Miscellaneous
It's tempting to say Emily Copeland is not like other 8-year-olds, but the truth is she's a curious, inquisitive little girl like any other. She just has the right tools to indulge her curiosity. On this episode of Discover the Truth by Garrett Metal Detectors, host Shelby Skrhak sat down with young metal detectorist Emily Copeland to discuss how she got into detecting and how she's encouraging others to try out the sport. Emily began metal detecting with her dad, Shannon Copeland, when she was 4 years old. "My dad said, 'Here try this,'" Copeland said. While her dad held the top of the metal detector and she held the bottom, she made her first discovery. "I swung it and found my first pull tab. I didn't really care if it was trash or not. I was so excited, I felt my face was going to blow up," she said. She began documenting her finds on social media and her own YouTube channel, Little Dirt Diggers, where she's posted 150 videos that have more than 25,000 views, and she's garnered more than 600 subscribers, young and old. Copeland takes her Garrett AT Pro everywhere, from her parents' and grandparents' rural properties to historic Civil War sites and the beach in Florida. She was hunting a Civil War encampment in the woods near Adairsville, Georgia when she found a U.S. box plate, or soldier belt buckle. Another time, she found something more personal than she could have imagined -- a brass, hammered bracelet belonging to her great great great grandmother and engraved with her initials. The beach was less fruitful for her, but she takes disappointment in stride. "It's not that frustrating to me, just a little tiny bit," Copeland said. She encourages newcomers to the sport to stick with it and have fun, whether you find anything or not. "You have to find the trash to find the good stuff," Copeland said. "That's what I always say."