Crazy Gold find - not mine but neat story

 Posted 02/08/2012  5:33 pm

I worked at a coin shop back in the mid 1990's. This fellow comes in and is looking at our coins for about a half an hour. We start talking and he tells me a story, he had never detected before, and a friend asked him if he wanted to tag along and use a spare detector, he did.

They go off to a mountain park where his friend had gone many times before, they sat on the same log at the edge of the parking lot. His friend was putting on his boots and gathering up his tools to go searching, he showed his buddy how to work the detector and headed off to do some treasure hunting, the friend (guy telling me the story) said he turned on the detector and set it down against the log his buddy had been sitting at, it started going off like crazy so he began to dig, about 10" down he hit a glass jar with a ceramic pop seal top on it, he carefully removed the mason jar and inside was an old dry leather pouch. Inside the leather pouch were 25 $20.00 gold liberties!

Of course I thought this was pretty cool, but seriously doubted him, until he said would you like to see them? He pulled out the old leather pouch from his jacket and dumped out 20 of them on our counter top! We ended up buying them - they were AU to MS-65! He had given his friend that took him along 5 of them.

True story, which I never would've believed until I saw the coins with my own eyes. the area was in Colorado, near Boulder, he would not tell me exactly where, but said it was an old mining camp, where his friend had found a few coins before, nothing great, but lots of old iron mining tools, lamps, etc. It was heavily searched over the years, but apparently nobody ever checked near the parking lot. His friend told him he had sat on the log where he found the gold stash (probably an old miners life savings) many times but had never turned on his detector until he was farther into the old mine camp.

Thought you all would enjoy this tale, there is still gold out there waiting to be found! I sold my detector many years ago to a good friend, he goes out all the time, and has found some amazing pieces, his first was a 1921-D Mercury Dime in VF, he just dug a Seated CC quarter a few months ago. If I had the time, I'd get back into the hobby!