Mountain Relic Hunt-day 1

[CPT_GhostLight]

I was invited to tag along with friends to do a little detecting in the high mountains recently. I figured even if I didn't find anything good, it would be worth it just to be up in the high country for a couple days and it totally was. I got up there fairly early and met up with one of the crew and we followed the train tracks for a while to look for some interesting spots to detect. We found a wide spot in the trail and decided to give it a try. To be honest, it didn't look like the was ever anything there, but you just never know.

I pulled out the D2 and decided to use the 9" coil to be able to get into the brush better and started out in my 40 kHz Fast program. Even though it didn't look like there was much there, the ground noise told a different story with the familiar machine gun iron and high falsing tones. I was digging mostly big iron, square nails, and other trash for the first hour or so and I decided to change it up to give my ears a break. I changed to 24 kHz and dropped the sensitivity and audio response a notch or two and thats when everything changed. All of a sudden the falsing reduced, good non-ferrous targets stated popping through the iron noise, and I made my first good find which was a heart pendant. I kept on digging the good sounding targets until the afternoon rainstorm came in and we had to pack it up.

So I ended up with a bunch of interesting items from the late 1800s to the turn of the last century, including a nice Rogers Nickel Silver spoon, a clock back, a pair of fancy but corroded scissors, a piece of a broken printing plate, a fancy screw cap to an oil lamp, a brass keyhole cover for a padlock, a religious pendant, some cool old buttons, a suspender clip, garter clip, and a Colorado Tax token.

The heart pendant, which I thought was probably from the 1930s or 40s, turned out to be from a very rare souvenir necklace from the Crystal Carnival Ice Palace built in Leadville Colorado in late 1895 and was dismantled in March of 1896. I've included the only photo I could find of one that was from an antique auction site to show what it use to look like before being in the ground for almost 130 years.

This one was a heartbreaker! I found it with the bottom side up in the hole and thought I had a gilded railroad conductor or military button for sure, but when I turned it over there was no top.... Nooooooo! I search all over for the top, but no luck. 😧

 

 

[schoolofhardNox]

Lots of nice relics and pottery sherds. Wonder if it was a camp or was there a house nearby, or was it a dumping ground? Even the iron stays fairly clean there.

 

[JCR]

Those are some nice relic finds. Thanks for posting.

[Doc Bach]

Excellent site and hunt there CPT! Great photos as usual and thanks for showing all of the iron and the shards of glass and porcelain.That provides a level of authenticity as to what is generally found at such digs and how much work that is involved.As for the souvenir heart pendant from the Crystal Palace that was in business for less than six months? Yeah I would have to agree that it would qualify as super rare and is a killer piece.

[CPT_GhostLight]

6 hours ago, schoolofhardNox said:

Lots of nice relics and pottery sherds. Wonder if it was a camp or was there a house nearby, or was it a dumping ground? Even the iron stays fairly clean there.

 

It may well have been a dump, but from the quality of the china and some of the other pieces, there may have been a saloon, hotel, or gaming house nearby.

[CPT_GhostLight]

5 hours ago, Doc Bach said:

Excellent site and hunt there CPT! Great photos as usual and thanks for showing all of the iron and the shards of glass and porcelain.That provides a level of authenticity as to what is generally found at such digs and how much work that is involved.As for the souvenir heart pendant from the Crystal Palace that was in business for less than six months? Yeah I would have to agree that it would qualify as super rare and is a killer piece.

Thanks, Doc! The Ice Palace was built in December 1895, but was only open from January 1st to March 28th, 1896 and had to be closed because of an unusually warm winter and it melted sooner than expected.

[Valens Legacy]

Great relics and I bet you had a lot of fun digging them. You never know what the ground holds, but it is always nice to dig up a piece of history.

Good luck on your next hunt and stay safe out there.

[F350Platinum]

Wow Cap'n,

An impressive and comprehensive snapshot!

Great photos and finds. That's some top tier scouting, I can imagine the thrill when the artifacts started popping.

It will be interesting to see any history y'all can dig up about what sort of town was there. Best of luck on day 2! 🍀

[CPT_GhostLight]

6 hours ago, F350Platinum said:

Wow Cap'n,

An impressive and comprehensive snapshot!

Great photos and finds. That's some top tier scouting, I can imagine the thrill when the artifacts started popping.

It will be interesting to see any history y'all can dig up about what sort of town was there. Best of luck on day 2! 🍀

Thanks, F350, I was just trying to feed your intrerest until you can get back on your real old relics! 😉

I don't think there was a town there. It may have been a destination stop on the railroad, such as a resort or hotel to serve tourists which was popular back in 1800s with droves of people looking to get out of the summer heat in Denver. We were searching for a particular spot and that actually wasn't it but it turned up some interestting relics, but more on that in Day 2.

[GB_Amateur]

17 hours ago, CPT_GhostLight said:

The heart pendant, which I thought was probably from the 1930s or 40s, turned out to be from a very rare souvenir necklace from the Crystal Carnival Ice Palace built in Leadville Colorado in late 1895 and was dismantled in March of 1896. I've included the only photo I could find of one that was from an antique auction site to show what it use to look like before being in the ground for almost 130 years.

Coincidentally I just finished a book about prospecting and mining from ~1860-1900 (more on that below).  Here's a picture (only half of the two page spread in the book) of the Leadville Ice Palace your pendant refers to:

And a description from page 172:

On November 1, 1895, a crew of 260 workmen that included 52 carpenters,... began to erect wooden frames for the ice blocks, most of which were obtained from the lakes....  It was so cold in Leadville, at its elevation of 10,000 feet, that the ice was (already) 20 inches thick.  At first stonecutters were hired to trim the blocks to standard 20-by-30 inch size, but when (that) proved too slow, a number of Canadian woodsmen, equipped with broadaxes, were imported to do the job.  Work continued day and night (for two months).

The completed palace..., 325 feet on a side (had) five foot thick walls....  The main entrance was flanked by octagonal towers 90 feet high and 40 feet in diameter....

(Among other things it contained a metal roof covered) 80 ft by 160 ft skating rink,... illuminated by electric lamps embedded in pillars of ice....

On display everywhere were industrial, agricultural, and mineral products of all sorts set inside great blocks of glass-clear ice....

The description continues for several paragraphs, but basically it was furnished, decorated, and outfitted like a (modern, at the time) museum to life in that area in the 1890's.

The book is titled The Miners and was part of a Time-Life series, "The Old West", published in 1976.  The text was written by Robert Wallace but he had a lot of staff that helped with the research.  240 8.5 in x 11 in pages, probably at least half are photos, covers many of the gold and silver rushes and their subsequent mines post-California Rush, particularly Colorado, Virginia City (Comstock), Homestake, and Klondike.  There's a lot of description of the austere life in those times which gives context to many of the finds detectorists make today in these areas.