What can you find with a metal detector?

Oh all sorts of things. On our first metal detector outing, we went to the Old Zoo in Griffith Park. This is only about 5 minutes away from our house so it was a good place to start. We started off in a dry riverbed and found a lot of bottlecaps and junk. Halfway through, the Garrett Ace 250 signaled that there was a dime underground. One simple scoop of the sifter (and mind you, all that other junk had to be dug out with a huge shovel) yielded this fine treasure:

We had no idea what kind of Chinese coin this was but a Google search tells me it is a gift medallion of some kind. That was disappointing because your initial thought when you see a coin of this size (3 inches in diameter) is that because it is so big, it is worth more. Wrongo. But I believe the big mystery behind this is, how the heck does someone lose something as big as this in a dry riverbed?

We followed the stream a bit more but it was just more bottlecaps. We checked out the grassy area of the Old Zoo and didn't get many signals until we reached a little knoll overlooking the stream, under a tree. I didn't think we should be digging in this grassy area but it was a good signal. After a quick look around, we started digging. One old penny, two old pennies, three, some other kind of coin, another of that kind of coin... this was turning into some kind of stash! This was our last big find of the day so I'll move on to the part where we take our treasures home.

To us, the most interesting find was the old coin stash. After a quick Google search on how to safely clean coins without damaging them, it looked like electrolysis was the best way. And after another quick Google search, my hubby was well on his way out to the shed to find a power source to build our own electrolysis machine. That took about 5 minutes to complete. Who knew? It took many on and off cycles of the electrolysis machine to remove the corrosion from the coin, but what we uncovered was an antique subway token! I couldn't find a lot of information on this particular token or what years it was from. We still plan on electrolyzing the pennies to find out what year these were lost. I'll post a better picture of the subway token when I finish de-corroding it.



I can just imagine some young guy back in the 30's, sitting down by the stream after visiting the zoo, with all the change, and his fare home, dumping out onto the ground unbeknownst to him. It's amazing to me that these coins went from that person to us, with no other transaction in between. We felt like time travelers. That was a really special day. A great day. A day on which we didn't get arrested for digging holes in the park.