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First stop after packing up was Finders Keepers which is a shop in Kalgoorlie where you can hire metal detectors for the day, they give you a half hour lesson on how to use the detector then off you go into the wild.
After studying our mining maps to find the perfect spot to start our prospecting (with the help of a GPS) we headed 20ks East to the old town of Kanowna, which is no longer there, just an old cemetery. After wandering around the old cemetery for a bit we got out our equipment and headed out. I was up first with Chris following behind to dig for all the gold I was about to find, unfortunately for me Chris was wearing steel cap boots so every time he got to close my detector would start going crazy and I would jump around in excitement thinking I had struck it rich this only happened about 100 times before it clicked what was going on. (Blonde moment number 1055)
We didn’t have any luck our first day out other than some used bullets that may have been used to populate the cemetery, so we went driving though the bush to our next spot that we thought looked promising, we found a beautiful peaceful bit of ground and set up camp for the night, it was a beautiful still night with a gorgeous sunset, we didn’t see any animals or even many birds which was a bit of a surprise.
The next morning after rising before the sun and with Chris strapped into the detector and we were off, we wandered around for a while only finding little bits of old metal we saw lots of holes where other people had been but not much else, its easy to see how people get lost out in the bush everything looks the same.
At lunch time we went back to the car and decided to try somewhere else, with the map and Chris’s longitude and latitude deductions we made it out alive. At 1.06pm we were sitting down eating lunch when we felt the whole ground shake we thought it was an earthquake, it turns out it was blasting at the super pit (20ks away) we couldn’t believe how strong it was.
We did a little bit more prospecting after lunch with not much luck, the closest we got to gold was Ari Gold so we packed up to have the equipment back by 4pm, by this time we were so stuffed we just needed to find a shower and a beer.
We have decided that maybe we need to buy a detector, even though we didn’t strike gold and aren’t going to be ordering our second Mongolian hot pot anytime soon, we had a ball wandering around the great Aussie bush and camping under the stars we will be doing this again soon.
Kanowna – beginning in 1894 on the discovery of gold the population grew to 12,500 by 1899 and even had a train station and a race track, the town is now just a sign on the side of the road and the odd tumble weed.
CameronCorner 