The weekend started off at Roy’s house as most of the team members meet up there to load the vehicles. We needed to get on the highway and head towards Beaver, Utah. We had a good 115 miles to get to the house where we were staying for the night. Once we got there, we explored the late 1800s home we had rented from Airbnb and picked our bedrooms. This old home had 7 beds, which was perfect for the crew that we had come along this trip. Within an hour or so after arriving, the rest of the team members had also arrived and by then it was around 7:00 pm so most of us were thinking about dinner. Roy, being the kind of guy that he is, decided he was going to run down to the local pizza joint, Craigo’s, and grab some pizzas and cheese sticks for the crew. Truboy and Chuchie left with him and explored a little of the town. When they got back, we fired up the oven.
The rest of the guys settled in with their luggage and started visiting for the night with some cold beers out of the ice coolers. Which I would like to mention… 8 guys and all the beer you can imagine, turned into a full night of boys being boys. (I could probably write up a whole blog by itself of all the fun and mischief we had that night, but we’ll stick to the point.) Needless to say, we had a lot of fun and everyone had a good night. The next morning, we managed to get up bright and early and started setting up to make a video in the kitchen before we headed out.
To my surprise, the wireless mics, for the first time, started acting really weird. We’d never had a problem with them before. Was it the hundred-year-old old house and paranormal related? Some types of signal interference? Honestly, I couldn’t tell ya but it was odd. The audio was cutting in and out and unfortunately, we couldn’t use very much of that for YouTube and social media. After many attempts, we decided to give it up and head out. We had another hour of driving to get to Frisco, so we decided to waste no time and get on the road to begin our day of adventuring and discovering. As we were driving, we took the opportunity to do some filming and explaining some of the histories of the ghost town that we were heading to. As soon as we arrived we stopped the vehicles to get the drone set up for a flight over the ruins of Frisco. Once again, we had technical problems, this time with the drone. It was weird.
The drone was not responding to the controller and after many attempts, I had to land it and put it away for the rest of the trip. Once we pulled up to the first ruin, the whole day was like Christmas in October. We had a great time metal detecting around the area and Shaun and I explored the old buildings. We found some great history like shutters roughly 15-20 feet away from the old bank, we found a saloon that had broken whiskey bottles and such lying around inside and outside of the building. We had even come across an outhouse with trash inside of it left behind my old miners, (we weren’t terribly anxious to dig into that mess.) But we wanted to push on, there was much to see in just one day. We drove over to the Kilns that are still standing at Frisco today. People say that they are the most preserved kilns in all of Utah. And I have to say, they are some of the best ones I’ve ever seen so far for sure. We only explored 5 but on Google Earth, you can find over 25 in the area, spread out all over.
If someone wanted to take their UTV or Jeep in the area and spend a couple of days, my guess is you would find some really cool stuff. Don’t forget your metal detector and I would suggest making camp somewhere in the middle because there’s a lot of dirt roads and ground to cover. Take your food and water and be careful, there’s no medical help for almost an hour away.
We decided to head over to the cemetery, and guess what? We experienced audio problems once again. By this time, I was beginning to wonder, what was making our audio equipment act faulty? We’ve used them on many other adventures but at the old house and at the cemetery we lost over 50% of good audio and video. Some say that this could be caused by paranormal, we sure were in the right type of area but who knows. We did lose battery power from one of the mics too, and we had just changed the batteries the night before. The audio was working, but it was cutting in and out very strangely as if there was something interfering with the signal. Within a few minutes, Shaun and I noticed that the cemetery was full of children from the ages of newborns to 3 years old. Not many adults… Just kids buried in this place which was kinda weird to think about. Where did the adults get buried? We saw no sign of another cemetery in the area and we covered around 25 miles surrounding Frisco town.
We spent about 45 minutes in the cemetery before deciding to move on. We paid our respects to the dead and decided to head out once again to a different location. But this time, it was time to do some big-time metal detecting on the other side of the mountain. We brought plenty of people and I found a great place to detect. Around an area called New House. This was a different area that had been mined in the Frisco mining division. That’s right, a second town to Frisco. This was a smaller town that only a couple hundred people lived in with around 20 homesteads, but it was the last stop for the train depot in Western Utah, and it had many very large buildings. A great place to metal detect. We had to regroup and get everyone in the vehicles so no man was left behind. “Pack it up boys, let’s head out.”
Once we got to the new location, we noticed a lot of trash scattered around. Let me explain what I mean by “trash.” When it comes to metal detecting, trash means that there are metals present, but it’s not the type of metal that you want to detect. If it’s too “trashy,” then your metal detector goes crazy and overloads it. Not to mention, most detectorists want to find things like coins and jewelry, things of value, but in this area, we were finding scraps of metal from the buildings, and trash from the people that lived there many years ago. But we wanted to see what we could find so we tried for a few minutes. You never know, one man’s trash could be another man’s treasure.
Todd wanted to give a crash course of metal detecting to the guys who were unfamiliar before we started. I think it helped! Most of the guys with us this trip haven’t spent much time on a detector, some had never used one before. We brought along the Minelab Equinox 800, Whites MX Sport, Minelab CTX 3030, Nokta Anfibio Multi, Nokta Kruzer Multi, and the Garrett Ace 400. I was hoping that we could get a good idea of what these detectors can do and compare them to each other, but the area did not make that easy for us. Roy did find an early 1900s spoon which was pretty cool, and I think Trueboy found more artifacts than anyone else just by using his eyes. As I said, the area was very “trashy” and it made it hard for us to make real discoveries with the detectors. But it was still a lot of fun and the team had fun and that’s what really matters.
Watch our videos to see more on this trip and explore our website to learn more and to see other stories that we’re working on. Good luck. Be safe. Find your adventure.
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