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GhostMiner

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  1. Well, thanks to the readers here, the Journal has made another milestone. We now have hit 400,000 views. I just want to say THANK YOU!!
  2. Yes, it's hard to explain things which have no logical explanation. Even Jacob, the tough old bird that he was, wanted to get out of that tunnel and back to camp that night.
  3. I think that entire property is haunted. That was one a number of times I chased after voices at night. Also lights that appeared & vanished. The place has a dark history.
  4. That entire property is full of weird happenings. I could probably write a book just on that.
  5. July 27 2002 Part Four As we got further in we turned our flashlights back on but muted the light with our hands. We could still hear voices in the distance but couldn’t make out any words. It sounded like mumbling to me.When we got to the east tunnel we heard the voices more clearly. In a whisper Jacob said they must be back in there somewhere. I couldn’t figure out why someone was messing around on the mine this late at night. We shined our flashlights down the east tunnel and I hollered out asking who they were. The voices stopped. That tunnel didn’t go all that far and we moved slowly towards where the talking had come from. Eventually we saw the ending wall. There was no one there. This was impossible as there was no way out except to come back towards us. Jacob shook his head and told me we needed to get out of there. So we headed back out of the mine. We stood at the adit for about ten minutes just listening. There were some faint sounds of what sounded like small rocks falling but no voices. We stayed there for an hour and never heard anything more. It was a mystery. TO BE CONTINUED ..................
  6. July 27 2002 Part Three Jacob and I spent the evening discussing the unexpected developments on the lower mine. It seems there are many twists and turns on this property. Jacob liked the idea of taking a shot at hard rock mining. It would allow us to work longer into the Fall and perhaps Winter. We could work the tunnels in any weather and stock pile the ore for Spring processing. The old mine car and tracks could be restored and made usable again with a little work on our part. However, we would most likely need a crew to follow the quartz vein if we wanted to mine enough raw ore to make it a worthwhile venture. We have no hard rock mining experience and lack some of the needed equipment. We will need a stamping or crushing process and drilling equipment for starters. It concerns me to take on a crew of new people out here. I worry about potential problems. Many things could go wrong. It was well after midnight and we were at camp and still talking things over when we both heard a holler from inside the tunnel. It sounded like a distant voice way down the drift somewhere. We got up and walked over in the direction of the adit which was not too far from our camp near the creek. I walked into the opening just ahead of Jacob. I thought I saw the light from a lantern down near the area where the tunnels branched off. I shined my flashlight in that direction but saw nothing moving and the light had vanished. Jacob hadn’t seen it and when I told him about it he said it could be trespassers. We both stood very quietly and listened for a few minutes. Sure enough, there were two or three voices down there somewhere. They must have taken the right tunnel leading east and were out of our view. Jacob had the Thompson and I had my sidearm. We slowly advanced into the dark keeping our flashlights off. TO BE CONTINUED ................
  7. July 27 2002 Part Two The old ore car was in need of repair so I spent the rest of the day working with Jacob to remove gold bearing quartz from the old mine bucket by bucket. We crushed it up as best we could by pulverizing. It was by far no professional job as we weren’t equipped for hard rock mining but at least we could get a rough estimate on values per ton. We panned the pulverized ore and came up with an estimate of just under one ounce to the ton. Jacob couldn’t believe it. This was rich ore - rich enough to make us a bundle. Jacob was trying to figure out why the mine had been abandoned. He thought that the big companies on top of the mountain had simply buried the lower workings under tailings and the smaller company was forced to leave. He said the big operations boss probably didn’t know how good the ore was and seeing they were making big gold up on the higher mines it was simpler to just keep dumping tailings down below and keep their big hydraulic mines producing. Once the lower mine was buried under many feet of tailings and abandoned it was soon forgotten. This was just amazing to me but it seemed to be all about speed of production and easier gold. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the old timers who had put in so much hard work just to be run off the mountain. Now Jacob and I had a lot of contemplating to do as to our next step. TO BE CONTINUED ...................
  8. July 27 2002 Part One Quartz Veins and Ore Cars We found the mine adit just before noon today. The tunnel opening is about eight feet in height and close to six feet in width. It was well timbered and covered by mine tailings from above as well as many years of slides coming down the mountain. Jacob shined the flashlight in to get a better look. Everything was timbered and still holding as far as what could be seen from the entrance. I was about to walk in when Jacob grabbed my shoulder and told me to slow down. He said we should not go charging in too far without inspecting the old working closely. There were several old oil lamps near the entrance. They were covered in dust. Jacob told me the workings were most likely from sometime in the 1800’s. He said if the workings dated post 1900 the lamps probably would have been carbide. The tunnel looked to go straight back into the mountain on a northerly heading. We shined our flashlights down the drift and slowly made our way deeper into the mountain. The tracks were still in pretty good shape but we didn’t see any mine cars. After about 300 feet the drift forked off with the original one heading north and the second turning right or east. The north tunnel appeared to be the main drift as it was higher and wider than the east one. We could feel some slight air movement coming towards us so there must be a vent shaft or opening somewhere higher on the mountain we figured. I went back and got a bucket and a shovel and we took a sample from the 300 foot area. I carried it over to the tub and Jacob began panning the gravel. There were some nice colors in the pans but nothing really rich. We went back in and stayed on the northward main drift. Then I heard Jacob let out a soft whistle. He was shining his flashlight on the side wall. He quietly told me to have a look at where the beam of the flashlight was shining. “Holy Moses” was all I could say. I was looking at a big quartz vein. It had to be close to a foot wide. Jacob shined his flashlight up close and I had a good look. I asked him if that was visible gold I was seeing. He gave me a wink and a nod and told me to go get a pick. When I got back he instructed me to walk in about another 100 feet before we picked away at the quartz. He shined the light down the dark tunnel. There sat an old ore car on the tracks. TO BE CONTINUED .................
  9. Thanks Clay & good to see you on the thread. The prospector I know just uses a pan. Not sure what arrangements he makes for permission. Maybe he is an outlaw. (I wonder if Robin Hood in merry England ever panned for gold LOL. My guess any gold he got was taken from the rich in the form of jewelry.)
  10. Not sure if this is true but I was told that all the gold there belongs to the King (Charles) & prospecting & taking gold is against the law. I was told this by my friend who lives there. However, he still prospects & gets some nice looking gold.
  11. July 26 2002 We got started with the exploration about half an hour after sunrise. We broke the pristine quiet when the excavator came to life. You could hear the sound from the big diesel motor echoing off the side of the mountain and traveling down the creek. Jacob would dig a trench down and every time he got to the right depth he hit the old track. I would ride the bucket down to the bottom from time to time and take a sample of the gravels and make sure the direction of the track was not changing. The track was running about true north straight into the mountain. I panned the gravel samples while Jacob dug away. There was almost no gold in any of the samples so far. Just a very few fine flakes not worth mentioning. We took a lunch break around noon and got back at it. We were making progress and getting close to the base of the mountain. By dusk we had cut a long trench that ended close to the mountain. It was a little wider than the tracks. We stopped for the day and took a look at what we had accomplished. Jacob said the old track had been buried over the years by the tailings from up above. He figured they dated back to the time of the big operations of the 1860’s to the 1880’s. He said this lower area must have been worked by a smaller company and at some point got buried by all the slickens and tailings from the hydraulic outfits. He said it might have happened after the guys working down here had moved on or it may have taken place while they were trying to work. He said the big companies were ruthless and wouldn’t have thought anything about shooting tailings 300 feet down below to this area and burying the smaller companies workings. I’d heard about stuff like this happening in various areas and sometimes it ended in violent shootouts with rival companies. There was no law to speak of. Usually, the big companies employed their own thugs to deal with problems. They had plenty of money and that meant power. After we called it a day we sat by the campfire and had Jacobs favorite stew with cornbread. The temperature had cooled nicely by dark and actually there was a chill in the air by 10:00 PM. We’d go from 100 degrees in the afternoon to about 50 degrees by 2:00 AM. We have not seen rain in quite some time. TO BE CONTINUED .............
  12. I have a good friend who lives in Edinburgh Scotland and he goes out prospecting from time to time. He does quite well. There is good gold there. He actually came to our mines in northern California to work with us for a few days back in 2019.
  13. July 25 2002 Part Two I did a little more scraping and the beam from the flashlight illuminated the area. There were two wooden rails capped with iron strapping. Jacob said it appeared there was some kind of operation going on down here. They must have been digging tunnels into the base of the mountain and using mine cars to remove ore and debris. Jacob told me it would have been done most likely by human labor and possibly work horses as well. We had some old reports on this area but there was no mention of this activity. It may have been done in secret or someone got paid off to keep their mouths shut. Hard to tell but we were both anxious to follow the rails into the mountain. Jacob began excavating the old tracks and following them north. By the end of the day we had gotten within 50 feet of the mountain's base. We were losing daylight rapidly and knocked off for supper. We really didn’t want to quit but figured we could get some answers tomorrow. After supper Jacob was gabbing away about what the old operation might have been like. He said they would have hand dug a drift into the mountain and hauled the ore cars out to process gravels at the creek. He figured it might have been a pretty good sized operation with quite a few men doing pick and shovel work as well as dynamite for the heavy ground. This had always been a placer operation with no sign of hard rock mining as far as we knew. There was no sign of a stamp mill in the area so Jacob figured it was a buried placer channel gravel they were following. He said it must have been rich for them to go to the trouble. I couldn’t wait to see what those old timers had been chasing. TO BE CONTINUED .................
  14. Something I never wrote in the journal : One night up on the mine Jacob & I were sitting by the campfire talking about all kinds of things when he told me a story. He said it was a few years after he had left the mine and was up in Oregon. He said there were a conglomeration of characters living up on a mountain. They were scattered about in cabins and tents. A mix of loggers, prospectors, ranchers, & drifters that all lived within a few miles of each other. On occasion, they would get together at an old barn one of the ranchers owned. Usually it would be a Saturday night. They'd drink home made whisky and after awhile get pretty drunk. Then they would organize a wrestling match. Jacob was in a number of them and said it could get wild. Sometimes it turned into a big brawl or a fist fight but they always remained friends after it was all over with. He told me about one night when one of the roughest guys in the bunch challenged him to a fight. A no holds barred fight which meant anything was legal except for eye gouging. Jacob said the guy was a young logger and knew Jacob was a gold miner. That always meant trouble according to him. Jacob told me the logger was a big, burly guy and was a good wrestler and fighter in general. Jacob was also young but wiry and was uncommonly strong for his size. They went at it and the fight lasted for nearly an hour. Jacob claimed he got the better of the logger but paid for it with a broken knuckle in his right hand and a broken nose as well. He said he beat the logger to the point where he couldn't get back up on his feet but the guy refused to quit. Finally, some of the other guys who were there put a stop to it. Jacob told me he and the logger became close friends after that fight. He said the logger was killed several years later when he had taken a fall out of a tree.
  15. July 25 2002 Part One WE MAKE A DISCOVERY We got up before sunrise and had ourselves what Jacob called a Mountain Man’s Breakfast. It consisted of Two or three eggs, sausage, home fried potatoes, and biscuits with gravy. With it we had coffee laced with double shots of Irish whisky. What a way to start a work day. We were free spirits and answered to no one. After breakfast and just as the sun came up the air temperature was still nice and cool. This was the part of the day I liked before the intense heat took over. We were determined to find where the gold was hiding and set about digging more test holes. Jacob was running the excavator and after about an hour or so he stopped and motioned me to go down into a 15 foot deep pit he was working on. The ground was sloped and I was able to walk down into the bottom with a shovel. Jacob said he had hit something hard down there but it didn’t look like rock. I saw something thin and long heading north towards the base of the mountain but it was still partially covered over by gravel. I started to scrape back the ground in order to better uncover the mystery. After a few minutes of work I could see what it was. I hollered up to Jacob to have a look at what I was seeing. He climbed down off the excavator and peered into the hole while shining his flashlight down there. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he exclaimed. TO BE CONTINUED ............
  16. July 24 2002 It has been a confusing day for us. After opening a new pit and checking the gravels we have not seen much of any gold. Certainly not worth mining. The pit we opened adjoins the first pit to the east. There is no bluestone and only a few fines. We found bedrock at 19 feet. So we closed up that hole and moved over to the west side of the original pit and found bedrock at 20 feet. There was no bluestone and no gold. We continued to work our way east from the original pit by digging test holes and still found nothing of value worth mining. Had we just gotten lucky with that first discovery? We spent the entire day until 6:00 PM digging in the floodplain with no good results. Jacob is now wondering if we just happened to find the only spot down here that had any gold. It would have been pure, dumb luck. Jacob is cool and collected but I am not very happy as I write all this. We will continue to poke holes in the floodplain at 10 ft spacing until we either find gold or look for the buried mine shaft in the mountain. We also have the old tailings dump to work if needed. Gold is a fickle friend as Jacob has stated many times. TO BE CONTINUED ................
  17. On the subject of the old tunnel. we are not talking about a shaft but a drift or tunnel going into a mountain. This may also prove to be a combination of tunnels and shafts. It was worked in the late 1800's after Hydraulic mining was stopped or limited by the Sawyer Decision of California in 1884. This court ruling sent the big companies packing and the ground left as well as the tailings was worked by small, independent crews on a much smaller scale with most of it being pick and shovel labor.
  18. July 23 2002 Today’s gold weigh was a good one with 23.2 ounces. The gravels here are looking very good. We will fill in the pit today and begin to open up a new one. If the ground continues to hold these values we will pass our 1000 ounce goal easily. Jacob and I are also talking about digging into the lower portion of the mountain down here at some point. We have some very old maps that show there was a drift tunnel cut into the lower mountain and it looked to be just east of the tailings dump. This would put it at the very easternmost portion of that claim. Over the years it has been covered over by sluff and storm debris so finding it will take a bit of work. I have learned from experience that when the old timers hand cut drift tunnels they were usually onto something good. Often times they were stopped out far before all the pay gravels were taken. I think the lower mountain area has been worked heavily but we will cut a few trenches for a test. We would sure like to find that old tunnel as well. We probably have enough floodplain gravels to last us into early August. Jacob is always thinking ahead. The mining process has become fairly routine now. It’s all about running material at a steady pace. The more exploration. TO BE CONTINUED ................
  19. This was the time when Jacob & I decided we could actually get 1000 ounces. It became our goal on that day. We were over halfway there but had limited gravels in the new location. We would need that tailings dump area to be productive as well.
  20. July 22 2002 Part Two We worked the rest of the day only stopping once for lunch. By 7:00 PM we had processed 245 yards of gravel. We had excavated a big hole right in the middle of the floodplain that was about 20 - 25 feet deep. The pit was chock full of the bluestone. We checked the mats on the sluice before we pulled them and the top third of the run was loaded with gold. Heavy gold. Jacob was in a really good mood after supper and we cracked open a bottle of Bushmills. We were on a nice pay area and the mining was fairly easy. The only thing was we knew it would be a limited amount of gravel here but it should hold up long enough to make us rich. That’s what we are thinking. We also have all the gravel in the big tailings dump to run. That will be our last project down here after we finish with the floodplain material. Jacob was saying that there probably won’t be any significant rainfall until Late September or early October Maybe even later. It is doubtful that we will be running the upper mountain mine again this year but we have not ruled it out completely. Hopefully we will get enough gold down here at the lower creek that it won’t matter and we can head back home sometime in September. Tomorrow we will do the cleanup from the total of the two day run which amounts to 380 yards. One thing I found out about having our camp set up down here at the lower year ‘round creek is that we are going to have to deal with more critters, especially at night. We had two bear come down the mountain just to our east. They nosed around the perimeter of our camp for quite awhile until Jacob fired off a burst from his Thompson. That sent them scurrying away to the east somewhere. There are also a lot of bobcats that come through in the middle of the night. You can hear them screeching to each other from a long distance away and eventually they are at our camp. It may be hard to get a good night's sleep I think. Jacob also cleaned out a rattler nest down near the creek. It was in an old wood pile. TO BE CONTINUED ................
  21. It makes sense to me. Thank you. I'm going to try to find someone to take a look at it.
  22. When we first encountered this material we had quite a nice cleanup from the gravels sitting on top of this stuff. It will be in the upcoming journal entry. As stated, every time we found this "Bluestone" we found nice gold.
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