Prospecting for gold and came up with coins

[Dgoldman]

Last Friday a friend and I went up to the East Fork in San Gabriel. We hiked in to a spot where we have found gold before. Armed with our detectors and digging tools we began the hunt. This area where we were at a year ago coughed up 4 Standing Liberty coins, two by accident in my buddy's sluice and two with my detector. Our mission was to find gold and detect for more coins. The gold was little to none this day but Lady Luck was on our side with a few more coins. This area has a lot of history in gold mining from the late 1800's. I have researched the location we were hunting and found it to be a tent city with a few miners shacks and buildings. Nothing is left today that is evidence of this but the fruits of our labor. It took us about 15 minutes to correctly locate the area in the river where the quarters were found a year ago. It's amazing how much the river had changed in a years time even with a drought as bad as ours(California). It's a mystery to me where the coins are coming from. A miner? A merchant? A lady of the evening? because 4 quarters have already been found, my thought is this was not just pocket change back in 1917 of which one of the coins we have is dated. I decided to start detecting up river in the same line as the others were found. After many trash targets and a couple modern day coins found I got a got hit about 50 feet up river from where I started. My detector said the target was at about 8 inches. I took 5 scoops of material out of the water and the last one popped out a "V" Nickel dated 1902. My heart rate jumped and the hair was standing up on my arms. Now I'm convinced we must have found some cache of coins or possibly gold that was buried long ago. Twenty minutes later my friend said " hey I got a good signal". He dug and with the first scoop he pulled out a "V"Nickel, also dated 1902. Again, we were both jazzed. We hunted for two more hours and called it quits. We will definitely return and prospect again but next time maybe focus more on finding more coins. God how I wish these coins could talk! Dgoldman.

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

A History of Mining on the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska - Grab it through Amazon!