History of the Foothills
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By Wm. J. Martinsen, from his book “Stories of the Foresthill Divide Area, Some Tall, Some
True”
Continued from Dec. 26th issue:
When we reached about twenty feet from the outer edge of the cave we ran into an old wooden
mine car completely decayed with an old shovel, bar, box of powder, and caps, all completely decayed. It took the best part of three days to dig this old car out and try to timber around it, but we finally made it. I devised an old jack with a bar so that we could work a temporary cap and lagging so that we could move forward with out driving lagging. This worked real well as long as the ground was not too wet or too dry.
We put our sets closer together with this method and of course used up our timbers more rapidly.
By this time we were also able to have fashioned a half way decent trail by working a little each day coming and going on the trail. Bob and I were neither one of us young men at this time (1981, 1982), Bob being two years older than me and I was fifty-six in 1980. After working to skid material and supplies down and working all day, there were several evenings when coming up the trail from the mine there were many stops to rest needed. Also there always seemed to be some tool or something that had to be carried out for repair or maintenance. It was after one of these extremely hard trips out from the mine that Bob and I decided to build a road down at least part way.
We took one day to walk the surrounding hillside as to where the best location to start a roadway would be. After deciding where we felt the best location for the roadway might be we approached the United States Forest Service with our plans for a narrow jeep roadway. We had to flag this for their review and this all took time. In the meantime while waiting for the U.S.F.S. we kept plugging away at opening the tunnel with every trip up the trail seeming harder and harder. Finally we got the go ahead from the U.S.F.S. to construct a road down to the Old Breece and Wheeler Ditch. We felt that walking to this ditch would be nothing as from the ditch the slide distance would be only about six hundred feet, but very steep.
We stopped all mining and proceeded to start to construct the road. The first season we were able to construct the road to a point about five hundred feet from the Breece and Wheeler Ditch. Bob owns a very small cat, gasoline powered, about one half the size of a D4. I would go ahead with the brushing and grubbing and Bob did all of the cat work. Road construction moved along very slowly in this manner. A good D6 or D7 would have built this section of roadway in three or four days. It took Bob and I about two months of weekends and any holidays thrown in.
Bob was called back to work so all activity ceased until in the fall when Bob was laid off. We
immediately took Bob’s cat back out and started road building again and after one or two weekends Mother Nature shut us down with a big snow. We were unable to get back until March so we lost much time in what we came to call our mining season, (November to April or May). However, we were able to complete the road down to the Breece and Wheeler Ditch and around the ditch above all three workings to a point in a small draw where we could turn the jeep around. One area of this section of road construction appeared to go through an area of bedrock and we were sure we would have to have a compressor and blast. However this section of roadway turned out to be one of our easiest sections.
With the road down to the ditch this made getting timbers and materials slid down the hill much
easier. Thank God for a little small jeep, with winch, that was used like a ton and a half truck to
haul these supplies and still is being used as of this writing.
We proceeded to move forward in opening the west tunnel making about two feet every day we
worked. We had timbered some forty feet through this cave in when one day we were setting up our makeshift jack and cap and noticed that we were able to lift this cap into position with ease which was most unusual. We got our temporary cap in place and noted that the cave material was much drier than previously. We were worried that we might not be able to go through this material being that dry.
A large boulder immediately ahead of our temporary cap needed to come out so I took a long bar
and started to pry on this boulder to get it out when, “WHOOSH”, and a large cloud of dust and we ran out of the tunnel. It blew our lights out and we went out to re-light them and by this time the dust had cleared and we went back in to look around and found we had broken into the old
workings. Had we have known we could have saved four or five sets of timbers as the material on top of our timbers was only about a foot to eighteen inches deep on these sets. The next three or four days was used in cleaning out the rest of the cave in and checking the safety of the cave in and some additional timbering with some cushioning as there was a very large cavern above the timbers at this point. What took us over two mining seasons to accomplish could have been done in two or three days with a back hoe and an end loader, and should be done for safety in the future.
We then proceeded to explore our new found tunnel. The old timers had evidently followed the
gut of the channel with wheel barrows before they installed the rails and car. The rails were
installed by shooting a different bedrock tunnel for the cars use. This bedrock tunnel went in about two hundred and seventy five feet. Both sides of the tunnel were breasted out high and wide but the gravel appears much harder and different than the gravel in our first opening. The lava does not look the same.
A small stream of water coming from the middle tunnel was the only available water supply. The tunnel which we had just opened had a bare trickle of water after draining. We therefore proceeded to use some of Bob’s old P.V.C. two inch pipe that he used for irrigation of his orchard to bring this supply of water around to the westerly tunnel. We leveled off a location for nine, fifty gallon drums and piped this water to a sluice box. We fashioned ore bins from barrels and proceeded to wash all of the material we cleaned from the floor of the tunnel. Some of this material was fairly good, that the old timers had lost from their cards, and their breasts and side drifts. However, the further we went into the tunnel the less gold we were getting. We eventually cleaned this tunnel to the face where the old timers had quit. From the end of the rails to the face of the tunnel, some seventy five feet, it was extremely hard going. Those old timers had to have been tough to work those breasts of only twelve to eighteen inches in height. We never found any pillars or material that the old timers had left like in the first workings we opened. However, the extensive workings lead us to believe that there must have been some good pay.
To be continued in next editon...........
