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So much for the 12 step program. Did you order the pink one?

This is a post I made on another forum that got a lot of attention. I condensed it for this posting. This is something everyone should be thinking about while out swinging a detector. Back in the 80's I had a close friend and working associate come to me and ask if I still had a metal detector. I told him yes and this story started to unfold. My friend was in a business where he made LOTS of money under the table. So in order to hide it, he was buying gold and silver coins and hiding it under his house. He told no one about, it not even his wife. He had buried the coins in containers and ran a wire with a flag to the surface so he could find them. Then one day he had a massive heart attack. When he recovered, he got scared and went under the house to dig up his hoard. He almost had another heart attack when he found that his wires had rusted away and he had no idea where the coins were. He told me he had dug many of them up but several ozs of both gold and silver were lost. This is where I came into the picture. I was working some very long hours and didn't get a chance to get over there right away. Some time passed and he sold the house. A few years later he passed. This house is not to far from me in a nice neighborhood. I drive by there every once in a while and wonder just how much gold and silver is still there. But then I just have to wonder how many other banks are in the neighborhood. I have an Aunt, that to this day, refuses to use a bank, and her money is hidden in her basement. My second wife's grand parents owned motels in Oregon. When they died, many thousands of dollars was found hidden all over their house. It was stuffed everywhere you could think of. They never did know if they found it all. Back in the 80's I used to research train robberies. One turned out to be practically in my back yard. We narrowed it to a 5 acre piece of ground. I tried to buy the property but the guy wouldn't sell. It has now been sold and as far as I know the 20 pound sack of $20 gold pieces is still buried there. Most "post hole banks", private party banks, are not buried deep and generally in plain sight of the person who buried it. For the simple reason that they may want to add or take away some amount without a lot of effort, and would be able to keep an eye on the spot. The area I grew up in was once owned by a large family that moved here in the late 1920's. I grew up with some of the great grand kids. The property, originally a section, got divided over the years and given to siblings. Some was sold off like the parcel my folks bought. I have been told that several of the old timers had buried money in the neighborhood. A lot of it has since been found. Maybe all of it. But then again who knows. I had an Uncle who has passed on, he buried several oz's. of gold and silver slugs in round containers in his back yard in the 1980's. No one knows what happened to them. He may have dug them up and sold them, OR, they may still be there. His property is no longer in possession of family members so the access is now gone. There are a lot of these stories told around a camp fires and I think most the stories you will hear are based in fact, but the pertinent details have been lost over the years or added to thru the telling of the story. Plus all the trash that has been discarded on rural properties make's it almost impossible to perform any kind of functional hunt with a detector. Short of a chance hit with a dozer cutting a new road, most the unfound money will stay that way. Long dead now I had a cousin that had moved to Foresthill Ca. in the mid 1930's. He and my grandfather were gold miners and worked many rivers in the area and at one time had a hard rock mine they were working in the Alta area. The property he moved to was a 52 Acer piece and was once an old Wells Fargo stage stop. There were 3 mines on the property, a boarding house that he lived in, and the old barn WF used. At the back of the property was an old rock foundation in front of the only mine shaft that was still open. This was the original cabin site of Dr. Todd of Todd Valley. I used to spend a lot of time there in the 60' and 70's, but before I got into metal detecting. When we were small kids in the 50"s My cousin would love to show us his gold coins. He would not let us go into the basement with him, but would come out with several coins to show us. Now when he had closed the mine in Alta, he brought the ore crusher and a few carts to the ranch. One night he caught some neighbor druggies trying to steel the carts and ran them out at gun point. Some time later they returned and set the house on fire and burned him out. Luckily he got out of the house. Many nice antiques were lost in that fire. A few years later he Passed away leaving the property to his son, my God Father. The boarding house was a two story place with a stone basement underneath it with a big iron door. When the fire burned itself out all the rubble was in the basement. Over time, little by little my God father cleaned out the basement. One day he found 2 mason jars that were shattered and all broken up, but the glass was all held together by the melted gold that was inside them! During the 80"s I was up there playing with a detector and detected one of the walls of the basement. I found 2 different spots behind the rocks that had metal. The rocks were loose, like they could be removed. I didn't check behind them, but told my God father about them and where they were. He said he would check them. It was a year or so before I was back up there and asked about the basement. I was told that it had not been checked yet. I headed out that way and detected around the foundation where the loose rocks were, but whatever was hidden there was now gone. I never asked about it again. All the old timers are dead now and that property has been sold. But I would give my eye teeth, with the knowledge I have now, to be able to hunt that property again. I too have several thousand dollars stashed for a number of reasons. That's kind of ironic that I may become the center of a treasure story some day.

Here is a little video I helped make on using a mortar and pestle to recover gold from specimen rock. Some specimens are really beautiful (like the one Steve showed here recently) but some are more pedestrian, and not really valuable as mineral specimens. These need to be crushed to recover the gold and this video shows how to do it cheaply and easily.

I have a mortar that has been in the family for generations. Chris has touched on a very good point- that just because a piece of quarts has visible gold in it doesn't necessarily add value to it as a specimen. I am crushing a lot more "specimens" than I used to. I love it when it doesn't crush well because of the gold content. I have heard stories from an uncle of ore that didn't blast well because if the high gold content. Don't know if it's true but I've never known a gold miner to tell a lie.