Finding old with new

Have you ever found that great lead to lost Spanish galleons, buried pirate gold, Wells-Fargo robberies, the rediscovery of long, lost mines, or the mattress-hordes of an eccentric old prospector? Then you run into a hitch in your giddy-up. The town or place that you need to find is no longer on any map? I myself have ran into that problem more than once. Now one of your best resources are the “old timers” in your area. They probably have more stored back for a rainy day conversation than you can shake a stick at. If you have that resource, use it. If you don’t though here is a great resource that I myself have used at my desk in my house while drinking a cup of coffee. This can save you hours if not days of foot work in the field. It’s a hobby that even some treasure hunters may have. It’s called “Geocaching”.

You can think of it as a modern-day hunt for treasure. It starts out with satellites above the earth. Using a GPS, they can tell you where you are within a few feet. A few years back, someone took that technology and started hiding things to find throughout the world and posting those so-called treasure coordinates on the Internet. Now, anyone can search for these geocaches.

I discovered through a good friend of mine that these folks where hiding some of these geocaches in old forgotten places like ghost towns, old canyons, creeks, and caves. What’s great about this is that they have posted the coordinates to these place on the internet and with the use of a hand held GPS ,or heck even now a day’s your cell phone probably has a application for it, you can probably find the place you’ve been looking for. I have even emailed the person who had hidden the geocache near the particular area I was looking for and he was able to give me exact location of a building I was looking for in the old ghost town.

You can take it a step further and enter the coordinates into the mapping program of your choice and probably get a bird’s eye view of the place before you even head out into the field. You can also share your research this way with your hunting partner if needed through email.

What it boils down to is when you are searching for a treasure site, don’t be afraid to think outside of the box a little and use resources that you might not normally consider. Mix a little old tactics with some new. Along the way you may even pick up a new hobby or two