Kent Chamberlain and the Mountain of Gold

For a while now, I've lumped all my adventures in Nevada under the collective heading "Nevada agricultural collectiveposting" because, eh, close enough. Unlike other blogs of mine, I'm trying to keep a handle on the number of labels I post, to make the label feature usable to find different "genres" of posts quickly. My overwintering in Omaha's ending, indeed by the time I finished writing this it already has, and there's several picture sets worth of adventures I've yet to tell, because precious little of it has to do with the homesteading. Instead, it's all got to do with goldhunting, or other various and sundry side quests off in the mountains somewhere. If it vaguely made me feel like Indiana Jones as I did it, it'll go in this section.

When I first packed out to go to Nevada, I came equipped with gold panning equipment and an excellent USGS publication from 1973, Placer Gold Deposits of Nevada, as well as the various maps cited therein, all saved on my phone. I've never panned gold before this, but I've watched a really great Youtube channel on the subject, and studying for my geography minor in a region with a lot of nearby coal, oil, and mineral fields equipped me with a basic knowledge of geology and the processes that cause rocks. Being a historian in the American West also required me to learn about how gold panning works in order to understand its role in the region's history. So I don't think I entered blindly.

Winters in my part of Nevada are bitterly cold, and last year I reasoned it'd be cheaper to drive to Clark County (home of Las Vegas, Lake Mojave, and the Hoover Dam) and its surrounding counties for the winter than to keep paying for gas to run the engine here and there to stay warm through the night. It also let me get a jump on my portable garden, and I early planted a lot of the same stuff - radishes, carrots, turnips, onions, spinach, and mustard leaf - that I just planted this year. I figured I could check out the goldfields in Clark County and along the Sierra Nevadas listed in that USGS publication.

My first target were the goldfields around Mt. Magruder in the Sierra Nevadas. There was a ghost town five miles away, another silent victim of the manpower needs of WWII that dot this state. I passed through several of these, and probably passed through several more hamlets without properly realizing, because heavily rusted iron grown over with massive sagebrush doesn't always show through the thin covering of snow in the peaklands.

In my travels last winter, I would come across another town like it; and there's plenty such that the locals back in Elko County have told me about, besides the one I live in. The World War II era left a mark on the land; over in Utah there's a town called Roosevelt, and several towns abandoned during the war and never returned to. Perhaps it was the nature of many of these places - itinerant prospectors, mostly male, likely filled these places. To this day, there's a tiny town on the south side of Mt. Magruder that I found on my second approach; there were no obvious bars or restaurants or anything so I didn't approach, but I drove around the town a little bit on my way in to get the feel of what a mining camp might have felt like back in the day.

This is what the USGS publication had to tell me about the Sylvania District, where I first worked:

"From Tonopah, 34 miles south on U.S. Highway 95 to Lida Junction; from there, 19 miles west to Lida on State Highway 3 (the numbering of this road has changed -Kent). The placer area is about 9 miles west of Lida on State Highway 3 in Palmetto Wash and in tributary washes reached by a dirt road leading south from the highway.

Looking on the map I'd downloaded and saved on my phone, it lined up well with the description, and there were even gold prospecting sites marked on the map. So I drove out to the ghost town of Lida, and then driving west from there, counted the miles until it was roughly the right place, and then looked carefully for the terrain to match up with what I'd seen on the map. This part of the state is utterly abandoned except for the odd traveller; even those aren't frequent because there are far more convenient ways to cross the border than these obscure mountain roads. So I didn't feel too bad about slowing down in uncertainty.

Finally I saw a turnoff to the left after Lida Summit that looked like it might be the place. I quickly copied the essentials of the map onto my hand (the glare of the sun was too bright for my little phone) and I set off to survey the site.

The first thing I noticed is that these washes and springs didn't have running water. This was going to be an issue; no water, no gold panning. Fortunately, there was a lot of snow to melt, and a lot of mammoth-sized sagebrush detritus to feed to a cookfire to keep melting it to make snow. So having parked my van well out of the way of the highway, on BLM land (with the 14-day free camping rights that entails), I started melting snow. That set up, I grabbed my trusty walking stick to take a short walk around the site.

The second thing I noticed were the bear tracks.

We don't have bears in Nebraska, but Wyoming and Colorado do. I've never seen one in real life, but an ex-girlfriend of mine from Alaska has run across them often. She taught me a couple things about them: first off, show neither fear nor aggression, just stand there motionless until they get bored and walk away, even if it takes an hour. Second off, if it's a mother with cubs, this won't work, she will shred you in preemptive defense of her cubs.

Which is why, once I noticed the tracks, I had to follow them. I didn't go unarmed - I had a knife (that I later lost on this trip) with me, and I had a crossbow, bolts at the ready. Neither would save me from an enraged mama bear, I didn't figure, but I also wasn't figuring on going right up to it and poking it or anything. If I could get a glimpse of them from the other side of a mountain, and snap it with my binoculars (which I also brought along), that was all I could hope for.

But it was, well, winter. The tracks led to a cave, and I wasn't stupid enough to enter that cave. Better to let hibernating bears lie.

On my way back, I noticed a bunch of rusted-out old junk. This was indeed once a worksite; the remnants of sheet metal roofing and rusted auto parts attested to that. Nearly invisible from the road, they were apparent as I walked in search of a bear paw to the face. I would come to discover that just about all of Nevada is like this - one big rusted out ghost town.

That bit of curiosity sated, I went back to my campsite to find water ready for gold panning. What I did not find was gold. Rereading the bulletin, it was more of a silver lode than a gold lode, and it was one of the older ones (worked since before the Mexican-American War). I would be better off working the site in spring, when the meltwater filled the wash and made the panning easier, and the thaw made the digging easier. I'm pretty sure there's gold there - everything else about the geology presented in the bulletin was correct - but it couldn't be found easily at that time of year, at least not with my level of equipment and experience.

I knew that the turnoff behind the one where I'd parked held a road that led to a series of prospects in Tule Canyon, on the other side of Mount Magruder. I hated to have come out here on my first prospecting gig just to leave empty-handed, so I figured I'd try to get up there. The road was four miles long, and after the first tenth of a mile, I realized it was currently impassable by van. I blew the 12 volt DC fuse figuring that one out, as well as shattered the red plastic encasing my left taillight. Perseus IV bore that scar until her refit this winter; it was proof that she drove up here and back down again with vim and vigor. The van was even stuck for about an hour as I dug out the road and then carefully tried to turn around.

After succeeding in extricating the van, I wondered if I could walk the distance. It was here that I lost my knife; it was a knife from pre-WWI Germany that I'd been given in Portland, so it was a bit of a bummer. Besides that, the walk was long and beautiful but also wet and soggy. I got about halfway and realized I wouldn't be able to do that times four, with all my equipment on my back, and then work panning gold for a full day on top of that.

I needed a different way in.

There is a back way in, passing that mining hamlet I mentioned earlier. I went that way through, and the road resembled a gravel rollercoaster. My plucky little van shrugged it all off until the snow finally turned the road to mush. I walked from there to several of the sites marked on my map, but the problem was the same. The gold, if any was left, would be buried deep inside permafrosted creekbeds. And so it proved; there wasn't even gold dust on the surface.

But you know what? Even though I didn't find anything, I'll be back. In writing this post just now, I came across an exciting new book with more detailed information on this particular subject. In the right weather, with the creeks flowing with melted snow, I'll be able to dig down deep into earth that isn't permafrost, and pan what I dig up. And this new source I found describes my journey here impeccably; too bad I didn't know about it when I first went:

All the same, I tried to locate a different place to prospect.

I ended up first going to Eldorado Canyon, the oldest site of European prospecting. The ancient mouth of the creek lay buried under the artificial modern-day Lake Mojave, but enough remains upstream to find real metal - gold, silver, and copper, by the appearance of it. Across its placid waters spread the red rock canyons of Arizona. It was a beautiful place to prospect and to recharge my water supplies, although it offered a tiny yield. I would discover a similar site with an even more dubious yield, at Telephone Cove, to the point where I didn't even bother panning there (although it is likewise beautiful and I stayed my seven allotted days anyway).

After those relative whiffs, I tried gambling on a total guess. The USGS publication mentions that there was a lode found someplace indeterminate between Telephone Cove and Eldorado Canyon, but that the precise location was kept a secret by its discoverers. I drove down the largest road intermediate between the two, and was put off by the Forest Service charging a toll to go further. So I drove a little ways back, heard the call of nature, pulled over and addressed that call... and saw gleaming.

I bent over and it was flood gold as far as the eye could see. As best I could tell, I was standing halfway up a small mountain made of mica, flood gold, yucca, and sodall else. Unlike my ideal setup, there was no permanent body of water nearby, but I could wash the results in the water I'd brought with me. It was BLM land, so I used up my legal two weeks onsite, pulling gold out of the dirt. Then I drove into Las Vegas, and discovered it was too impure to be sold.

All is not lost from that trip, however. The flood gold looks remarkably like money on a LEGO figure scale, and I've got some ideas for Youtube that might exploit that somehow. And my best friend from back home has done some preliminary tests and has confirmed that it is metal and can melt, but his blowtorch blows it around more than melts it so he's going to invest in a kiln. I don't know whether this trip will turn out to be a boon or bust yet, in other words. But it was my very first adventure in gold panning, and I (might) have rediscovered a gold deposit lost to time.

Not so bad for amateur work.