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Never quench your detector in water or any other liquids

Well not exactly a big welcome back to the gold but the Monster did not disappoint! My first trip back out since my knee injury and 2 hours was enough. Oh ... Almost forgot ... the nugget was a whopping 0.24 grains! LOL! Paid for the gas to get out of the driveway but that is about it! Bigger and better next time!

I do not believe it is petrified wood

Glad you were able to get out and score! Lots of open land around where you live that has nuggets on them. Go geet some more! Tom H.

Cypress is beautiful wood, never new about the knees though. Very cool! I actually took a paleontology class in college but it was mainly about invertebrates and vertebrates, we didn’t do anything with plants unfortunately. I’ll have to research cypress a little bit more to see if there’s any of it found out here in the west. Your idea about fungi is good too, this thing has some weird growth patterns to it or it was broken off or something. Thanks!

Looks a bit like a cypress knee. Maybe some similar nub that grew up from a root system. Or maybe some type of growth influenced by fungi. Its cool. It's certainly not your average chunk of pet wood.

I love water!! When im deer and elk hunting i use Wilderness Athlete for hydration and recovery along with lots of goog ol water! Not a soda or beer drinker so i guess im kind of boring haha.

Scientists have accidentally discovered details about a "very exciting" planet orbiting a nearby star system, which is thought to contain more water than Earth. The scientific interest in the planet, known as Nu2 Lupi d, was sparked after researchers spotted it using the European Space Agency's Cheops satellite. It orbits a sun-like star around 50 light years away from us that is visible with the naked eye, has a mild atmospheric temperature and appears to contain a large amount of water. https://www.newsweek.com/scientists-accidentally-find-very-exciting-unique-exoplanet-more-water-earth-1613902

Thank you.

Absolutely not. We need a ceiling. It is a matter of national security. Alpha Centauri is not sending their best aliens. Some could be criminals or have diseases. Others may be good life forms. We just don't know. You guys that don't support the ceiling just want to give extraterrestrials free housing and benefits. You support open skies and the destruction of our great planet by these invaders. You just want to destroy what our brave men and women in uniform fought and died for.

Instead of an expensive ceiling, if we just keep acting the way we’ve been acting, they’ll probably want to stay away.

It seems a much more likely explanation than flying spaghetti monsters from Alpha Centauri. But that is just my opinion. It certainly could be an invasion of aliens. Maybe we should build a ceiling to keep them out?

OK, I’ll pull up a chair and throw another log into the fire. Given that the US seems to be the only country releasing videos of those ‘UFO’s’, it’s logical that it may be us showing off to the other guys while keeping it secure. Why else would someone be flying them over the ocean with so much Naval security ‘escorts’ nearby? Remember when the US finally publicly announced the stealth fighters and bombers? People had reported seeing them flying over various testing ranges before that and there was a lot of speculation as to what they were, and they wanted to start flying them in daytime and had to release the news about their existence. Making them appear as mystery sightings may be another way of announcing it as a warning to other countries without divulging too much about them. I think we are most probably alone as for a living planet within the Solar System, still hoping that Curiosity or Endeavour find some evidence of fossilized life forms. But as for the whole Universe? Definitely there is life. What and where? Can’t answer that one. But statistically, it is pretty much a given that it has independently started in a lot of places out there.

Beautiful weather! It is interesting hearing what lightening does to a Pi machine, along with AM radios, they make good lightening detectors!

Wondering if I could purchase the 6000 from you Bill and have a day outing in your area this winter. I’m leaving Fla in a week and driving out to Reno. I use my monster up in the sierras area and do pretty good but again the fires may keep me out. So there’s always Rye Patch. My first nugget came from there. Hope to do business with you. Patty

Wouldn't it be a hoot if aliens were just billionaires from another planet? I think the consensus among all the experts is that life does exist out there somewhere. It just about has to. It would be ridiculous to think life is unique to our planet given the vastness of space and all the possibilities out there. Believing UFOs come from outer space is quite different than believing there is life out there on a distant planet. Wouldn't you agree Slim?

The texture in the last couple photos do look like wood. But it is really difficult to tell. Wood agate can be just about any color. And sometimes it doesn't look anything like wood. It's more about the crystalline structure of the material. Whether it is glassy or sugary in texture and how it flakes off when chipped. Agates and jaspers are "in between" glassy obsidian and crystalline quartz. They are not quite glass but pretty darn close. They flake with a conchoidal fracture but at steeper angles than the glassy stuff like obsidian and opal. What you have does not look glassy enough to be petrified wood. But it certainly could be. It is definitely a silica rich rock but the texture indicates it is coarser grained than an agate and probably formed under a bit more pressure than an agate would form. I bet if you look closely with a magnifier you will see the crystal structure on the surface of a fresh break. It won't look glassy and smooth but frosted and a bit textured. That will tell you whether the rock is microcrystalline like an agate or crystalline like a quartzite. If it is frosty and crystalline it is not petrified wood.

That's a cool little piece cut like that. Save some for a comparative collection. I think it's probably quartzite - metamorphized sandstone (partially melted) with the grainy texture still intact. If it was fully melted and glassy, it would have been obsidian. And as you found out, it is very hard and does not streak well. Don’t apologize for posting these, it's great practice for all of us geology students!

But, according to some of our "experts", it would be impossible for life to be on it.

Max, back in my younger days, I used to be a whitewater guide for a company that brought access challenged people on river trips. Some of the clients back then had awesome off-road chairs that had really heavy lead-acid batteries on them, but now with lithium batteries, there are some amazing chairs for backcountry use out there. I don’t know the level of your mobility, but if it’s hard to walk on unlevel and rocky terrain, I saw one type with tracks being used on a trail that looked like a mini tracked Bobcat. It was called a trackchair. Something like one of those may give you really good access for prospecting. Kinda pricey though I imagine, even the cost of a basic medical-grade mobility chair is ridiculous! Edit: found it- it’s called an action trackchair http://actiontrackchair.com/trackchair-st/ I bet if you could figure out a way to modify it to use those tracks as a double riffleboard for a mobile drywasher system!

Yea I was told it was the "wrong type of rock" by some stud rock wizard but it was just eye catching and very unique in the sense that it is shaped like an egg, the back looks like a shattered egg shell, and in the flat side it looks just like a chicken embryo? Baby? Whatever. Before I was schooled I had done researched dodo bird and their egg size and was so excited that I had the only dodo egg I knew of. Sometimes education is such a let down. Maybe those same nice people will put me in a museum

Not at all Bob. If the planet of origin is unknown it would be ridiculous to rule it out.