larger pits (4).
Near the top where the soil was shallow and the gold rich the old timers could dig everything down to the bedrock and put it through the puddler. This is called surfacing (3).
When the gold return made that less profitable they left unpuddled ground (9) between the shoot and the main gully.
As far as detecting is concerned I would look at the tops of each heap, around the puddler because that is where they brought their gold wash (and rubbish), In the surfaced areas and especially in the ground above surfaced areas. Also try right along the sides of the gull (8) as gully courses can shift over time leaving old deposits higher on the hillside and even above the end of the gully.
Many of the modern detecting maps will show hundreds of gullies which on inspection show a similar pattern and provide opportunity for years of work.
Of course for the more adventurous a wander among the hills can occasionally turn up patches that even the old timers and the modern detecting maps missed.

 

[grubstake]

For some reason I didn't realise Creswick is considered a "hard" goldfield. I realised once I got there it has a lot of mineralisation and I was having to ground balance every 20 - 30 meters, sometimes less.
Have you got any tips on a more beginner friendly location that might help me settle into the machine a tad more?

Creswick is only 'hard' in the sense that it was wetter than the more northern areas of the Golden Triangle and water, from both natural and miner-made sources, has reshaped the landscape, making it more difficult to identify and understand potential gold sources and deposition.

Unfortunately, mineralisation further north is mostly worse for detector prospecting, caused by iron-rich, reddish soils and clay in most gold-bearing areas

 

[Hawkear]

Grubstakes point is well taken here and the further north and drier the goldfields become the more iron rich the ground. The yellow clays around Creswick have I think been leached of much of their iron content and are generally milder in terms of ground balance. On reflection that may be why Xadz had some much trouble with them in Creswick trying to balance between the extremes of a mild soil and hot ron enriched rocks.
As I said I have had no experience with a gold monster but my recommendation for any newbie is to go with a top grade detector which can handle the extremes of soil and hot rock mineralisation.
A secondhand 5000 (with small coils forget the big coils for now) or 2300 are relatively cheap these days and are almost guaranteed to find gold in any goldfield. If you can't afford to have one sitting around unused for the next twelve months sell it again after you've had your time with it.
Gold detecting can be fun but at the end of the day the real objective is to find gold and unfortunately nothing can be more damaging to ones enthusiasm than having an inadequate detector and failing to find your first and second bit of golden joy.

 

[Big Johno]

Grubstakes point is well taken here and the further north and drier the goldfields become the more iron rich the ground. The yellow clays around Creswick have I think been leached of much of their iron content and are generally milder in terms of ground balance. On reflection that may be why Xadz had some much trouble with them in Creswick trying to balance between the extremes of a mild soil and hot ron enriched rocks.
As I said I have had no experience with a gold monster but my recommendation for any newbie is to go with a top grade detector which can handle the extremes of soil and hot rock mineralisation.
A secondhand 5000 (with small coils forget the big coils for now) or 2300 are relatively cheap these days and are almost guaranteed to find gold in any goldfield. If you can't afford to have one sitting around unused for the next twelve months sell it again after you've had your time with it.
Gold detecting can be fun but at the end of the day the real objective is to find gold and unfortunately nothing can be more damaging to ones enthusiasm than having an inadequate detector and failing to find your first and second bit of golden joy.

Some good advice there boys. My only comment is to reenforce Daves point SLOW DOWN, Slow down , then when your thinking you've slowed down, SLOW DOWN. I guarantee that newbies walk over a lot of small gold , and experienced ol buzzards like us walk over gold when we get impatient.

 

[Xadz]

Alot of amazing information to take in.

First investment will be some Doug Stone and John Tully maps I think, that way I can take them with me instead of trying to look at stuff on my phone.

Does anyone know where I can read about how gold made its way to Ballarat and therefore Creswick to try and understand where it came from and formed?

I think I need to slow down. I tried walking like a had my shoe laces tied but you know the exciting of swinging the coil for the first time must of increased my pace.

You guys are super helpful, it's nice to see some seasoned prospectors passing on their knowledge. It's really appreciated.