Treasure Hunting

Searching through a few sites today, I stumbled across one that I almost passed by, but something made me dig a little deeper, and man am I glad I did. VirtualParks.org is one of the best sites I’ve seen for learning about new parks, which helps find new places to metal detect.

The home page offers seven choices to help you find your next metal detecting outing:

• Geography - Use maps to drill down
  to a park you want to view scenes of
• Theme - Scenes with a common theme i.e. All Lakes, All Mountain Passes, etc.
• Best Of - A gallery of the best scenes. A showcase of the 100 best panoramas on the site
• Alpha - Panoramas listed alphabetically. Look at all scenes whose names start with A, B, C, etc.
• Trips - Narratives of the trips. The story of how the scenes were shot
• Newly Added - Most recently added panoramas. Sorted by time
• Full Screen VR - High-res FullScreen panoramas. for a more immersive experience

I decided to try out themes. Clicking on themes gives you a large list of ….well, themes. I selected Ghost towns and ruins thinking it would be a good start, and have good potential for finding relics. There are links inside this theme, and each one has a virtual tour to show you the terrain. I’ve wasted about three hours so far, and will be going back to it when I’m done with this post. The virtual tours drop you right in the middle of the location, and you can almost imagine the areas you’d search if you were there.

If you’ve been planning a metal detecting trip, VirtualParks.org might be the inspiration you need to select a location. Give it a try, and tell us what you think. If we find anything else really interesting on the site, we’ll be sure to let you know.

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