The father-son duo spent years combing this bit of Pennsylvania wilderness with high-end metal detectors, drills and other tools to prospect for a fabled cache of Civil War gold.

I love it when I am in the middle of a high trash area and all the ferrous bars go away, the screen number goes to a three or an eight, and the meter is forty to a hundred. I don’t know for sure that I have found gold, but it narrows the odds down.

The metal is expensive, not because it is rare but because of the expense to produce and work it. The minerals mined for titanium are all oxides, unlike many base metals that are mostly mined as sulfide minerals.

Old tailing piles extend for miles. There was still plenty of water flowing here, so WPA members set up highbankers at several settling ponds.