** Lost Gold At The Dead Man's Mine ** A Miners Journal **

[GhostMiner]

The Parting Glass

https://youtu.be/sCZcJHAcAZ4?si=eQKQZgx7XuHX5yvO

 

[GhostMiner]

   July 4   2002

 

   I didn’t wake up until nearly 8:00 AM but Jacob was up and had breakfast cooking. Bacon, Eggs, pan fried bread, and coffee . My head felt like it was three times its normal size. Jacob poured me a half cup of coffee and filled it up the rest of the way with whisky. He told me to drink it and take a few aspirin and I'd feel like a new man. I can’t say I felt like a new man but it did help me quite a bit. Once I got some food in me I didn’t feel half bad.

   Jacob said he didn’t mind Vern and Jim leaving as it was much easier to split the gold two ways instead of four. He said even if we ran less yardage out of the trommel we’d still come out way ahead. It got me to thinking that maybe he was right but there was the issue of camp security. That was something that bothered me. Jacob didn’t seem too concerned about it for some reason.

   After breakfast we went over the trommel with a fine tooth comb and checked everything out. We serviced all the equipment and checked the fine tailings. It still seemed rich in the test pans so we reset the sluice to 7 degrees and added another four feet of length with some matting to make sure we would catch the fine gold that was escaping.

   After we had the sluice set up it was late afternoon and we called it a day. We would hit it in the morning. Jacob and I would split the night watch and see how things went. That’s about all we could do and as darkness fell I went up on watch while Jacob got some sleep.

   TO BE CONTINUED .................

[GhostMiner]

I may have to change the name of this journal to "As The Trommel Turns" now. There is so much crazy stuff about to take place in the back half of this 2002 season that I have to take a deep breath before putting it on the forum. Wow.

[dig4gold]

Truth or fiction?? I at times forget that this isn't always truth. 

D4G

[GhostMiner]

   July 5   2002

 

   I was feeling good when I woke up before sunrise. Jacob was already cooking us some breakfast and we headed to work at the break of dawn. The air was still nice and cool. I went up and got the pump started and Jacob radioed me that water was coming down and the trommel was turning. The plan was for me to dig pay gravel with the excavator and Jacob used a skid steer to load the hopper. We’d also have to deal with tailings as needed. 

   We had built a nice ramp for the skid steer to drive up to the hopper on the trommel and had excavated a drop off area for heavy tailings from the grizzly. We also had a sloped drop off for the reject material from the trommel barrel. The fines went through the sluice run and down a sloped hill. At some point we would rerun the fine tailings to see what gold we could capture but today we were running virgin pay gravels.

   Jacob checked the sluice several times and said it was looking good. He also checked the fine tailings with a few pans and didn’t see much of anything. We had also slowed our run rate to 25 yards an hour. Things were running smoothly. We worked straight through until 3:00 PM and shut down. We wanted to pull the mats and see what we were getting. We had run 170 yards for the day.

   We could see lines of gold in the top section of matting and Jacob checked the bottom of the run. There was no gold there which meant we were most likely getting it all. Jacob shook his head and commented on Vern. He called him a young buck who thought he knew it all and wasn’t willing to listen. I didn’t say anything. We were both in a good mood and set about to do the cleanup. We finished up well before dark and the moment of truth came. Jacob poured the gold on the scale. It sure looked pretty. There was a whopping 81.4 ounces. We had more than doubled our production per yard from Vern’s setup. Jacob gave me a wink. He said if the ground holds up we’re both rich men. Then he cautioned that pay gravel can be a fickle friend and enjoy it while it lasts.

   I asked Jacob what he was going to do with his gold. He said he was getting pretty old to worry about saving much of it. He said he was going to buy himself a new Cadillac and find himself a real pretty dance hall gal to spend it on. I laughed and said good for him. I told him I was going to buy a real nice piece of land somewhere out in the country and build my wife her dream house if things worked out for us. In the back of my mind I knew we had a way to go before we were rich and we also needed to get back home in one piece. There seemed to be no end to trouble out here and I believed the mine to be a cursed place. If we could just mine the property for a few more months we had it made. 

   TO BE CONTINUED ..............

[GhostMiner]

   Trommels can be very hard to set up correctly. Besides the sluice angle you also must set the barrel angle correctly. Then you have the rotation speed as well. It's all very dependant on the gravels you are running. Something I quickly found out is you can have big time arguments over how trommels are set up and operated. I've seen guys in fights over how they should be set. Why? Because you put someone in charge but others don't think they did it right. And if any gold is lost you have trouble in a crew. It can happen fast and can easily get out of control. I had one guy quit over just this thing. And he was one of rhe best guys on the crew. He got so mad he just left and never came back. This wasn't in the 2002 season but another year. But Vern quit in 2002 for real. Jacob abused him a little and he didn't like it. I didn't write all the things that happened in the 2002 journal for good reasons. 

   I was warned about working on a crew in 2012. There were four guys from Nevada and they were also outlaws. Against the advice of a geologist who warned me they would slit my throat one night I went ahead and worked part of the Summer with them. They drank whisky & and smoked plenty of dope. But they were also on a piece of ground that had good gold on it & knew how to mine. Not my claims but not far from them. They also had a nice washplant and good equipment. I saw some nasty fights that Summer & was involved in one of them. I ended up in a fight with two of the guys on that crew. I'll leave it at that.  

   I had gold fever and so did these guys. We worked hard all day and partied at night. We pulled 50 ounces out of those gravels one day and ended up working the gravels for two months before the streak ran dry. I brought home some nice gold. The crew carried guns & knives & had two big guard dogs that you would not want to mess with. When you are mining a big pay streak things get serious real fast & people get crazy. What I write about in the 2002 season isn't even the half of what went on that year. Until you live it you will never understand it. Like what it's like to be on a remote mine with no way to communicate with the rest of the world and you are living free. You handle your own business and it's all real. You deal with your own problems and stay clear of other people. That's the life and it's no place for the faint of heart.   

 

[GhostMiner]

   At some point I will talk about some other mining seasons I kept a record of. One of the more interesting seasons besides the 2002 & 2003 seasons were the 2012, 2015, 2019. & 2020 seasons. The 2020 season was my last rodeo. For someone who knew nothing about mining when he was growing up I find it hard to fathom the expriences I have had while doing gold mining & exploration. Some of the people I have met in the gold mining business were some really crazy characters. It was all quite an experience for sure. One wild ride. Hopefully that helps to answer a previous question. Now I'll get back to season 2002 as there is still much to tell.

[Old Miner Don]

19 minutes ago, GhostMiner said:

   At some point I will talk about some other mining seasons I kept a record of. One of the more interesting seasons besides the 2002 & 2003 seasons were the 2012, 2015, 2019. & 2020 seasons. The 2020 season was my last rodeo. For someone who knew nothing about mining when he was growing up I find it hard to fathom the expriences I have had while doing gold mining & exploration. Some of the people I have met in the gold mining business were some really crazy characters. It was all quite an experience for sure. One wild ride. Hopefully that helps to answer a previous question. Now I'll get back to season 2002 as there is still much to tell.

I just don't understand how you and Jacob could go back to mining without taking time to recruit extra help. You KNOW trouble is coming back and you guys aren't exactly invisible.

If it were up to me I couldn't let that go. If they kill you then... you lose.

Obviously you weren't killed but many others were and in 2002 you had no way to know what was going to happen.  I would have hired guys straight out of prison if I had to.

(lol probably where the hooligans were coming from)

[GhostMiner]

4 minutes ago, Bedrocker said:

I just don't understand how you and Jacob could go back to mining without taking time to recruit extra help. You KNOW trouble is coming back and you guys aren't exactly invisible.

If it were up to me I couldn't let that go. If they kill you then... you lose.

Obviously you weren't killed but many others were and in 2002 you had no way to know what was going to happen.  I would have hired guys straight out of prison if I had to.

(lol probably where the hooligans were coming from)

Yes, when looking back, what you say makes perfect sense. However, when you are out on a mine and trying your hardest to get gold and have the fever you sometimes make questionable decisions. My wife would have had a fit if she knew half of what was going on out there. Even today that place is far from safe. I've had my share of run ins. As long as you are getting gold each day you tend to overlook the rest of what's happening. The 1st part of the 2019 season was spent on someone elses mine in a very remote & higher altitude area. I worked there for nearly a month on my own before the crew made it out there. We eventually moved to our own mine later that season. That experience was a total nightmare that will be told here eventually. But for now it's 2002 at hand.

[GhostMiner]

1 minute ago, GhostMiner said:

Yes, when looking back, what you say makes perfect sense. However, when you are out on a mine and trying your hardest to get gold and have the fever you sometimes make questionable decisions. My wife would have had a fit if she knew half of what was going on out there. Even today that place is far from safe. I've had my share of run ins. As long as you are getting gold each day you tend to overlook the rest of what's happening. The 1st part of the 2019 season was spent on someone elses mine in a very remote & higher altitude area. I worked there for nearly a month on my own before the crew made it out there. We eventually moved to our own mine later that season. That experience was a total nightmare that will be told here eventually. But for now it's 2002 at hand.

One thing that happened on the other mine in 2019 was a black bear attack. This happened before the crew was there. It was late May and I set up camp. It took 2 days. One night I had finished eating. I'd been having problems with bear up there. I had been warned about them by the mine owner. He said one night they got so bad that the crew slept in a metal storage container. For me, several would come into camp and circle it bawwing the entire time. I'd fire off a few rounds from my semi auto and they would leave. This particular night a big one came down the mountain. He had followed an old, abandoned mining road that ran for several miles. Camp was at the bottom of the road. I fired off some rounds but he refused to leave. I didn't have an airhorn which was something we also used to signal each other or scare critters with. But I always had bear spray on my bibbed coveralls. This bear was what I would call a rogue. He came straight in and towards my little table where food had been. I grabbed my bear spray as he took a swipe at me with his paw. I was moving backwards and tripped over a rock and landed on my back with the bear looking straight down at me and bellowing. He started to stomp up and down and he was almost on me. Somehow, I slipped the safety off the spray and let him have it. Square in the face. He let out a loud bellow and sauntered out of camp. It was nearly dark and I was lying there with the spray in my hand when I noticed my hand was shaking. I never saw that bear again. True story.