Always the saddest title, even sadder than “Skunked”.

Back to this winter’s honeyhole for the Final Farewell Farewell hunt — cleaning up loose ends, wandering aimlessly around a huge field, and getting skunked (except for a nice field tell – a colonial buckle, not very deep, but there’s no reason to believe the random areas of this field are any better than the random areas of any other random field, and reasons to believe they are worse).

No more old timer’s half dollars.  No big fish.  But the site did produce 65 silver coins, including 3 silver half dollars, one of which may have been one of the old timer’s.  We’ll never know, but it made good copy at the time, and was fun to think about.  The oldest silver coin was a 1901 barber dime.  There may have been some IHs or some abused coppers as well; if so, I don’t remember them.  In any case, my 5th best site ever in terms of silver coin count, tho it did not produce a top 30 career find.  The big fish, if they were there and deep, were hidden by the brutal mineralization.

This was a bizarre site to figure out, and in fact, I never did.  It had the most dense hot zone I’ve ever hit, flanked not 30 feet away by zones that would not even give up clad.  Fortunately, it had one traditional zone that could be meticulously gridded out to get some stray silvers after the hot zone, but that was the exception, not the rule — everything was dead in other directions.  38 in the hot zone (about a half acre).  1 in the devil strip. 26 traditionally gridded out in about a 3-5 acre area.  And acres and acres of dead all around and in between.  Weird.  No doubt alot of fill and grade, incompetent competition, intense variable mineralization, and variable bedrock, and many more factors going on.  Who knows?

So, that’s that.  Onto look for a new site.  We’ll see how that goes.  At least the weather is improving.  The endless winter may finally be winding down.