June 2020

So, late and extremely tired we arrive at the tenement. Beyond the locked gate was a miners track that in places was as good as any of the unsealed roads we had been on but others where the rain had washed parts of the road away, needed some very determined and gentle manoeuvring in our little Subaru Forrester that was not really built for this environment.

We were looking for the site of some old test drill holes but when we couldn’t find them decided that where we were looked as good a spot as any and camped there. Later, when I gave my new birthday present (a drone) it’s inaugural flight I discovered that we were in fact camping on one of the drill holes. I must say that I was pretty impressed with my navigational skills!

This was an impressive landscape, in order to prepare for this trip, Debbie and I had undertook a brief geology course to help us in the words of our tutor, Aaron (remember him, the expert detector salesman) to find the haystack. WA is so big that before you can find the needle you have to find the haystack. Well, this site had pretty much all of the geology Aaron had told us to look out for, we must find gold here surely. Again, the metal detector found plenty of metal but alas after a week of digging, no gold.

As we sat around the camp fire in the evenings we noted how much quicker we were getting at identifying our targets, it used to take about 20 mins from the first indications of a target to confirming that we were looking at a staple or a hot rock and could move on, we were now down to around 6 or 7 mins. Next week we would find our first nugget for sure.