I woke up early Sunday morning. It was still dark. As I lay there, I thought to myself, what do I want to do on my birthday. The first thing that came to mind was metal detecting. But where to go? Then it hit me, that old camp site!
About 10 years ago I was deer hunting, but as usual I was metal detecting when I should've been hunting. Now don't get me wrong, if a buck had attacked me, I would have defended myself, even though it would have taken time out of my metal detecting . While detecting this old campsite, I found a shield nickel, a seated liberty dime, and a 2 1/2 dollar gold piece. With this in mind, I decided it was time to revisit the site.
One good thing about this site, it was a long drive and a short hike. After I arrived in the area, it did take awhile to hike around and locate the old camp site, things have changed in the last 10 years. One of the really great things about this site, it's at a elevation of 4900 feet in the Sierra Nevada, I truly love the higher elevations.The weather at that elevation is extremely nice, it was almost cold.
It was about 8 to 8 30 in the morning when I finally got things set up and started detecting. As usual I brought my camera along. These days I have as much fun doing videos as I do detecting.
After detecting for while, I was able to narrow the area down to where an old cabin had been. I set up a grid in this area and started cleaning the iron out. It was extremely slow going because there was a ton of metal in the ground.
After several hours of detecting, I was rewarded with a old belt buckle and two coins. One was an 1806 British two pence piece, in extremely good condition. The other, was an old Chinese coin. This site is very old, 1850 to 1860. I found quite a few beautiful old bottles that were broken. Despite a lot of digging I was unable to find a whole one.
I feel this site has a lot of potential and I will definitely be going back to it. Next trip - I will be shooting for a gold coin and a whole bottle, or a whole bottle full of gold coins!