Along The Way
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Thar's Gold Out There Pardner
With the nice weather we've been experiencing lately in Southern Alberta, the ground is thawing out allowing me to get out and do some detecting with my metal detector.
I have been messing with metal detectors off and on for more than 40 years beginning with my dad being involved as well. You never get over the thrill of the sound that a metal detector generates when it detects something in the ground that has you reaching for your digging tool to see what you've found.
Probably the coolest find we came across years ago was the frame of a rusty old handgun that had seen better years, but a neat relic just the same.
At one time both my dad and I got in to gold dredging as well, and one summer my dad and mother took a trip to the Yukon where a friend that lived in the Yukon at the time had another friend who allowed him to do some gold dredging on his claim.
This gold dredge my dad had with him was a compact unit that used two truck tubes to support it on the water, a two-stroke gas engine supplying power to the suction pump that pulled gravel up from the bottom of the stream before discharging the gravel on the sluice also mounted on the truck-tubes.
The gold bearing gravel was then washed over the riffles of the sluice, with any gold present separated from the gravel, dumping the spent gravel back into the stream.
They didn't get rich on that trip, however they had a lot of fun prospecting for gold on a stream that maybe was worked over by a original gold miner during the early days when gold was first discovered in the Yukon during the gold rush that took place in the 1800's.
The photo shows a sampling of some of the relics and other things I've found with my metal detector, my latest detector a Minelab unit seen here that has been modified with the original metal shaft having been replaced with a carbon fiber one, making the metal detector much lighter to swing while detecting.
