Lost Ring Found, Castle Rock Trail, Lake Tahoe
4:52pm, March 2nd, 2026, I received a text requesting a lost ring search on the Castle Rock Trail. This scenic trail is a one mile hike to a rock outcrop that provides spectacular views of Lake Tahoe. With the trailhead at 7,400+ feet in altitude, I expected a good amount of snow along the trail and the search area. The text included a description of how the ring was lost and satellite images with pinned gps coordinates.
March 3rd, around 8:30am, I arrived at the trailhead with metal detecting equipment and snowshoes. Fortunately the night-time temperatures were cold enough to create a frozen top crust on the deep snow and I didn’t need to use the snowshoes. The hike to the search site was just short of a mile with a little over 400 feet of elevation gain. With minimal cellular reception, it took a little extra time to locate the pinned gps coordinates. Within 10 minutes of searching, a solid repeatable signal was located. A quick dig in the snow revealed the lost ring. So within 15 hours of being notified, the ring was recovered. I scheduled a meetup with the ring owner that afternoon in Carson City, so the total time from being notified to the return of the ring was less than 24 hours.
September 14, 2025, 7:03pm : Received a call requesting the recovery of a lost platinum ring at Zephyr Cove Beach. Client lost his ring while in the water and described “ that is where it fell off and got lost, the water was about five feet deep. Ring is silver, smooth with rounded edges and has custom engraving on the inside”. September 15, 2025, 7:45am : Arrived at Zephyr Cove and began donning dive gear. Half hour later began searching the lost area pinned by the client. I don’t think anyone has metal detected that section of the shallow water ever, or at least not recently. Tons of targets—bottle caps, pull-tabs, bobby pins, twist-ties, bits of foil, etc. The ring is platinum (Pt950) so on the Deus 2 should be around a 62 VDI, and of course all the pull-tabs and bottle caps were showing similar. I burned through two Nemo batteries and loaded a third. I was deep into my 4 hour of searching and the cold water was finally getting to me when I got my millionth 62 vdi target, and expected another pull-tab. But that’s the beauty of metal detecting recoveries, just as you think you’ll never find the ring and ready to call it a day, you get the surprise and joy of seeing the ring in your scoop and instantly all the effort and being cold vanishes.
