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Dan Kegley/Richard Robinson patrols the far-reduced waterline Thursday at Hungry Mother Lake that has been drawn down for dredging.

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Lake patrol: Dredging plan creates opportunity for treasure hunter

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

The water is gone from the upper reaches of the lake in Hungry Mother State Park, leaving a lonely, bleak and muddy landscape where reflections of Walker Mountain rippled earlier this summer.
This new and, fortunately, temporary landscape is not a result of the drought, but of preparation for dredging over the winter to remove sediment from the lakebed.
On Thursday near the diving platform that stood on concrete legs exposed above the water, a figure wandered along the waterline, far out from where it once lapped the sands of the park’s popular beach. The man’s head was lowered, and he walked slowly.
He was not lamenting the interruption of fishing or boating on the lake. He was listening, through a pair of headphones, for a signal that would tell him his metal detector had found something beneath his feet.
Richard Robinson has handled people’s money in his job and in his hobby for a long time. He is a retired accountant with United Telephone and Sprint, and in 1969 took up metal detecting, finding lots of people’s change over the years.
Hungry Mother State Park and its lake are very familiar sites to Robinson, a Marion native and 1971 graduate of Marion Senior High School who now lives in Bristol, Va. He’s found plenty of treasure in the park, including the girl he married.
“I’ve been looking in this park for 40 years,” he said. For metal, that is.
The prime spot for finding lost metal items is in the lake channel, off limits to terrestrial metal detectors except for times, like now, when the lake is lowered. Out there, he said, people in boats inadvertently dump their pockets overboard when they pull out cigarette lighters. Or fishing pliers. He finds plenty of lost tackle where fishing waters flowed.
Another hotspot is around the diving platform where emptying pockets leave their contents in a concentrated accumulation.
What he finds is mostly change, along with the occasional pair of eyeglasses, and of course, plenty of trash – metal scraps of food and drink containers that he retains with the good stuff for proper disposal. The junk metal’s sharp edges concern him.
“People are out here barefooted,” he said, pointing to a distinctive five-toes-and-a-heel footprint on the lake bottom.
Robinson metal hunts all over, and made the newspaper in Roanoke several years ago. He participates in organized metal hunts, and works over the grounds near schools, in parks and old home sites – “wherever crowds gather,” he said.
Out of all those places, and all his discoveries, he has a hard time naming a “best” find, although a two-piece Virginia State Seal made until before the Civil War is a favorite.
“There’s no one thing,” he said. “But put together, I’ve found quite a bit.”
Hungry Mother officials welcome park users to visit while the lake is low, but remind them that if they’re planning lake-oriented activities, they should make reservations for after March 1 next year. The park will not give refunds because of the dredging.
Unless, of course, you count what you might find with a metal detector.