A friend of a friend is looking to sell the old family mine. Staked back when it was a pathway to ownership, the place is now private property with full mineral rights. It is out of our price range. It is only accessible half the year, on a good year. But it is a piece of paradise, with shiny to be had... We had to go have a look. Or try to, any way!
(All photos taken with my cell phone.)
The area was hard hit by ARSONISTS last year. They got away clean with their crimes because the Forest Service has NO financial incentive to actually solve these crimes. The view is still spectacular.
There is just a rabbit's warren of roads up the sides of this mountain, and as we tried to find the place we became increasingly uncertain we were really on the right road. As the road got worse and worse, we finally said "That is as far as we can go" and got out to hike around a bit before turning back. We had 4WD but we have only moderate clearance on that rig. We left our big boondocker at home because it has no AC. The Toyota was just not up for any more of this, we had picked our way through a mile of it already and it had taken probably 30 minutes. Going nowhere fast and risking our good rig, time to call it a day!
As we wandered about a bit, we found the obvious signs of previous mining right there. It was not the mine we were looking for, it just did not match the description or the google earth images we had seen. But we did find an old tailings pile. Mark ran the metal detector over it and it was singing like a canary.
We also found LOTS of rock that had a lot of shimmer, and with a 10X loupe showed what I think is metallic flakes. Now, people around here will still shoot your ass for claim jumping, and the jury is going to find it "justified homicide" so we just walked away from that pile. But literally IN the road, we picked up a few specimen pieces to do a little testing. Not sure when we will get around to testing it, since we plan on going back next week and going to the RIGHT claim this time, we want to at least wait to get specimens from there too.
When we got home, we got back online and starting sorting out where exactly we had been. It turns out we were within about 2 miles of the site, but it looks like a brutal 2 miles. We are taking the beast and our 4 wheeler next time. The good news is, we WERE on the right road, just had the wrong rig!
STACK ON!