I met up with Dan yesterday morning figuring we were maybe going to meet up with Drew again, but was surprised when he said we were meeting up with Dave and Todd. Very cool! Or maybe trouble, could the somewhat new guy have a prayer around the Three Amigos?
Surprisingly, I had my best day detecting. Took a while to get going though.
Our first stop was Dan's cabin site. Only find for me here was broken pieces of iron from a shoe buckle. Todd & Dave may have found pieces of it's frame. This spot wasn't coughing up a lot, so we took the long hike to check out a site that turned out to be a bust. So we backtracked, and that's when Todd spotted the rock pile. A cellar hole found.
Set my pack down on a pile of rocks 20ft or so from the hole, turned on the detector, and started swinging for clean ground to balance over. Don't think I got 2 steps before it bangs out an upper 70's at maybe 5". Whoa! Up comes a copper!
It wasn't pretty, and those guys identified it as being a VT or CT copper. Unfortunately what little detail was on the brown layer, flaked itself off leaving me with a mostly blank green disc. I can just make out a bit of Britannia, and the letters INDE. It's a bucket lister regardless, my first state copper!
I also picked up a few cuff sized buttons in a 20sq ft area, so I beat that spot up more, but that was it. Only other notable find was more iron buckle parts.
This was the hole of the day, and coughed up some neat finds. We beat it up a bit longer, and moved on to the next spot. It had been hit pretty good too unfortunately, but I wandered a bit and managed a couple of buttons. I thought they were just plain buttons, but Dave immediately ID'd them as Tombacs. He gave them a quick rub with his thumb, and the convex one revealed an engraved pattern!
Something off my personal list since I've already scored a tombac. I love the intricate designs they put on them.
After this spot we hiked out to try another spot 20 minutes away, and stop to refill the canteens. It had a well and walls, but some of the surrounding area was really grown in, so we were a bit limited. My last 2 finds of the day were deep. 1'st was another plain tombac, somewhere between 8 and 9 inches. A trifecta.
The other was 8 inches down in the middle of a nest of small trees you have to almost wiggle through and bang your coil off of to navigate through. But it paid off. A low VDI target that got better as I dug. My first knee buckle!
I wondered why there was such a big clot of rust on it until I started cleaning it. There was a square nail running through it. You can see where it was bedded in the pic, and probably why the VDI was so low. I'm afraid to give it more than a real basic cleaning, dunno if this is it or not.
I'll end the way I started, thank you Dave and Todd for the invite!
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