Yeah buddy, that HF is something you will wanna take very serious.
If I recall the 417 was 78% silver. It’s sits down at the Tucson Gem & Mineral Museum with the next two smaller ones. It was in the side of a narrow arroyo, the top not six inches from the surface. Not fifty feet away uphill is a deep looking shaft from the late 1880-90’s that doesn’t appear to have produced. He and a buddy had planned on going scout’n for deer season in that area one weekend. His buddy’s wife wasn’t none too happy about it as they went scout’n the previous weekend. He says to his buddy’s wife, well what you like to go do? She replied, let’s go metal detecting. Well of course the boys decided to go detect in the area they wanted to scout for deer, but she didn’t know that. Kill’n two birds with one stone sort of thing as it were. They found silver all the way up that wash.The 417 being the highest piece. Silver will make a detector scream like a son of a bitch. Thing is, bullets are all over out there too since it’s fairly close to town and has been a good hunting area for over a hundred and fifty years. They cleaned it up pretty good that day and in the following weeks despite the trash dig’n. He’s taken me there a couple times and I did get a thumbnail size piece first time and then another small chili pepper look’n piece next time.
It was well into sunset before he got that lunker unearthed and was pretty nervous about having to leave it there overnight as you can imagine. They went back early the next morn’n with his son and another guy and dragged it out on that makeshift sled of corrugated steel.
Can you imagine the thrill of finding something like that? Dig’n and dig’n around that thing and it just keeps going down and down! Holy shit man! It’s pretty fuk’n rare to find a silver nugget that big. There’s been bigger, but not that many and none have survived in their found form so this is the largest known silver nugget in existence. Pretty darn cool.
Edited twice due to piss poor proofreading. : (
Awesome! I can imagine the excitement!
Did he ever get out to get a deer that year? Or did the silver find change his plans?
You’d think holding the state record for a silver nugget would be good enough, but oh no, now his goal is to find Arizona’s largest gold nugget so any animal hunting is out. Until then, you can’t get that metal detector out of his hands.
I can understand! Once you get the gold/silver bug, it's hard to cure. Arizona is a beautiful state. I've seen a lot of it, especially the eastern half. Great memories!
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