A few years ago, several friends and I had the unique opportunity to hunt a scraped park (preparing for astroturf) in an old and blighted section of San Francisco. Prior to the scrape, this was the type park where the entire top 6" or so is filled with wino caps, tabs, aluminum, zinc, etc.... so it had never seriously been detected (most hunters in the area go to the cleaner upscale parks elsewhere in town). At first, the scrape was even and uniform, taking all the new stuff off, and leaving only oldies
But after a few days, the tractors started mixing the old dirt with the new dirt, so there was no more 2nd guessing the targets anymore. And since we were in "relic" mindset, we dug all, since digging was easy.
I noticed an interesting phenomenom, since I kept all the junk I dug: After about 10 nights working the project, I had nearly 1000 junk items that could be classified as being in the gold ring range. Like tabs, shrapnel, etc... Of course we were angling for the old nickels, and perhaps tokens and the like. But the # of gold rings for digging all that? TWO! So obviously, had it not been for the scrape and mixing of the soil, it obviously wouldn't have been worth hunting a turfed park like this, for gold rings. Sure, a person can buck the odds by passing certain non-round-sounding items or whatever. But my suspicion is, they'd give up and head for greener grounds after a few hours in a blighted junky ghetto park like this. Swimming beaches simply have much better odds, to begin with, and you don't have to worry about hundreds of divots in the turf
