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This is the truth...
TigersFan2
Posts: 1,442 ✭✭
Often I'm more jealous of some of you pulling old Mercury Dimes out of the ground than I am of people posting their pictures of their MS65 coins. I can imagine the excitement of finding a Mercury Dime can rival or beat other coin collecting excitement.
I love the 3 P's: PB&J, PBR and PCGS.
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Even when I was a little kid, Mercury dimes and Buffalo nickels were gone from circulation. Every time I dig one, it's a physical connection to a world that existed before I was born.
I'll happily take a Roosie but a Merc would be way sweeter. Beautiful coins!
But, when i find something strange it just befuddles me to no end. Some dozen years ago I had just parked on a paved road and was heading off into a familiar area and just not paying attention to anything. Did turn the detector on and was kind of dragging it a couple of inches off the ground behind me. Eliminates the brush problem....Had a mile or so to go when I got a beep....what?? Of course I stopped, turned around and located the beep...not too far down, an inch or two was a diamond ring! Now this was just nuts....I'm in the middle of BFE, not on a trail, just hoofing it across the desert...
Had to take a look around for more hits. Saw about ten feet away a machete, just laying there minding it's own business. Another 5 feet or so beyond was a huge 8" blade buck style knife....WTF? Another 20 feet in the same direction was a light blue tee shirt in a bush....Now I think I'm sweating....another WTF is going on here.
Back to the truck, off to nearest phone at a bar and call to the local sheriff...He met me out there about an hour later and explained that I had come across a location that they had found a body some 18 months or so ago...Whew...body removed!
Was willing to give him what I found but he said the case was closed and the perp was spending his days in the pen..Showed him the diamond ring in my pocket and asked what should I do with it. Shouldn't someone get it back? He said no, the body was a male and had no clue why there would be a ring there. He told me to just give it to the first lovely girl I saw!!
The ring was smallish with a 10 pt or so diamond. Looked real and certainly was white gold as it was marked so. But thin and small.
Later that day, on the way home, I stopped to get gas and there was a little 8-10 year old girl sitting on a park bench outside the station entrance door. Yup, she got the ring...ran to her Mom who was pumping gas and off they went....lickity split....never saw a quicker exit!!
Put a smile on my face and made my day....
You can find some really weird stuff in the desert.........
bob
I lived in Phoenix for eight years and did a fair amount of desert scrambling. If you get way out, sometimes you find old shacks (miners, recluse, pioneers). One friend found and old rifle under some floorboards... all wrapped in old oiled cloths. Another found a large nugget under a stone in an old fireplace... I was never so lucky...Cheers, RickO
Wow... great story Bob....
I lived in Phoenix for eight years and did a fair amount of desert scrambling. If you get way out, sometimes you find old shacks (miners, recluse, pioneers). One friend found and old rifle under some floorboards... all wrapped in old oiled cloths. Another found a large nugget under a stone in an old fireplace... I was never so lucky...Cheers, RickO
yes, weird stuff in the desert....Once up a dead end canyon I found an old sedan from the 30's so rusty and modified that I could not tell the make. It had been used as a shelter with an attached lean to. The motor was used to run the rear rims to turn a pulley that looked like it must have been attached to a pump of sorts to push air down a vertical shaft (no bottom that I could see!).
There was no tire and it was up on blocks of wood for support. Lot's of old gas and oil cans around and of course the pile of tin cans and trash you always find. Could not determine why this hole was dug as I found nothing in the slag pile..no beeps on the detector...just an old hermit that dug a hole? Wonder if he was still in it, lol.
I have lots of these stories from the many years exploring.....
bob
So you can imagine how I feel digging a Barber.
If you want to hear and see somebody getting entirely too excited over a piece of junk silver, watch me at about 5:40 in this video.
Or, if you have 23 and a half minutes to kill, watch the whole thing.
That one's my magnum opus of detecting videos. I won't be making any more like that, most likely. But it was fun.
A silver dime I wouldn't look twice at in a junk lot can make my whole week if it's a detector find. These little mini-adventures are all the richer for me than simply buying nice coins. For that reason, I have never sold any of my dug coins. Though many if not most of them are junk, they are perhaps the most sentimentally valuable to me out of all my coins. Each one carries vivid memories of the day I found it.
PS- John/goldrush- the detector in that video might look familiar to you.