Post by speekergeek on Mar 12, 2004 21:51:43 GMT -5
Beef Up Your Detecting Skills With Public Sites
Want to become a hardened detectorist in no time, doing things that’ll build and challenge your detecting skills, truly test your dedication to this hobby and, best of all, turn you into a better detectorist? Concentrate on hunting public property sites like parks, public school grounds, very old swimming holes, old library and town hall grounds, and grass parkways between the street and sidewalk. Not just hunting any old one of them, but hunting for the best of them.
Anyone can pick out a few of the oldest houses in any neighborhood, get permission to hunt and come away with an assortment of goodies. But does that necessarily make you an accomplished treasure hunter? Nope; no more than taking a fishing pole to a stocked pay-to-fish pond would make you an accomplished angler. Come to think of it, we have a lot in common with people who go fishing. The people who are really good at it, especially the ones who compete at the pro tournament level, don’t get that good by propping up a cane pole in a forked stick on the bank and catching a nap under a tree. They can step off a plane anywhere in the country, read any lake or river and hunt down the fat ones.
In metal detecting, anyone with any degree of skill can find something old at an old house with a tended lawn. Doing this is all well and good (especially if you’re a beginner and need to build your confidence), and it can certainly lead to some impressive personal coin and backyard relic collections. But does this in itself build you into a coin and relic hunter? No. It just makes you someone who’s good at the metal detecting equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.
But, some would argue, isn’t this what successful detecting is all about? Well, in some respects yes, but in many more respects it isn’t, because you won’t always have a plum Victorian house with a trash-free lawn to hunt. Especially if you end up joining a detecting club that likes to hunt a wide variety of sites over hill and dale, or simply run out of owners willing to let you dig holes in their lawns. If you take a weekend fisherman who fishes nothing but small inland lakes or ponds and plunk him down on a river bank, he’ll be completely lost and come away skunked at the end of the day.
The common perception among detectorists is that as sites go, hunting public property comes close to scraping the bottom of the barrel. These sites are dreadfully full of metallic trash, have often been hunted to death for years, and rarely hold quality coins or relics. This may be generally true, but it's not specifically always true. Depending on what was there or even nearby at one time in your local history, this may not be true at all.
Public site truisms typically apply when you just pick any old place at random and only search the really obvious places, such as around benches, picnic tables, trees and picnic shelters. If you don’t know how (or more importantly when) to look for the public-access sites with the most potential for good finds in the first place, you’ll end up, as they used to say in my neighborhood, busted and disgusted. The key to winning the war of public property sites is to pick your battles very carefully.
This all starts with research. Some of us would sooner hack off an arm than do research. If you’re one, the bad news is it’s a necessary evil. The good news, however, is "research" often doesn’t get more involved than looking through a collection of locally historic photographs for potential sites, making a photocopy of them, locating the sites on a current street map and then comparing what’s in the photo to what’s there now. Old public property sites to watch for include:
• City parks. Even I have a general dread for these sites, especially if I know nothing about their history. But if a park was all I had, though, I’d choose one across the street from the oldest homes in town. Especially if the parks contain (or once contained) field houses, large cement wading pools, concession stands, baseball diamonds, observation decks. The bottoms of long-established toboggan runs or sledding hills can be among your best finds because of the potential bonanza of coins and jewelry lost from the fingers and pockets of sledders during the winter. They also tend to be slightly less trashy than other areas within the same park because they're in the wide open and away from where the crowds fling around pull tabs and that Grand Satan of all aluminum trash: the Snapple cap.
• Old railroad depots. While depots, the rails and the rights of way next to them are private, railroad-owned property, quite a few were either adjacent to or very near small public parks or large vacant (and if you’re really lucky, they’ll still be vacant) grassy areas that passed for local parks among the local kids.
Want to become a hardened detectorist in no time, doing things that’ll build and challenge your detecting skills, truly test your dedication to this hobby and, best of all, turn you into a better detectorist? Concentrate on hunting public property sites like parks, public school grounds, very old swimming holes, old library and town hall grounds, and grass parkways between the street and sidewalk. Not just hunting any old one of them, but hunting for the best of them.
Anyone can pick out a few of the oldest houses in any neighborhood, get permission to hunt and come away with an assortment of goodies. But does that necessarily make you an accomplished treasure hunter? Nope; no more than taking a fishing pole to a stocked pay-to-fish pond would make you an accomplished angler. Come to think of it, we have a lot in common with people who go fishing. The people who are really good at it, especially the ones who compete at the pro tournament level, don’t get that good by propping up a cane pole in a forked stick on the bank and catching a nap under a tree. They can step off a plane anywhere in the country, read any lake or river and hunt down the fat ones.
In metal detecting, anyone with any degree of skill can find something old at an old house with a tended lawn. Doing this is all well and good (especially if you’re a beginner and need to build your confidence), and it can certainly lead to some impressive personal coin and backyard relic collections. But does this in itself build you into a coin and relic hunter? No. It just makes you someone who’s good at the metal detecting equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.
But, some would argue, isn’t this what successful detecting is all about? Well, in some respects yes, but in many more respects it isn’t, because you won’t always have a plum Victorian house with a trash-free lawn to hunt. Especially if you end up joining a detecting club that likes to hunt a wide variety of sites over hill and dale, or simply run out of owners willing to let you dig holes in their lawns. If you take a weekend fisherman who fishes nothing but small inland lakes or ponds and plunk him down on a river bank, he’ll be completely lost and come away skunked at the end of the day.
The common perception among detectorists is that as sites go, hunting public property comes close to scraping the bottom of the barrel. These sites are dreadfully full of metallic trash, have often been hunted to death for years, and rarely hold quality coins or relics. This may be generally true, but it's not specifically always true. Depending on what was there or even nearby at one time in your local history, this may not be true at all.
Public site truisms typically apply when you just pick any old place at random and only search the really obvious places, such as around benches, picnic tables, trees and picnic shelters. If you don’t know how (or more importantly when) to look for the public-access sites with the most potential for good finds in the first place, you’ll end up, as they used to say in my neighborhood, busted and disgusted. The key to winning the war of public property sites is to pick your battles very carefully.
This all starts with research. Some of us would sooner hack off an arm than do research. If you’re one, the bad news is it’s a necessary evil. The good news, however, is "research" often doesn’t get more involved than looking through a collection of locally historic photographs for potential sites, making a photocopy of them, locating the sites on a current street map and then comparing what’s in the photo to what’s there now. Old public property sites to watch for include:
• City parks. Even I have a general dread for these sites, especially if I know nothing about their history. But if a park was all I had, though, I’d choose one across the street from the oldest homes in town. Especially if the parks contain (or once contained) field houses, large cement wading pools, concession stands, baseball diamonds, observation decks. The bottoms of long-established toboggan runs or sledding hills can be among your best finds because of the potential bonanza of coins and jewelry lost from the fingers and pockets of sledders during the winter. They also tend to be slightly less trashy than other areas within the same park because they're in the wide open and away from where the crowds fling around pull tabs and that Grand Satan of all aluminum trash: the Snapple cap.
• Old railroad depots. While depots, the rails and the rights of way next to them are private, railroad-owned property, quite a few were either adjacent to or very near small public parks or large vacant (and if you’re really lucky, they’ll still be vacant) grassy areas that passed for local parks among the local kids.