I got out recently for a little metal detecting adventure here not far from my house...
For a while now I had been eyeing what appeared to be some old ruins way off in the distance, on state land, off from the roadway, as I drove to/from my gold prospecting trips.
Well, it was blowing pretty good, but the afternoon temp was up to about 45-50 degrees, and I had several hours to play, so I fired up my White's MXT, got my earphones, equipment and went for an "adventure"...
After a short hike across some rolling terrain, sure enough....old ruins. What surprised me was the extent of them. There was basically a "house" dug back into the bank, with several rooms & an old wood stove remains inside. The roof was sod covered & collapsing into itself.
There were several other stone foundations beside it, telling me there were probably about 3 other buildings at one time. Scattered around were the remains of several very old, rusted mattresses, another wood stove, lots and lots of iron, wire, scrap tin cans and broken glass.
Impossible to tell if this was an old mining setup or a ranching setup.
As you might imagine, my MXT was screaming "Iron" endlessly. I hunted out front, out back, all over hoping to get even one signal that said "$1" or "50 cents" or "25 cents". Nope. Nada. Guess these past occupants were dirt poor, had no coins to lose.
This place was built up just above a bit of a dry wash/dry creek. However, I could see that at least at some times there's been water flowing down the gulch, washing the rocks & gravels. With the recent wet snows it appeared that all was directly soaking into the porous, rocky ground, so I am guessing that snow melt wasn't washing the creek bed, but possibly big summer thunderstorms in the past that really pounded down faster than the ground could absorb it all.
I detected up the creek bed and kept getting strong signals at points, and after digging I realized it was heavy layering of iron-rich black sand setting off my detector! Just upstream about 100 yards I came to a wide, open spot that looked like it MAY have been mined out in years past. So, could the cabins been old miner's cabins from the late 1800s, or 1930's Depression Era, older? Real hard to tell... I decided to fill up some Ziplock bags in my backpack with as much black sand material to pan out back at home, to test for "color".
I stopped, had a ham sandwich, and enjoyed the moment/lunch out of the wind in the gulch. All around was heavy Elk sign......pills, footprints, browse marks. I could see the Elk, which were just over the hill actually, liked this place to forage. Cool.
About 2 hours after starting my adventure I headed home. I had found several lead bullets, some cool pieces of purple glass & old broken china/pottery & 2 bags of material to pan.
Back at home I panned out the 2 bags, and not surprisingly, found about 5 really tiny micro specks of gold in my last of 4 pans of material. Loads of black sand, but not enough color to work, let alone hardly see. A lack of water there sure would make prospecting near impossible.
So, had a great adventure, found a few specks of gold, if not a huge cash box of 1800s gold coins.
Hope you get out on a detecting adventure soon, and "dig up" some history...
Randy "C-17A"
www.goldadventures.biz