Planning the fall trip
Virgin Valley in the fall. What the claim looks like in late summer, and what we go in expecting.
The annual trip to the claim in Virgin Valley runs late summer or early fall. We hold a ten-acre claim in the northwest corner of Nevada, up near the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge. Eight hours from Santa Cruz. No cell signal past a certain point. Dirt roads for the last stretch. The antelope are indifferent.
The realistic expectation going in is: move a lot of bentonite, look at every lump, find mostly nothing useful. Virgin Valley gives up material in uneven bursts. You can work several days and pull nothing worth keeping, and then a corner of the wall opens up and there's a color bar in the clay that stops you cold. The piece in the photo above came out of exactly that kind of moment — wet, fresh, the color running all the way to the surface.
What's different about fall material
Fall trips produce two categories of finds: fresh material out of the current working face, and tailings — pieces that have been sitting exposed in the dump pile for multiple seasons, slowly drying. The tailings are prioritized. A piece that has been through three or four summer-winter cycles in open air without crazing is telling you something about its stability. Fresh material from the face goes straight into a water dome. The tailings get watched in dry air for a few months before any decision about cutting.