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The fiancé has decided she wants to collect gems and rocks now so I guess that means I to have a new hobby and another excuse to get out and explore . Anybody else on here do some treasure hunting while out overlanding?
Rockhounding / gold panning /metal detecting
- Thread starter Smileyshaun
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wood hunting, of course and we do collect a fair amount of rocks as well. the wife will take smaller rocks and put them in resin or wrap them with wire and make a necklace or something like that. neat way of having an actual keepsake of an area we visited. she'll also bring back rocks and put them in her flower pots for decoration and we've been hitting arkansas a good bit over the last few years and have gone to the crystal mines in the southwest area of the state and have a bunch of nice big crystals. there is one big rock the wife keeps as a door stop...so every time i stump my toe on it, i can remember our trip.
i know a lot of agates can be cut and polished in a tumbler to look really nice...we haven't gotten that far yet.
rocks and gems are cool to collect. i still have a bunch of rocks i collected from places when i was a kid.
@Smileyshaun , with your shop and nice stash of wood, you can make some really nice display cases for her.
i know a lot of agates can be cut and polished in a tumbler to look really nice...we haven't gotten that far yet.
rocks and gems are cool to collect. i still have a bunch of rocks i collected from places when i was a kid.
@Smileyshaun , with your shop and nice stash of wood, you can make some really nice display cases for her.
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Member III
well she wants to make sure wrapped jewelry and stuff but ya a display case would be cool . Almost at the point of using the little woods hop again just need to sell off or donate my table saw and do some rearranging and I’ll be back to making dust .
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Did a bit of that when I convinced my daughter to go to Wyoming with me a few years ago. We were kayaking and stopped for a break.
My youngest sons favorite thing to do when we are beach combing is to find a “worry rock” he will find one then see another and toss the first one And on and on. Then it ends up in the washer. Lol
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Well first bit of rock stuff was getting these thunder eggs cut open to see what beauty they hold 
With a degree in Mining Engineering (and enough geology classes I could have had a minor), I've got more rocks than I care to admit. Never made it there when I lived out that way, but I heard good things about Garnet Mt. near Ely NV. I did get some fluorite from Gabbs, NV and some turquoise near Tonopah, NV.
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Off-Road Ranger I
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Funny. My kids went on a wildness field trip in school, they had them use pans to see if they could find gold. My kids panned down to the black sand and flakes in a couple of seconds , the teacher couldn't believe they did it again, and they showed how they did it. Then explained, Dad had they doing since they could hold a pan. By the time my youngest got to the class, the teacher had her show the other students how to do it, and still had more gold in her pan than the teacher...The Kiddos made me proud!
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Shaun living where you do gives you lots of options for rock and gem hunting. Youtube has several rockhunting videos in Nevada. I've not looked for Oregon videos as I go to NV. I have plenty of rocks(not just in my head) from my travels and I take my metal detector and find lots of scrap nails and old screening.......
naysjp
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naysjp
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I tried googling Gold Nugget Prospectors and nothing comes up but random videos. Were you giving me words to google or is this a company name?
There may have shut down a couple years back , I stop following them when "Buzzard" died and Tom ( His Son ) took it over, but he had shows on the Outdoor channel a few years back. I would think they would show them again since the price of Gold shot up so high, and how popular Gold Rush Tv show is.....I double checked , its Gold Prospectors Association of America , or known as GPAA, they are still around... Sorry I mashed up two different clubs...
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I live in the middle of Nevada’s old mining districts and am a huge history buff. I’m always ready to go snoop around old cabins and ghost towns. I’m not huge on panning or digging gems as I work in a gold mine and do not want to dig on my days off. Hunting arrowheads (where it’s legal) is another thing I really enjoy. My wife is a total rock hound though. It just has to look pretty to her and she’s grabbing it. If you don’t keep control of her, the truck will come home completely over it’s payload rating. And that’s in a 3/4 ton truck.
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I got into gold panning last year and now keep my pan and the other gear in my rig on the molle panels.
Like many of the wives out there I will pick up any rock that is of visual interest and will try to select rocks of geological significance to the area I am exploring.
I do look for early history sites and have a small collection of flint flakes and other things that I have made elaborate stories about ( yes this flat rock was used as a grinding tool ) - though of course it might just be a flat rock.. lol! I also collect cans ( yah the can gal!) old beer, soda or food cans… love my collection of oyster tins…
I do metal detect in some areas but out here in California it is frowned on in many of the parks ( eg removing relics and damage due to holes). Have yet to find anything really cool other then some UFOs..
Like many of the wives out there I will pick up any rock that is of visual interest and will try to select rocks of geological significance to the area I am exploring.
I do look for early history sites and have a small collection of flint flakes and other things that I have made elaborate stories about ( yes this flat rock was used as a grinding tool ) - though of course it might just be a flat rock.. lol! I also collect cans ( yah the can gal!) old beer, soda or food cans… love my collection of oyster tins…
I do metal detect in some areas but out here in California it is frowned on in many of the parks ( eg removing relics and damage due to holes). Have yet to find anything really cool other then some UFOs..
We were out by the Summit near Desert Center, we were Quail hunting near an old mine, and one of the guys found a sckool can, "dip". that had two half dollars and several smaller coins in it . I looked up the worth of just the half dollars, and they were about 50.00 dollars each alone, he sold the whole thing to a coin shop in Long Beach area for a couple hundred!!!!!
We're actually planning our spring break around going to North Carolina back to the Hiddenite emerald mine where I was at years ago on a family vacation. We had an amazing amount of fun in three days brought home buckets of gemstones and thousands of memories. I've recently been watching Dan heard prospecting on youtube he's a pretty enigmatic guy in.. He's entertaining to watch and you can tell he is a school teacher
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To bring an old post from the dead . Found my biggest carnilian so far x awesome bands in it . Have tried gold panning a few times but no luck so far 
