A
Anonymous
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My trusty White's 5900/DI PRO sl is becoming heavier all the time, but it originally weighed a ton anyway. Maybe I'll spend some of my humongous lode of unused cash (Oh, sure!) and buy a lighter, more modern detector. The 5900 is a superb detector for coin hunting and prospecting, having many desirable features lacking on many newer models. This is a heavily mineralized area, so manual ground balancing is absolutely required, especially in the mountains.
Metal detecting is becoming more difficult in the Front Range area as new housing developments replace former farmsites.
Gambling casinos in Central City and Black Hawk have also caused huge changes there: Many years ago most of the abandoned houses on the mountainsides could be purchased for 75 to 100 dollars in back taxes and nobody even wanted them! We surely didn't -- who in their right mind would spend hard-earned money to buy a building in an old ghost town...?? In 1948 One slick fellow offered to sell me a building on Central City's main street for $500 -- did he think I'd just fallen off a turnip truck? Now, I wish I'd been riding that truck, because that same building recently sold for a few million dollars! At that time, however, there were only 138 people living in the entire mining district of Gilpin County! Buy land there? No, we were raising a family and didn't have any surplus funds. Now, regardless of condition, every old rotting, gingerbread-trimmed house is selling for absurd sums. Consequently, metal detecting is becoming very difficult in that area due to the influx of people... we can no longer search abandoned property because there isn't any! In previous years I'd even found many older coins along roadsides but those roads are currently being "improved", which wipes out many good detecting locations.
When I was a boy Denver had numerous vacant lots where we used to play, but those have disappeared as every possible piece of real estate has been used for some sort of construction, either housing or businesses. When we moved to Wheat Ridge (about ten miles west of Denver) there was an old farm next door, built in the 1880's, and I found a few good coins there under a huge maple tree, but that site's been graded and a new house now occupies the land.
All is not lost -- there's still some open land down by the local greenbelt on Clear Creek, about 1/2 mile away, and a few old coins can sometimes be found there -- when prospective miners came here late during the gold rush they usually discovered that every available panning site on the river was claimed, so many of them simply came back down the river to Wheat Ridge and started farming along the fertile bottoms of Clear Creek. Our present property was only an asparagus farm when I was a kid!
Yeah, I'm not done detecting yet, but swinging that almost 5-pound White's detector is becoming tiresome because I'm shaped like an anorexic noodle anyway!
By the way, the FAA is backlogged with paperwork, so the Challenger II still doesn't have the necessary registration and airworthiness certificate yet.
Regards to all from Ol' Frank in Colorado
Metal detecting is becoming more difficult in the Front Range area as new housing developments replace former farmsites.
Gambling casinos in Central City and Black Hawk have also caused huge changes there: Many years ago most of the abandoned houses on the mountainsides could be purchased for 75 to 100 dollars in back taxes and nobody even wanted them! We surely didn't -- who in their right mind would spend hard-earned money to buy a building in an old ghost town...?? In 1948 One slick fellow offered to sell me a building on Central City's main street for $500 -- did he think I'd just fallen off a turnip truck? Now, I wish I'd been riding that truck, because that same building recently sold for a few million dollars! At that time, however, there were only 138 people living in the entire mining district of Gilpin County! Buy land there? No, we were raising a family and didn't have any surplus funds. Now, regardless of condition, every old rotting, gingerbread-trimmed house is selling for absurd sums. Consequently, metal detecting is becoming very difficult in that area due to the influx of people... we can no longer search abandoned property because there isn't any! In previous years I'd even found many older coins along roadsides but those roads are currently being "improved", which wipes out many good detecting locations.
When I was a boy Denver had numerous vacant lots where we used to play, but those have disappeared as every possible piece of real estate has been used for some sort of construction, either housing or businesses. When we moved to Wheat Ridge (about ten miles west of Denver) there was an old farm next door, built in the 1880's, and I found a few good coins there under a huge maple tree, but that site's been graded and a new house now occupies the land.
All is not lost -- there's still some open land down by the local greenbelt on Clear Creek, about 1/2 mile away, and a few old coins can sometimes be found there -- when prospective miners came here late during the gold rush they usually discovered that every available panning site on the river was claimed, so many of them simply came back down the river to Wheat Ridge and started farming along the fertile bottoms of Clear Creek. Our present property was only an asparagus farm when I was a kid!
Yeah, I'm not done detecting yet, but swinging that almost 5-pound White's detector is becoming tiresome because I'm shaped like an anorexic noodle anyway!
By the way, the FAA is backlogged with paperwork, so the Challenger II still doesn't have the necessary registration and airworthiness certificate yet.
Regards to all from Ol' Frank in Colorado