Mon, 16th Apr, 2018 Bush camp, 120km north of Laverton, WA (3 years & 8 months on the road)

Woke at 6am and saw the most beautiful sunrise. It was a lot redder than the photo shows.

Back to bed and up at 7.30am, 20 degrees with the van closed up from the night chill. It is cloudy and windy this morning.

We went for a drive trying to find other spots Doug Stone mentions in his book. Stopped and detected one area that was dry blown at some stage. Didn’t find any gold but Steve found a bower bird’s nest. He is collecting green, white and silver – no gold unfortunately. He even had three intact glass stoppers and a shell.

Found a blue feather nearby.

Checked out some more shafts which have had a trench dug between them.

We think we saw the bower bird hopping along the ground near the shafts but I didn’t get a photo of him. Will have to google what he looks like.

Followed an old drill rig track back to the main road then past Pinje-eija Hill which is a big shale layered hill. Found another track back in according to the book took us to where Doug’s mates had found a ‘Glory Hole’ and pulled out 50oz of gold nuggets – we wish.

Back to camp. We decided to move on so I got the washing done as we can get more water in Laverton. Even though it was cloudy there is still a nice drying breeze blowing.

Steve went for a wander with my detector over the scrapes nearby. He finished off our detecting here with a nice rock with gold specks all over it. Will see how it comes up in the Allibrite rather than crush it.

The sky cleared as we were having drinks by the fire and we even spotted a satellite while we were waiting for dinner to cook in the camp oven. Perfect temperature outside tonight so we ate by the fire.