Taking it from the top, literally and figuratively!

Is this Leadville? Some friends and I hit a public mining camp back during the summer there and loaded up. Go for it! There’s bound to be more hiding there


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No, it's more on the Front Range. I'd like to try a reconnaissance with MD today but very high winds are forecast (~50 MPH) so it might not happen. Leadville area is good to. Thanks for the good wishes!

Good luck - interested to see what you find.

I've detected a ghost town back a few years. Very trashy site. Rusty corrugated metal panels from roofs littered the ground... As well as hot rocks and melted metal. From what I understand a few of the neglected structures caught fire in the 1960s and locals bulldozed the rest into the Earth.

Didn't find much at my site but it was mighty fun to be out there alone in the wilderness with whispers of yesteryear blowing in on the breeze.

OK, my wife and I braved the high winds and went to the alpine mining camp site for three hours yesterday as a reconnaissance with MD. Interesting. I found some stuff.

http://metaldetectingforum.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=473389&stc=1&d=1602776790

This is not exciting stuff. Yet! It falls into two categories, modern junk and old mining camp era junk. I have grouped the junk into four images for detail, modern stuff first:

http://metaldetectingforum.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=473390&stc=1&d=1602778736

http://metaldetectingforum.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=473391&stc=1&d=1602778736

and the older stuff:

http://metaldetectingforum.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=473392&stc=1&d=1602778973

http://metaldetectingforum.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=473393&stc=1&d=1602778973

The modern stuff is aluminum, brass and brass w/ lead, to whit, a squashed older style beavertail poptop beer can, two different grades of aluminum foil, eight 5.56 mm cartridge casings and two bullets, a nice un-deformed .308 boattail and mushroomed spitzer. This is (was?), after all, a nice open area, good for some plinking with the 5.56 mm, and, since it is also at 10,000' elevation in an alpine meadow with good nearby water and forage, a favorite with the local big game (elk and moose). It is also eminently huntable, so also a fav with the local big game hunters, as attested to by the 30 cal slugs. My wife asked me if I saw the moose down there in the meadow - I didn't. I was head down dutifully pursuing MDing, of course, particularly where the critters had bedded down and knocked the meadow grass flat! Lots of moose and elk scat around.

As for the mining camp era stuff, it was either rusty iron fasteners or rusty relics, except for the round thingy with the hole in it, which is probably a decorative surround on some iron object, that is a thin white metal and uncorroded (silver?), that does have some rust adhering to its back side. The fasteners were forged nails and one genuine rusty carriage bolt that my wife found visually. The other stuff consists of a segment of an iron wheel with remnants of spokes, a handle of some sort and what looks like a locking latch of some kind.

So the upshot of this is that I'm sure much more stuff is there and the town site is confirmed where I operated. However, conditions are tough for MDing. Some of the meadow has woody forage brush and the rest has deep grass, probably hip high in mid-summer. They have already had at least two snow light storms up there and the grass is now dried and bent over, providing a grass mat 6" deep, unless the critters have bedded, where it is 3" deep, all with a somewhat tough root system.

Other things encountered included some dressed rocks, likely foundation masonry, ceramic dish sherds and sundry colored broken glass, possibly a cabin dump site and some 3' diameter pits, some lined with riveted iron sheet, possible sunk ore buckets.

I did some deeper research on this mining community and they did have high wind driven fire problems, disease problems (sad children graves on a nearby hill) and the expected cold, snow and altitude issues. The population peaked in the late 1870s and was a mostly obliterated ghost town shortly after the turn of the century.

I'm going back if I can get good weather and avoid getting shot or stomped, although it is probably going to get socked in pretty soon. I wonder if this would be a better endeavor immediately after the spring thaw when the grass has been compressed and rotted and the voles have eaten some of the roots under the snowpack? This seems like a good prospect, but I need to find ways to be more efficient at dealing with the brush and deep grass.

Oops, sorry, I blew the image downloads. Please just click them.

Latest Try @ the Silver Camp Before Winter Sets In

A mountain meadow
A forest fire
But more than that, a 115 year disappeared community
A rock lined well and ruins
More findings
There is a bit of fused glass, so I found a burn pit. I found a bunch of square nails in several areas. The .45 slug is modern. Maybe I found a blacksmith's shop because there was a stone foundation at hand and I found a horseshoe. I don't have a clue what the gear looking thing is but it was near the horseshoe. It has 10 degree divisions with major divisions every 30 degrees. One of the divisions is omitted, so I wonder if it is some kind of intermittent system.
Nearby I found a broken spade blade.

Pa, are we deep enough yet? No, son, keep digging.