I stopped by Riverside park here in Wichita after work. I have been doing so for a week now digging up mid tones at various parts of the park. Now if you live in Wichita and you metal detect, then you know how unforgiving Riverside park is.
Old timers around here love to show off their boxes full of silver coins they found at Riverside park back in the late 60’s and early 70’s. They took it all and then, drank beer to celebrate and filled the park with pulltabs and bottle caps. As another hunter put it: “There is a four inch layer of junk at Riverside park”. So us, johnnies-come-lately can’t find squat at Riverside.
That is why I decided to start digging mid tones. There are thousands upon thousands of them at Riverside. I figure if I can’t find an old coin, at least I may find a gold ring or two.
To be fair, I have found silver coins at Riverside. And I found an Indian Head. And I’ve found several wheaties. The issue is that I had to get very creative to find those coins. With the exception of the Indian Head, which I found at a hunted out area, all the other coins were found in unconventional areas of the park, such as the various banks of the river. The park proper, however, is a desert when it comes to old coins.
So today, I went looking for gold. Let me interject here that I love my V3i. It’s just so darned programmable! I have been hunting for relatively shallow stuff and digging tons of pulltabs. Today however, I set the V to detect the deepest stuff. I figured if I got a mid tone at six inches or deeper, the target was bound to be something interesting. And there I was, swinging away when I got a coin signal. Wha-wha-wha-whaaaat!!!??? A coin signal at seven inches plus??!! The area I was at is heavily hunted. The local metal detecting club holds seeded hunts here for the love of Pete! So what’s this deep coin doing here? How did it get missed? Well, the answer may be as simple as this: The coin was sitting right next to a melted piece of metal and the signal was ugly. Not the kind of signal one would be tempted to dig. Unless…you have a metal detector that you can program to process the signals really slowly and thus allow you to separate targets that are sitting right next to each other!
So there’s my story. I pulled this 1934 D wheat cent from an almost eight inch deep hole. And the significance of all this? The significance is that if this was missed, then who knows what else is laying under that dirt. Stuff even I missed with both my Ace 250 and my At Pro because I wasn’t hunting the area with the correct technique.
From the depths of the hunted out park
Thank you for looking!
The Dirt Is Good To Me 
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