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I hope someone wasn’t expecting something to be shipped in it, then when they couldn’t find it they went on to the next one. That would’ve been pretty bad!

Wow, someone must’ve gotten some sort of a red flag on coil shipments, but testing an item destructively that way and not reporting the damage to you was ridiculous. Submit a form 95 claim to customs for destruction of property- this explains it on their website: https://help.cbp.gov/s/article/Article-178?language=en_US Was the shipment insured? One issue I can think of happening is maybe that they will try to blame the Bulgarian customs office on it if they inspected it before it was exported. You may need proof that that didn’t happen either.

I took a long trip to Baja in the 90’s all the way south with a girlfriend and we camped out alone on the beaches. Everyone we met along the way were extremely nice and helpful, and most of all generous. We ran out our battery at one camp site and asked a local if he had jumper cables. He walked back from his house carrying a car battery and swapped mine out with it to get us started. It was his house battery from his solar system. I just assumed that he had a car, and didn’t even consider that his only vehicle may have been his fishing boat. Another fisherman kept leaving live crabs at our camp each day and wouldn’t take money for them (we gave him our extra canned food when we left), and at another camp we had neighbors- a military unit arrived and set up a camp next to us and invited us to stay. We had 24hour armed sentries posted on either end of the road leading to where we were and they’d politely say good morning and evening to us whenever we walked by them. They also set up what looked like some antenna poles up on the beach and to our surprise, they ended up being volleyball net supports and we played beach volleyball with them- have you ever played volleyball with fellow teammates who were still wearing their rifles? That was pretty fun. Overall, people are just pretty nice in Mexico and it’s too bad there are more problems now down there, but it still does not represent the majority. Thanks for the great write up Condor, it brought back some good memories!

Good on you Doc for helping around the house, but I’m sorry about your better half not enjoying some of your outdoor hobbies. I won’t brag too much, except saying while I was driving a civic and had not much in terms of camping gear when we first met, it was my wife who came with the 4-wheel drive truck and all the camping and rock hounding gear. She’s a keeper and I’ll swing any cleaning tools around the house to keep her happy, even if it does hurt my back! And you’re a good man, Doc, for doing the same!

Oh yeah, but with his luck he’d need a leash also as it would grow four legs and walk away!

You are right, as most of the surface materials in the DTC were collected in the 70’s, they did not yet qualify as a Federal historic resource (less than 50 years old), so most museums would accept these provided there is some provenience information documented for them (location they were found). As there are maps available for the camps, they can even identify which units and sometimes even whom the artifacts were from in this case. There are some very interesting sites still left out there- and it’s good they are now protected. Sites including the giant topographic scale map model that is over 100 feet wide of the surrounding mountains and valley, a giant end of training party site where 100’s of beer bottles are still lined up in the sand and standing as if still in their crates that have already disintegrated, the fox holes still strewn with 50ca machine gun shells, and the rock alignments that were once painted white marking the camp driveways and pullouts where military tents used to be. It’s stuff like that along with the occasional personal belongings and other artifacts one can see that give visitors a sense of the significance of what happened there. Those things should be preserved.

Hi Tom, Museums share their collections to other museums quite often, and some of the DTC collections went to the Smithsonian as well. I know World War II vets are still around us and the artifacts from the war may not seem that significant as they are not as old as others, however, as those vets are quickly passing with age, their story will be better told by what they’ve left behind if it is preserved.

Those look useful. That larger stash will be handy when picking up other small stuff I find like topaz crystals and fluorescent pebbles and other mineral samples. But Doc, will I find larger gold nuggets if I order a larger Nugget Stash? 😉 A guy I know dropped his snuffer bottle with gold in it and it floated away down river. He needs a stash that comes with a leash!

My Self-Contained Obscure Object Processor has settings for discriminating any type of metal from gold, including those also. It works really well! 😉

That’s a beautiful agate. I think it was more likely polished by someone and left there. The wood is much softer than the stone and not really growing around it, plus the force of water required to deposit a stone that high above the waterline would have easily removed that tree. What a beautiful stone though, nice find!

Then probably a drill site as Aureous says, or maybe weathering bedrock outcrops? It would help also if you can get a geologic map of the area. If you suspect a drill site, it wouldn’t hurt to take some samples and pan them out.

I don’t think they’ll take the ammo rounds, but other items would be nice. They once accidentally had some what is known as DU ammunition on display not knowing what it was, and it had to be removed by some specialists because it was scratched due to being fired. Military guys will know what I’m talking about. It’s a good idea not to dig up any military ammo at all, and as there were some more recent exercises after DTC during the Vietnam era and later, they practiced with more potent stuff than what they used during the WWII era.

Wow, those are really nice collection of artifacts from the camps. Being that it was found just 20-some years after the camps were active, your collection is in one of the best conditions and most interesting I’ve ever seen. I’ve conducted surveys and mapping at the Desert Training Center (DTC) under contract for BLM, including at Iron Mountain. Due to their historical significance, the DTC camps have been nominated for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places to ensure better protection against (now illegal) collecting and other disturbances. The desert in these areas still contains artifacts and has sites left from past military exercises performed out there, but unfortunately, like the Sherman tank tracks left from General Patton’s North Africa Campaign practices, they're rapidly deteriorating due to the passage of time, as well as from looting and off-road vehicles damaging the landscape. If anyone is interested in helping to preserve the history of these camps, please consider anonymously donating (or bequeathing) your collection of DTC artifacts to the General Patton Memorial Museum at Chiriaco Summit, CA. They will accept donations for curation without asking any questions. Thank you!

As there aren’t very definitive and more recent egress tracks leading to those I think they may be natural- to determine wether they’re mineral outcrops or places where cows hang out will take boots on the ground or at least some better aerials than that image.

Still available? PM’d Update: sale pending…

Gerry included, there have been several very helpful people here that I would have to thank for their help, the well-knowns like Gerry and Steve, Chris, Rob and Ron, and the other members whom I was able to meet up with and go detecting with. I was recently fortunate enough to meet up with one member here who brought me out to one of their detecting places and gave me some great tips and pointy fingers, and as a result, this is what I found with my 6000. A little .21g nugget, and my first with the 6K. They’ll go unnamed, but they know I’m very appreciative to be able to go detecting with them. Thank you!

Good catch, I thought it looked fake, more like gold plated cat scat from a litter box. Or can it really form like that?

I know it’s not detectable, but it’s old and I found it. 518-million year old trilobite fossils. These are really old, especially for what was to become some desert mountains of today in California. All of Earth’s landscape looked much like Mars back then. There were no plants or animals of any kind on the land, save some algae crusts growing next to the ocean's edge and an occasional sea snail nibbling on it in the tidal zones. There were no vertebrate animals swimming in the oceans, in fact, the super continent Pangea had not formed for another 200 million years, and dinosaurs did not exist for another 290 million years after the death of this trilobite.

That’s pretty interesting how they are actually fractals in how they form, their shapes are very unique and it’s interesting how just a small inclusion of certain minerals in the mix affects the resulting shape of the nuggets. I searched a bit but was unable to find any specific XRF analysis of Rye Patch Chevron nuggets, has anyone come across this? I’m really interested in what the mineralogy aspects are of them. Also, do these occur anywhere else in the US?

Wow, simply beautiful. How do those form? Are they unique in their composition that causes crystallization, or is it a physical process that causes it?

@Nuggethunter70 Yeah, I posted a video on Phrunt’s original thread about this finally being mentioned by Minelab about the same issue. It would become unstable when it was running the speaker, but then would quiet down when using a Bluetooth speaker. It was fixed quickly be Minelab’s contractor and they also replaced my cracking coil. I am very happy with mine, getting tiny lead specks and it is sensitive to .08gm pieces of gold I stuck a couple inches in the ground (I was using a Goldhawk 5 x10)

Sub gram ditts going for $5 spot? It’ll be like… But Gerry on the other hand will be posting more like this…

Hey Mitchel, We probably better stop posting about it, I think we’re jinxing it. More clouds are coming through shortly after noon…

Mitchel, you are right. Looks like we get a sunny window between the rains on Sunday and Tuesday. That’ll be great! If anyone here wants a local weather forecast for the eclipse on Monday the 8th and want to save $18 for their premium membership, send me your location and I’ll send you a screenshot of your area for free. I subscribed to Windy.com and it provides a very good set of prediction models for up to 10 days ahead.

I can’t wait for this to hit the market, I wonder if Gerry will be training with them? I was also sad when news broke that Minelab decided to drop their advanced line of GPXRF detectors, so I’m really excited that Fisher is coming out with one! Finally a way to do lead discrimination, this thing is going to really take off!