Does Metal Detecting Pay?

So, does it pay?

If you broadly define pay as simply a positive return on investment, then my short answer is yes, definitely—it pays! However, if you strictly narrow it down to time and dollars invested versus dollars returned, my answer is maybe.

What qualifies me as an authority?

I supported myself for years as a roving, full-time detectorist living solely off the gold I recovered, often in remote, hard-to-get-to locations, primarily in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains and to a lesser extent in Nevada, Arizona, and Alaska. It was an exciting, independent, freewheeling lifestyle. Every new day was exciting. The possibility of discovering a life-changing bonanza with the next swing of my detector’s coil kept me inspired, focused, and energized.

For most of those years, I didn’t have the usual list of monthly bills to weigh me down. Had I had a family, I would not have been able to come close to consistently supporting them from what I made solely from nugget shooting. However, as it turned out, I was able to make a living for myself and bag a ton of great memories in the doing.

Back in the early 1980s, after I had been prospecting and mining gold for years, I began to hear a lot of chatter about metal detectors being able to detect nuggets.

I had a list of hot spots that had produced good gold for me. And I wondered if they would give up even more gold if I targeted them with a detector.

So, while knowing zilch about detectors, I popped for my first one in late 1984 and chose the model my only metal-detecting buddy, Ron Crone, favored. But I didn’t know jack about how to use it.

Ron was an expert detectorist who specialized in coin hunting. He was passionate about his hobby and in the preceding year had dug up over two thousand coins. He had some gold prospecting experience too, but had never got around to hunting nuggets with his detector. However, he was tempted to try, and I needed help learning to detect, so we decided to work together as a team to see what we could accomplish.

Ron’s help would put me on the fast track to becoming a competent detectorist and I would share some of my hot spot with him. Would we be able to partner up and rake in the gold with our detectors? We didn’t know but were determined to find out. Ron had a regular nine-to-five job, so we could only get together for nugget shooting on the weekends. Interestingly, the first gold I found with a metal detector was with a Whites Coinmaster, which was designed, optimized, and marketed for its enhanced ability to detect coins (not gold).

One Sunday in January 1985, I detected my first gold nugget. It was a quartz/gold specimen (gold embedded in a quartz matrix). And it was a whopper! It weighed over 13 ounces and contained approximately 6 ounces of gold.

The hefty specimen, after I dissolved most of the quartz in acid, is shown featured below on the cover of Treasure Found magazine.

Me, Ron Crone, and the nugget. I’m the goon on the left

The magazine is no longer in business; however, back issues can often be found for sale on Google.

Not everyone agrees that metal detecting pays.

For most detectorists, the question of whether or not metal detecting pays is a subjective one. Few ardent coil swingers consider revenue generated from metal detecting as their only criteria for measuring success. Those that do, mostly newbies, usually soon give up and walk away.

The intrinsic value of metal-detecting targets recovered, combined with the thrill of the hunt, physical fitness bolstering benefit, support and companionship of fellow detectorists, and sense of achievement that the metal detecting experience brings, all figure into many detectorists’ compensation packages—certainly mine.

While seasoned devotees will not claim that metal detecting is an easy pathway to wealth, most will agree that based on the totality of rewards (personal and monetary) metal detecting does pay, and, for the favored few, it pays bigly!

The highest degree of success usually favors those adopting proven hunting strategies. For instance, hunting gold nuggets where gold has previously been found has proven to be far more productive than randomly hunting terrain with no prior history of gold production. Likewise, for coins and jewelry, popular beaches, parks, schools, fairgrounds, and churchyards are likely to produce more than locations less visited.

Every seasoned detectorist, no matter how skilled and hardworking, has experienced frustrating periods of low productivity that tested their commitment to endure.

Thankfully, there are tons of success stories to inspire them to hang in there.

To illustrate:

My prospecting partner at the time, Bruce (last name withheld by request), and I were camping and nugget-shooting far off-road, deep into the Mojave Desert throughout the winter of ’94 and into the spring of ’95. I was having a good season digging beautiful little pickers and the occasional bodacious nugget out of dry washes and from hillsides beneath weathered quartz outcrops.

One day, near the top of a hill not far from camp, my detector went wild. I had stumbled upon a patch (a localized concentration of gold). Rich, buttery gold was scattered around on the surface in an area only a few feet square. Some were solid nuggets, but most were lumps of rotten, iron-stained quartz, heavily laced with gold, a combination known as specimen gold, and highly prized by prospectors and collectors worldwide.

I beat it back to camp, grabbed a bucket, and scooped up my windfall from the surface.

Later that day, I dug up a shallow pocket of nuggets and gold specimens from the same weathered vein that had produced my surface patch. The vein was only a few feet above my patch and a few inches below the surface.

Among the specimens were pieces and chunks of raw gold that had weathered out of the quartz in the vein. I could hardly believe my luck because not 30 feet away was an 18-foot-deep exploration shaft that had been sunk by the old-timers on the same promising quartz outcrop that had given up my patch and pocket of gold. I don’t know how the old-timers could have missed the gold I found, especially the surface gold. But to be fair, while passing through with my detector slung over my shoulder, I had traipsed over it a couple of times myself without spotting the gold that was twinkling on the surface I walked on.

Each morning that season, Bruce and I grabbed our detectors and headed out on foot from our camp to prospect for gold. To cover the widest possible area, he would go in one direction and I another. One evening, Bruce arrived back at camp later than usual. He was visibly excited and had an incredible tale to tell. While hiking back toward the end of the day, less than a quarter of a mile from camp, he had run into a lone greenhorn who was metal detecting.

The guy told Bruce that he was on vacation from his job as a custodian for a school district in Oregon. He and his wife were visiting friends in Palm Desert. Hearing there was gold in the area, he had bought a brand-new metal detector and was here breaking it in.

After he and Bruce talked for a while, the man warmed up, offered Bruce a soda, pulled out some awesome gold, showed Bruce where he had dug it, and told him the story of how he came to it.

He explained that he had purchased a brand-new metal detector about a week ago. And with minimal instruction from the salesman and directions to an old mining district an hour or so distant, he drove out to try his luck where gold had been first discovered in the 1880s.

With his rig locked in 4-wheel drive, he drove off-road for miles into the desert. Serendipitously, he stopped on a rutty roadside about halfway up the slope of what was to prove to be a munificent hillside. He was on the other side of the mountain from our camp and, as the crow flies, less than one-half mile distant.

Getting out of his truck his the detector and instruction manual in hand, he attempted to ground-balance his machine as the salesman had instructed him, but over the spot he had chosen, the detector wouldn’t shut up and smooth out. It quieted down though when swung a short distance to the side.

Being the first time he had ever used a detector, he was confused and didn’t know what to think. Was the machine defective? Was he doing something wrong? Or was all that screaming actually a target? He dug to find out. And, you guessed it; he had hit a big, juicy-sweet pocket of gold!

From six or eight inches below the surface, in an area about the size and shape of a football, he dug out over 100 ounces of nuggets and spectacular specimens—heavy with gold. If my recollection serves me correctly, it was 119 ounces in total. Of all the improbable blind luck!!

The fortuitous mop jockey had been back several times, checking to be sure he had gotten all the gold. With his vacation now almost over, this was his last opportunity to clean up any leftovers. He was heading back to his job in Oregon the next day, still a greenhorn, but a greenhorn with a pile of gold and one helluva story to tell. With an easy smile, he wished Bruce good luck and, doubting he’d ever return, told him he was welcome to any gold that he might have missed.

Bruce and I did clean up a few delicious nuggets that he had overlooked, mostly on the slope below his pocket. Of course, we didn’t recover anything to rival his take, not even close.

That guy’s jaw-dropping discovery just goes to show you, you never know what your next targets gonna be. And even a raw greenhorn like the Oregonian can strike it rich right under the noses of skilled, hardened sourdoughs.

Before the Oregonian arrived, Bruce and I had walked separately over that pocket while out prospecting without ever sweeping it with our detectors or suspecting it to be there. Yet, because we had weeks of prospecting time left in the area, maybe we would have found it if he hadn’t beaten us to it. That’s life though; no hard feelings; good for him! Besides, I knew in my gut there were still bigger pockets out there—beckoning.

So, what’s the conclusion? Does metal detecting pay?

That depends on your criteria. If you base your question strictly on monetary gains from the total time invested in metal detecting versus the same hours spent earning an average hourly wage, then over the long-term metal detecting will most likely fall short of your expectations. Therefore, if your primary goal is to consistently augment your income on a regular basis, then, rather than picking up a detector, consider a side job.

However, if you are seeking a fun and potentially profitable activity that will regularly get you out of the house and into better physical condition while having a great time, metal detecting may just be your ticket.

As previously stated, the conclusion for me is, yes, metal detecting pays. But, as I said, it’s subjective. So, if you’re on the fence, the only definitive way to settle the question for yourself is to give it an honest go. You’ll soon have your answer. It doesn’t cost much to get started. And greenhorns usually meet skilled, like-minded individuals from the metal-detecting community eager to welcome them into the fold and put them on the fast track to developing their detecting skills.

There are many targets in which detectorists commonly specialize, including:

Coins
Gold
Relics
Caches
Jewelry
Meteorites
Lost Mines/Treasure

Update:
* As of today, 10/22/24, the gold spot price (value of gold on the global market) is on an upward trend–and approximately ten times higher than it was in my heyday. Therefore, nugget shooters now have a great opportunity to make bigger paydays than I ever did. And it doesn’t take a huge investment to get started. If you find you don’t like it, you can always sell your gear and get the bulk of your money back.