Late in January of this year myself and 3 friends met up for a day of prospecting in the Bradshaw Mountains in Arizona. After sampling for hillside gold on a friends claim for a little while, I decided that I would like to go do some detecting in a wash not to far from where we already were. Two of the group stayed behind, and continued sampling for gold, while another friend and I took off for some detecting. After a short drive we were on the detecting grounds. Both of us turned our machines on and went to work beeping the creek bed. My friend almost immediately started finding small nuggets on a bench as he usually does, meanwhile I stuck to the gut of the creek hoping for faint targets that may have been missed by previous detectorists. An hour or two had gone by, and I had only dug a few trash targets. By this time the other two friends had shown up in the creek, as they had finished their drywashing for the day. I continued metal detecting, and came across an area that had been vacuumed , so I focussed on the perimeter of the worked area. Not one foot from this area, and I got a good but strong signal. I immediately figured it was just trash from the placering, but instinct told me to dig it up regardless. To my surprise, the signal kept getting deeper, and before long, I was on bedrock with a screaming signal coming from a crevacy area. After chipping away at the hard material, the target was out so I went to work locating the target with my scoop. You could feel weight in the scoop and that is pretty exciting. It wasnt long before I had the target in my hand, however I was a bit puzzled at first because it resembled lead or tin at first glance. I soon realised that this was no man made nugget, this was an element with small bits of host rock througout the compacted veins of tarnished wire. I knew then that I was holding a very rare, and large silver nugget, and it was absolutly beautiful. At just over 18 grams, what a rare, and fantastic find indeed. Adam – Arizona, USA