He Went in With Metal Detector, Came Out With $160K in Gold

A man exploring with a metal detector hit the jackpot, uncovering what a veteran gold prospector calls a "once-in-a-lifetime find." The amateur gold digger, who is remaining anonymous, was searching the goldfields of Australia's Victoria state, site of an 1850s gold rush, when he stumbled upon a 10-pound rock dotted with gold. He then showed up at Darren Kamp's prospecting store in Geelong. "He pulled this rock out and as he dropped it into my hand he said, 'Do you think there's $10,000 (AUD) worth in it?'" Kamp of Lucky Strike Gold tells the BBC. "I looked at him and said, 'Try $100,000 (AUD).'" It was now Kamp's turn to be gobsmacked. "He said, 'But that's only half the rock,'" the prospector tells the Guardian.

As Kamp tells CNN, the amateur digger had broken apart the full nugget, hoping to find gold inside, not realizing dirt was concealing the gold "oozing out of the rock everywhere." Altogether, the man had found a 10.1-pound nugget containing 5.7 pounds of gold. "I haven’t seen a specimen in this amount of gold in my 43 years of prospecting," Kamp tells the Guardian. "Maybe in the 1850s there was probably a few found, but in today's terms it's very rare." He estimated the value at $160,000. "He said to me, 'Oh, the wife will be happy,'" adds the prospector, who ended up buying the rock, per the BBC. The Guardian notes the finder had been using a budget metal detector capable of locating items buried only a foot underground, which turned out to be well worth the $800 cost. Catch a photo of the nugget here. (More gold stories.)