One meager find = One major milestone!

My favorite spot to hunt has been at Forest Park here in St. Louis. I had spent many years studying the history of Forest Park and hunting every one of it's nearly 1300 acres. It started one hot August evening in 1987 with a 1914 Wheatie and today I reached my milestone of 20,000 coins from Forest Park on a 1951-D Wheatie.

I've had this milestone in my sights for the past 3 or 4 years. I didn't think I had enough left in my worn out body or that there were enough coins worth digging left out there to reach it. But, I plugged away and kept track of it and finally reached it today.

In 1987, many other detectorists were still hunting out there frequently. I ran into several of them on a regular enough basis to get to know them by name. One by one, over the succeeding years, they vanished until I was the only one left. New detectorists came and went out there. Old-timers returned once in a while for a nice spring day's hunt. I sometimes gave it a break out there, but I always came back and seemed to never miss a beat finding old coins. In the early to mid 1990's, I hunted out there on a daily basis often for 8-10 hours a day. Seldom did I come home without at least a few good finds. I was young and had boundless energy back then.

As the years passed and the good finds piled up, I noticed how it was getting harder and harder to find targets, and to get my body to keep up with the frenetic pace. I started out there with a Bounty Hunter Big Bud and went through a string of different detectors as the years went by - Compass Coin Scanner Pro - White's Spectrum - Minelab Explorer. Every time I got the latest and greatest machine, the finds picked up in quality and quantity. Old spots out there gave up the goodies time and again with each new machine.

Those "good old spots" started to disappear, one by one, due to being hunted out or being bulldozed away during construction projects. I know that you never hunt a site out, but you do reach a point where there simply aren't enough targets left to make detecting worthwhile or enjoyable. Hot summer days and freezing winter days metal detecting are more enjoyable when you are finding things, but when you are chasing after a needle in a haystack, they become brutal! And I won't even go into the 7" deep zinc pennies that are popping up everywhere!

After using my Explorer for a couple years, I hunted less and less out there as I was finding many other sites far and wide that produced better. I would go back out to Forest Park and hunt but the lack of consistent, good finds was a growing disappointment. I had been spoiled by years past, I think. Silver coins were everywhere, then they started getting scarce. Indian cents were everywhere, then they started getting scarce. After it got to be a chore to even come up with a wheatie, I realized that my favorite spot was slowly becoming my nemesis.

I suspect that many long-time detectorists out there can empathize with this. Many of the newer detectorists out there can only listen to stories of the "old days" that I used to enjoy, and wonder at how neat it would have been to make consistent nice finds in quantity and quality. I started telling myself that when I hit the 1,000 silver coin mark out there, that I would give it up and concentrate on other places. But I kept digging silver afterwards and continued on out there. Now, recently, I decided I would tough it out until I reached 20,000 total coins and give up. I didn't like the thought of "giving up", but My health has declined to a point where I can't hunt on many days and even only for a couple hours if I do.

When I hunt out there now, I spend more time looking around at the many productive sites, that were good to me in the past, that I can't get anything more from. I do more reminiscing than hunting anymore out there. I can't help but think that our hobby, as we knew it, is dying out. More and more sites are hunted out or developed into strip malls and condos. More and more anti-detecting laws are passed. I'm far too big and frightening looking to go back to knocking on doors to hunt private yards like I did decades ago.

I would say this to you other detectorists out there: If you haven't already, find your "Forest Park". Get to know it's history well and hunt it often with a conscious attention to the history you are recovering and the connections you make with the past in the objects you recover. Even if your special place to hunt isn't a huge park with tens of thousands of targets to dig, it is still your place to spend a nice day, and to get to know it on an intimate level because it will leave a little bit of itself in you, like Forest Park has with me.

This is the only time I ever photographed a crappy looking common wheatie, but when I look at it, I don't see coin #20,000, I see in it the other 19,999 coins that came before it.

This is the list of what is included in 20,000 coins from the park:

1,480 - Silver Coins

5,153 - non-silver Obsolete Coins

13,305 Clad Coins ($1,126.32 face value)

20,000 Grand total

Also found:

My oldest coin was a Persian silver drachm from 2 B.C.

Oldest US Coin - 1828 Large Cent

Most Valuable Coin - 1916 Standing Liberty Quarter grading VF

And add in about 20-30 thousand trash items.... no wonder my knees hurt!!!

Thanks for bearing with this long post and Happy Hunting!

Mike - Missouri, USA