There's gold in them thar hills!

[Smiles Jr.]

One of my old hunting and fishing buddies retired and moved into a beautiful motorhome. He and his wife have lived in it for about 6 years now. They usually spend their winters in a place in Arizona called Quartsite along with thousands of other fulltime RVers.

He has a group of buddies that he hangs around with and a few weeks ago they went up into the mountains with the guys as one in the group is a bird watcher and he wanted to see if he could find some rare bird up there. And my friend has one of those cool looking off-road Jeeps. As they were messing around on the mountain my friend was busy looking for snakes and other creepy-crawly critters. He flipped over a rock and saw some unusual stones and picked one up. He says it was heavier than lead and he showed it to one of the other guys. The other guy took out his pocket knife and scratched on it and LOW AND BEHOLD it was real gold. My friend proceeded to pick up 17 other "funny" stones. All 100% gold nuggets.

They scoured the area for two more hours and did not find any more. The next day he drove to Phoenix to get an idea of the value of his find. Are you ready for this? $43,000 (as of a few weeks ago). The price of gold has gone down slightly in the last few days but WOW! I don't think he plans to sell them.

He told me that he highly suspects that someone had placed those pieces under that rock many years ago. They were apparently way up in a very remote area 20 miles from the nearest roads and houses. The slab of stone he turned over seemed a little out of place in relation to the other big rocks in the immediate vicinity. They were on Bureau of Land Management land so there is no concern for ownership of the property.

Hmmm, maybe Jesse James, or Bonny and Clyde???? How about an old Inca Indian king's stash from the 14th century?

 

[Nyboy]

That is so cool

 

[digitS']

Is he going back with his metal detector?

Hoodat posted a picture on here of what is probably a pebble chopper that he found near San Diego. It was once very common to find Indian artifacts just here and there. I once climbed a cliff in Owyhee Mountains and here were aaalll of these flint chips all over the rocks and everywhere. Some of the basalt rocks had been piled in walls.

Indians valued gold but may not have been obsessed with it.

I seemed to have lived my entire life near places that were placer mined for gold. My uncle-in-law's brother lived just a few miles from us in Gold Hill, Oregon. We could visit and he would let us take pans down to the creek that ran thru his property and we could sift thru the sand and dirt for "color." It was always possible to find some and we would put our speck or 2 in one of his little bottles .

Near the Applegate River not many miles from Gold Hill, we found an old, falling down cabin. You could tell that it belonged to an early miner by the collection of tools. He had a shovel with the longest handle I'd ever seen! Anyway, placer mining by the "big boys" like Guggenheim did an awful lot of damage hereabouts. The dang miners themselves did an awful lot of damage, too! It seems that when the rivers and creeks ran too high to work, a "good thing" for them to do with their time was to go out and shoot any Indians that they could find . . .

Steve

 

[897tgigvib]

Smiles, it would most assuredly not be from an Inca King's stash. This much is pretty certain.

The Inca Indians lived down in South America, Peru and Chile, up in the Andes mountains.

More likely it was placed there by Bogart and his gang sneaking up north from the Sierra Madres while each accusing the other of taking their whole stash. Yes. That's how the Gold got under that rock. Make sure it's not patented! Or copyrighted either!

 

[OldGuy43]

Yes, many years ago I knew a fellow who paid for his vacations in Alaska by panning for gold.

 

[Ridgerunner]

What I thought of when I read this was that someone salted a claim. Maybe they hid some real gold so they could swindle someone else by making them think there really was gold in them thar hills. Maybe a grizzly bear got them before they could complete the swindle.

 

[Jared77]

Regardless of how it got there, thats a CRAZY cool story!!!!

 

[NwMtGardener]

Thats really cool!! It reminded me of this story:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newswe...s-you-to-find-his-treasure-and-his-bones.html

If you have some time on your hands and want to find a buried treasure chest, he apparently left clues as to where it is in a poem, kinda fun!

 

[Chickie'sMomaInNH]

i've heard for years that it is quite easy to find gold out in the desert areas of AZ and NM. with the occasional rains/wind that wash & blow away the topsoil, it makes it easy to just got out and pick it right off the ground.

i have a baggie of 'salted' dirt that my brother in law sent to my dh many years ago. we have his old pan so i happen to find the bag of dirt last week and started to pan through a small sample. man, is that tough to do just to look for dust! but it is neat that there is magnetic soil mixed into it. it's like playing with one of those 'Wooly Willy' toys i remember as a kid! for those of you who want to reminisce http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wooly_Willy

 

[digitS']

May I tease someone from the wonderful state of New Hampshire?

better not . . .


Steve