Last Night A Prospecting Pick Saved My Life

[tboykin]

They say it takes you a year to find your first nugget with a detector. The way I see it I have a lot of catching up to do with the crusty old guys and so I better get to digging. I figure if I try hard enough I can beat the odds, but we'll see.

I've been researching a local gold region the past few weeks and have made two trips out in search of pocket gold. Lots of mining activity going back to the 1800's, several claims, creeks with plenty of color to pan. Most people there go to the same spots to look for gold, and the source has never been found. To stay legal I'm focusing on BLM areas, and to stay fit I'm going way off the beaten path. First trip I skunked but dug up some memories that are worth every drop of sweat. The latest one almost ended up very badly.

I located what I thought was a vein of white rock (hoping for quartz) using Google Earth. Then correlated this with historical mining activity, claims, and geology of the specific creek I was focused on. I had been waiting all week, Saturday I couldn't get out the door fast enough. I had a frame pack, GMT, .40 S&W, water, food, and tools. My Jeep got me within 5 miles of the "vein." The rest was on foot. First few miles were a washed out mining road, there was a rainbow of green, red, and white rocks. Looked good so far.

I knew the second half would require beating the brush. Uphill. Thousand foot elevation gain based on my topo map. It was brutally slow and I had forgotten my machete. Luckily I was able to grab the tree branches to "Tarzan" up the mountain side. Halfway up my first water bottle was empty - who needs a gym when you have gold to find? The brush was thick, I was covered in sap when I hit the clearing. The woods opened up to reveal the "vein" was actually a landslide. The rocks were a mixture of rhyolite, calcite, and some serpentine. Some boulders but mostly scree. I could see the source of the landslide at the very top of the hill - black bedrock with layers of exposed "lasagna." I had come this far, so before declaring defeat it was worth checking out at the very least. But things got dangerous. Fast.

The slope was severe enough to require going uphill in switchbacks, not for lack of leg strength, but because with each step a cascade of bowling-ball sized rocks would slide downhill. I had blinders on and was focused on getting to the top of the hill. I knew it was steep but not how steep since I wasn't looking downhill... A habit I picked up due to a slight fear of heights.

As I approached the top I paused for a breather. The slope was too great to sit, I had to lay on my chest to keep from tumbling down. There in all its glory was bedrock at the top of the mountain. If I could just make it to the tree line I could bypass the cliff face. My water was almost gone, my shirt tied around my head to keep the sweat from hurting my eyes. I made my first mistake - I looked down. It was several hundred feet to the bottom, and I could see my zig-zag pattern cut into the rocks where they had slid all the way down. One misstep and I would have found myself smashed up in the trees at the bottom of the mountain, no cell service, no other human within miles, and no way back to the road. I had to keep going up, there was no way I could go back down the way I had come.

I only had 30 yards to the top of the landslide where the tree roots were exposed from the crumbling rock. But those 30 yards were almost vertical. Every foothold seemed to give way just as I put my weight into it. So I dropped to my belly and crawled. My pick came in handy as I could jam it into the underlying rock for some traction. The trees were ten feet away but the closest root was 5 feet over my head since the bank was undercut. I'd have to stand up and try and grab onto the root.

As soon as I lifted my chest off the ground I felt the ground give out from underneath me. I was sliding down the cliff. My left foot caught a slight hold on a boulder and I lunged with all my strength. I stretched out my right arm with the pick in hand hoping to catch that root. THUNK. The sound of metal on wood. I hooked the point of the pick on a 2" thick root that held as the rest of the ground slid down the mountain. Luckily there was no one below me... it was enough rock to bury a truck. The boulders crashed into the way to the trees 200 feet below where I was hanging. It could have been me...

I pulled myself up into the web of roots and got my feet on solid ground. Heart was pumping but I did pull out the GMT and went about my detecting at the top of the landslide. Turned out to be a bust for gold, but at least I can mark that location off the list.

I found another way back down, had a close call with some target shooters (another story for another day) and hugged my wife extra hard when I got home. Nothing makes a man more thankful for what he has than confronting his own mortality. And at least I have a good story to tell around the campfire at Rye Patch...

GL and HH,

tboykin

[klunker]

  If you would mix in a rattle snake some poison oak and have the wife bop you severally when you got home this would be an exciting story. But I never embellish my stories either.

[tboykin]

Gotta be honest - no snakes, too high up for poison oak, and didn't tell my wife. She would definitely be swinging a rolling pin if she knew.... Every time I go out she says "Be careful." But careful is boring!

[beatup]

Sounds like one heck of trip

[Reno Chris]

One of the things crusty old guys learn is not to do excessively dangerous stuff - I've known guys who weren't as lucky. Loose rocks sit at what is called the angle of repose - the angle at which they can just stay in place. A little disturbance can bring down a whole slide as you saw.

Seeing quartz veins on Google Earth is an art and the few that can be seen tend to be really large, and many really large veins are what are known a bull quartz - to summarize the quartz contains nothing but bull sh...

Often the richer veins are the smaller ones. In fact in many places pocket gold deposits are called seam diggings - not because the veins are gigantic, but because they are more like little seams.

Sometimes veins will crop out of the ground and be visible, but more often veins get buried by soil, rock slide debris, covered over by brush, etc. The normal discovery procedure in many cases was that miners would find areas with lots of loose chunks of quartz on the ground, and if the quartz had good gold or other valuable minerals, they would dig trenches to find the vein. 

If you would like to see a real quartz vein on Google earth, go to 39 34' 40.91'' N and 120 39' 07.94'' W. This location is a vein on private property  with a series of workings, it pinches and swells but at the point I have given you coordinates for, the vein is about 20 feet wide. The location is just NW of a small town in northern California named Sierra City. The mine produced lots of gold, but it was small stuff too tiny to see with a metal detector. Still it makes a good example of a vein visible on Google Earth. Although you can only see this vein in a few spots, it goes on underground for about 3000 feet - more than a half mile.

[1515Art]

jeez...sounds like reality TV to me, should have had the camera rolling, season 1 episode 1, our star "tboykn" almost dies in massive rockslide nearly tumbling over a 3000 foot precipice saved by agility, panic and a little luck from a plunge spelling certain death and yet the search for gold continues...

[tboykin]

10 minutes ago, Reno Chris said:

If you would like to see a real quartz vein on Google earth, go to 39 34' 40.91'' N and 120 39' 07.94'' W. 

Thanks for this. It's the exact kind of thing I'm looking for. Only way to see if it's real is to get out there!

[gambler]

hey buddy, you ever heard of the buddy system? don't go it alone.

[Roughwater]

Tom,

I'm glad you are still here to tell your story.  Good for you for getting off the beaten path to find some gold.  Keep at it an you will find some I'm sure.  

I learned my lesson about climbing up a steep incline when I was young.  I was walking along a railroad track with a creek to my right and a cutout rock hillside on my left.  The hillside went up almost vertical with a 2 or 3 ft terrace about every 30 ft in height. I decided to try to climb up to the first terrace.  It didn't seem too bad going up as I was able to find some hand and footholds in the rock but after getting up to the first terrace I realized I would be much more difficult to get down the way I got up.  I could not find my way down from the first terrace so I had to climb up to the second terrace then up to the top and to find a better way down.  I have always been more careful about climbing up a steep hill since.  One can see the handholds and feel for the foot holds going up but the footholds especially are harder to find going down.  One bad thing about life there is a lot of things we can't foresee till we are in a fix.  

[Reno Chris]

Another big obvious quartz vein in a Northern Nevada desert environment can be seen at:
41 35' 34.29'' N   117 27' 33.1'' W

This vein did not yield much, though its visible for miles and there are a few working on it.