Texas A&M class ring recovered from a Colorado sledding hill

In early January Charley Mitchell was part of a group of young men that came up to Colorado from Texas to be part of a friend’s wedding. They stayed at the house of the bride’s grandfather which is up in the foothills west of Morrison, Colorado. Prior to the group’s arrival the area received several inches of fresh snow. Being the adventurous types the group of young men decided to do something that isn’t common in Texas, they went tobogganing.

During the festivities Charley’s prized Texas A & M class ring went missing. The group searched for the ring, they even purchased a metal detector to aid in their search. But their search was in vain as the ring was well hidden. The wedding went on and the group returned to Texas but the search for Charlie’s ring continued. Jim, the land owner kept up the search but the area of search was quite large and he had no success either.

On January 25th a small group from my local metal detecting club and I were contacted about searching for Charley’s ring. The weather had turned warm and melted the vast majority of the snow, with only small patches of snow and ice on the hillside. Our group divided the hill into search zones that were probably 15 yards wide running vertically up the hill, each one of us selecting a zone and began searching. I was one of the last to get a zone so I took the first zone on the steepest part of the hill. On my first pass down down my zone I hit a patch of ice hidden in some tall grass and found myself laying on my back in mud. After getting myself up and scraping mud off my XLT I continued my search down to the end of my zone. On my return trip up the hill I located a dime that was laying on the surface so I bgan to get excited, if they were loosing change at that location the ring could be close by. Two swings later my XLT sounded off and there was the Charley’s ring laying right on the surface gleaming in the sun. I made the announcement to the group that our search was over after only 5 minutes of search time.

Charley was pretty sure he would never see his ring again so he was pretty darn excited to get his ring back. Due to him working off shore on an oil rig that reunion had to wait till after his return to dry land at the end of February.

Ring recovered January 25th, 2014