My Backyard
In my backyard there is an old demolished Mica Mine from the mid 1920's, I took a lady friend up there to do some metal detecting in the fall of 2009.
Now when I was a child of 12 (1972) my brothers and I used to use the mine as a shooting gallery, because of the high cliff horseshoe shape. We used to have shooting contests of various kinds, and one brother came up with the idea of trying to shoot a hole through a dime, yes a dime, at 50 yards scoped 22cal. rifle. My brother made a wooden frame the several dimes were mounted in. I have 6 brothers and 3 sisters, 5 of us brothers were in this competition. in the first round, out of the 5 of us only 2 were successful at shooting a hole in the dimes, the other 3 were winged. Round two the 2 of us got to shoot again, one shot each. I don't remember what happened to the dimes.......
Back to the Metal Detecting, I thought this would be a good area for relic hunting because we had found such items before such as Railroad spikes, a Mattock, several Horseshoes, a couple of Sickles. So we started sweeping back and forth and my lady friend gets a good solid hit for coins at 4" inches, she started digging (left the pinpointer at home) and searching, she pulled up 3 dimes with holes shot in them, 2 of them were mine. She was rather disappointed and threw them back in the hole and reburied them. we also had a wonderful story for the next family gathering for Thanksgiving. My brother still claims he had dirt in his eye. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!!!