As the Stewart family prepares for another cross-country trip, though we won’t be metal detecting there, in the state of Nevada you can find one type of metal naturally unlike anywhere else. I’m talking about gold.

For our family, the idea of treasure-hunting for gold traces back to 1985 with my dad traveling into a little secluded town called Silver City, Idaho. Yes, kind of contradictory to a gold story, but I promise there is gold around there. As he made the 40-minute drive through potholes and streams and around fallen trees, he came across prospectors panning for gold on the long and extreme-terrain road to town. He got out and talked to them about what they were doing and was fascinated by it. This led to a lifelong bug of treasure-hunting and wanting to explore for all sorts of items – something he passed on to me, my mom and others.

You might not think New Englanders can find gold here like they do out West. While this is true to some extent, if you travel about 3 hours up north into the majestic Western Maine Mountains to Oxford County, you might find gold. In Coos Canyon runs the beautiful Swift River, where gold runs heavy. And by heavy, I mean that quite literally. Gold is a very heavy metal and is often found in bodies of water such as streams and rivers in the cracks and crevices. The most common way they find gold up north is through a technique known as sluicing. You set up the sluice right in the stream and hold it down with some rocks, allowing for the natural flow of water to wash the material through as you feed it in. Many small grates collect the bigger rocks, such as gold, as the water flows. And all you need to do is take a shovel full of material at a time and let it wash through. Other versions have a vacuum-like suction piece which makes it easier to get up the material trapped in those cracks I mentioned earlier.

After all that hard work, you sometimes can expect a few flakes, maybe a good size smaller gold nugget or, often, absolutely nothing. Finding gold is not an easy thing, but when you do find it, it makes the work worth it.
Finding gold around here is not the same as out West. It’s practically all desert out there and there’s no water to help trap it. Of course, there are small streams where you can sluice and pan (a technique where you use a pan-shaped dish with ridges to wash out the dirt, leaving the heavy gold in the bottom) for gold, but typically treasure hunters out there rely on special metal detectors made specifically to target gold.

They sometimes just give off tones and can target the super-small sizes of some gold pieces. For example, the Garret ATX is one of the best gold metal detectors on the market. The higher the number on the 1-to-13 scale it displays, the better of a conductor it is. So, a material like gold will sound strong on the machine.

On one trip out West, we found ourselves in the small South Dakota town of Hill City (population is 959 in 2022). Mom, dad, Andrew and myself panned for gold in the Black Hills with the help of a lifelong prospector. In his backyard was a small stream with a bridge that we sat on with our feet in the water. Small piles of material would be placed into our pans, and he would show us the proper technique to go through the material. In the dirt we panned, there was lots of garnets (a beautiful small red gem) mixed in with black sand – typically, a good sign that you are near gold. We panned for a few hours and were able to find a few flakes between the four of us! That experience planted the gold bug!
Someday we hope to make it out West for a strict metal-detecting/gold-prospecting trip, on the quest to find a gold nugget of our own. It isn’t an easy task, but it sure does give you an adrenaline rush trying to find it!

Methuen father/son treasure hunters Steve and Jonathan Stewart were the August 2019 MethuenLife cover story. They run YouTube, Facebook and Instagram accounts called Mass Metal Detecting and have followers around the globe. They love to save history and enjoy talking about it. If you’d like to invite them to your property for a hunt, you may be included in a future article! Please drop them a note via MethuenLife@msn.com.