On The Relic Trail With A Twist

[CPT_GhostLight]

I haven't been able to get out to any relic sites in a while so I modified my mission to see if I could find any older relics in the city which was founded in 1871. There are of course limits to where you can detect in the city and getting private permissions here is not easy. So I decided to research some public areas like city parks to see if there was any chance of finding older things. Most of these places have been pounded hard since the 1970s until they outlawed digging in the 1990s. Until recently I haven't had much luck finding older items but I still go out to look when I can. Recently I researched a place that use to have a neighborhood for many years that was demolished in the 1990s for a park to be constructed. I noticed this place had a railroad track that used to run through it so I decided to give that area a try.

I had the D2 with the 9" coil running my wide open Fast program. I wasn't finding much at first except a whole lot of modern trash from the nearby homeless camp, so I moved to an area close to the creek along a dirt road. That's when I started seeing older glas and pottery shards on the surface and then hit a loud 96 on the TID. It was too big for a quarter but I dug it anyway, because all 90s come out of the ground. 😉 It was about 4 inches down and in the hard pack so it took a while to chisel it out. When it finally came out it was a heavy solid brass "4" from a house number. It's not particularly old, but from the demolished neighborhood, so I slowed down and started finding some older bits of this and that.

I wandered back onto the dirt road and hit a solid sounding 73 on the TID. It sounded way too solid to be a ring pull or pull tab and I dug out a compressed rounded dirt clod. As I started to peel away what hardened dirt I could it became obvious this was an older button, so I put it in the good pouch and kept on hunting. I didn't find a whole lot else so I headed home. When I got home I cleaned all the finds worth cleaning starting with the button. As I got more of the compressed dirt off, I could just make out the word "DENVER" and "DTCO" and some sort of rectangular object in the middle. I wondered if I had found an old Denver & Rio Grande button, but after searching the interweb I found only one reference to those words and letters which came from an antique auction site. It turns out it was a Denver Tramway Company that operated trollies from 1888-1893 and then changed to Denver Consolidated Tramway Company and changed all their uniforms and buttons. So I struck "old" in the city! Real old for my area! The rest of the finds were mundane except for a nickel plated screw cap marked "Morgan Wright" and "ACO" which I think came from an oil lantern and a brass thing that kind of lokks like a buckle part or possible hair clip of some kind.

This is what one in good condition looks like:

Inspired by my old button find, I researched another park that replaced another older neighborhood in hopes of finding more relics a couple of days later. When I got there it was also overrun with homeless people camps, but I pushed on and nobody paid any attention to me except for one guy yelling at everyone he saw. I was finding mostly modern trash and clad coins as I swept past the camp and made it to a treed area near the creek. I hit a modern coin spill of nickels, dimes, and one quarter and right near there I hit a 93-93 TID and thought it was another spill, but out pops a shallow big English penny. Well that seemed out of place, when not foot away I hit a tiny sounding 75 to 80 TID and out pops the tiniest crotal bell I've ever seen! Actually I think it's probably from a cat collar.  😏  I did manage to find a UMC Co Nitro No 10 shotgun cap that dates from 1895 to 1899.

Well the coins had dried up and I wasn't finding any older items so I hit one more grove of trees to see if there was anything else interesting around. I got a bouncy 88-90 that I thought might be a copper memorial penny but it turned out to be a 925 silver ring with 10 diamond chips on it. Well that wasn't old, but definitely the find of the day for that hunt. So while I didn't find any old relics on the 2nd hunt, I did score silver and copper! I guess sometimes luck is better than research! 🤣

[JCR]

That's a lot of digging with some neat finds.  Be careful out there in the jungle of humanity.

[F350Platinum]

Incredible hunt Cap'n. 👍

Love the ring and the British penny, trolley button and the buckle. Good thing the camp didn't get wind of the money pulled out of the ground! 😀

Great job and I'm jealous because all my relic sites are planted 😵 how are you liking the CF shaft or were you running the Master?

[CPT_GhostLight]

2 hours ago, F350Platinum said:

Incredible hunt Cap'n. 👍

Love the ring and the British penny, trolley button and the buckle. Good thing the camp didn't get wind of the money pulled out of the ground! 😀

Great job and I'm jealous because all my relic sites are planted 😵 how are you liking the CF shaft or were you running the Master?

LOL! I'm really fast and stealthy when I pop something good into the good pouch around other people. It usually looks like I'm throwing something in the trash pouch. Sometimes I do both at the same time to throw them off the track and always have my "pull tab face" on! 😆

That was a few days before the shaft arrived, so it was my stock D2 shaft and 9" coil. 😎

[GB_Amateur]

Great finds, particularly the trolley button which looks like brand new.  Keep that British penny in an accessible spot since it's a good calibration piece when comparing detector performance between different countries.  The Aussies have an identical(?) size,shape,weight,composition version, too.  Possibly other Commonwealth countries?

I am a bit curious as to your recovery method given that you started out by saying digging in city parks was illegal but then you "dug" these items.  I was told that Denver city parks (not that I'm trying to guess where you hunt...) had specified a certain blade (no more than 6" long and no more than 1" wide) as being allowed.  And a lot of people have perfected the screwdriver stealth method which is accepted in even some of the most restricted public places.

[GB_Amateur]

21 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

...the trolley button which looks like brand new.

I should have looked more carefully -- I now notice a photo of the recovered one above a photo of a non-recovered one.  Maybe it will still clean up but likely the gilding is gone.

Items like that at least give an indication of the site's age.  For sites not otherwise documented it can confirm it's worth hanging around searching for old coins for those of us driven by that target.

[CPT_GhostLight]

On 5/6/2023 at 9:42 AM, GB_Amateur said:

...

I am a bit curious as to your recovery method given that you started out by saying digging in city parks was illegal but then you "dug" these items.  I was told that Denver city parks (not that I'm trying to guess where you hunt...) had specified a certain blade (no more than 6" long and no more than 1" wide) as being allowed.  And a lot of people have perfected the screwdriver stealth method which is accepted in even some of the most restricted public places.

I'm not in Denver, but shovels are not allowed in my local parks. I use the term "dug" very liberally. It's more of a surgical extraction. I use a 12" version of kac's Park Probe for most of my city targets. If I have to go deep, I cut a small slit in the grass and pry it open a bit to remove dirt. I put a small towel down and put any extracted dirt on it until I get the target out, then I pour the dirt back in and pinch the grass slit closed. No trace, no fuss. I have a pair of 12" hemostats with rubber coated tips if I can't get the target out with the Park Probe. Any target larger than my fist has to stay in the ground, but I'm not looking for big targets in the parks. 😉

[GB_Amateur]

6 minutes ago, CPT_GhostLight said:

I use a 12" version of kac's Park Probe for most of my city targets. If I have to go deep, I cut a small slit in the grass and pry it open a bit to remove dirt. I put a small towel down and put any extracted dirt on it until I get the target out, then I pour the dirt back in and pinch the grass slit closed. No trace, no fuss. I have a pair of 12" hemostats with rubber coated tips if I can't get the target out with the Park Probe. Any target larger than my fist has to stay in the ground, but I'm not looking for big targets in the parks.

Quite a nice collection of tools you use, and your description of recovery sounds benign.  Does this method still work under dry conditions or do you just head out into the desert then?

I've always been curious as to the composition of probes.  I know some are brass but many (most?) are steel.  I've epoxy coated the tip before but haven't really used one long enough to see if that wears off or breaks off fairly quickly.  One of my recovery tools is a ~1" wide garden spade made of aluminum.  I've never scratched a coin with it yet although I mostly use a Lesche hand digger and the tip of that can do damage if it happens to accidentally scrape across the coin's surface.  The aluminum one is for working around roots.  What's your damage experience with that setup of yours?

[CPT_GhostLight]

3 minutes ago, GB_Amateur said:

Quite a nice collection of tools you use, and your description of recovery sounds benign.  Does this method still work under dry conditions or do you just head out into the desert then?

I've always been curious as to the composition of probes.  I know some are brass but many (most?) are steel.  I've epoxy coated the tip before but haven't really used one long enough to see if that wears off or breaks off fairly quickly.  One of my recovery tools is a ~1" wide garden spade made of aluminum.  I've never scratched a coin with it yet although I mostly use a Lesche hand digger and the tip of that can do damage if it happens to accidentally scrape across the coin's surface.  The aluminum one is for working around roots.  What's your damage experience with that setup of yours?

I use the same tools for moist or dry ground. Kac's Park Probe and the hex driver (probe) are steel, I'm not sure about the metal of the Berry & Bird tool. You can see the hex driver probe is worn to a point at the tip. I go through those every other year or so and get a new one. I probe very gently with that in moist ground to just barely touch the target and only scratched a few coins when I got too agressive or in a hurry, but fortunately those were clad coins. It is also great in dry ground to pick apart compacted ground and rocks to free targets. So far, I haven't scratched any coins with kac's Park Probe but I make sure to get well under the target to provide a cushion of dirt before pulling it out.