Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Any Gold Miners here?

Very interesting indeed!

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This is a great thread... thank you for posting, looking forward to more...

Very cool.! Living in Az,we come across old mine shafts ,while hunting. I often wonder ,what did they see that started them digging in that spot.

Bet it's the glory hole...

Paddler's on the other side?

Super cool, thanks for sharing.

Yep, I don't know crap about underground mining, and am scared to play at it.

Consider that cave in. The roof has collapsed, and obviously, no one has addressed it.
I don't understand underground structures, or the various rock formations. No idea what will
happen when someone goes in there and starts moving stuff.


Local coal mine had an entrance collapse two weeks ago.
The men were working deep in the mine, and a gust of air blew their coattails around.
Of course they got scared and had to evacuate, out a different entrance.

Last week, a man got crushed in there. Not a collapse though. (Hopefully the safety
people are straight, and fairly investigate).

This is not far from Quecreek.

On second thought.............No reason to dig around in the litter box.

That's how he makes pocket change.

Very Cool! Im sure that you will find gold here & there, but Id be dam careful! please up date this thread from time to time!

This is very cool. I've found a bunch of old mines out in the hills of Nevada. I still have one that I want to go futher into that is well hid and probably I am the only living guy that knows it's whereabouts. Big pile of quartz at the mouth. This just gave me some inspiration to go check it out again. When I found it, didn't have a light source....

Thanks for posting this, I really enjoyed it.

Now that most of the water is out, i would be in there scanning the walls/ceiling/floor with a good (gold hunting type) metal detector. What the old timers couldn't see inside the rock...

I think I'd stick to panning the creek!

Very interesting story. Thanks for posting. By our camp in Pa. there's an old coal mine in the side of the mountain with narrow gauge rails coming out of it. One of the locals dad had owned and operated it, but the state shut him down for not de-watering it safely. I've stopped there a couple times to get out of the rain when deer hunting that area. You could tuck back under the overhand where the tunnel went in and stay dry. Must have been back breaking work. They just opened it up enough to get to the vein of coal. They laid on their side to work the coal, as they couldn't stand up back in there.

That's the plan, CraigD. This gold mine was put on the back shelf while building an off the grid home, but the home is finally built and I'm retired with a fancy metal detector.
The mine shaft is sketchy. We invited an old hard rock miner (Clem) to check it out and he was a little shook up walking out of that mine. He didn't like it, saw some fissures, but he also found gold pecking around the walls

There is no way I'm digging that cave-in. I'll come in from above with an excavator before I start picking around that mine shaft. Those old miners abandoned this mine for a reason. Dangerous.

Cool story! The place I spend 1/2 my time is riddled with drifts.

Where we stay to Hunt/Trap/Fish on the Kiwalik river is smack dab in the middle of gold country on the Northern Seward Peninsula.
I work'd for a company, the wife would fish and watch the kids by the river.
We have a camp 3 miles from Candle, which was second to Nome in Gold production, to our west is the Imnachuk with Utica, though now abandoned, Deering on the coast is still there, doing it thang.

When fuel prices went up and gold prices went down, the operations went down.Thats when we just switched to fishing , trapping and sewing for an income.

I mined for Reinhard Berg in the early 90's a few seasons, 'Berg/Whettleson company'
Later , in teh early 2000's I worked for the successor company CAMCO 'Candle Mining Company' or something to that effect.

Then I spent 4 years as caretaker running off thieves and squatters from the buildings, didn't make friends with some that way as well..

We bumped into Drift mines that followed the gold streak, sometimes with ''stuff'' like rails, ladders, timbers pipes, crates for Chickens and other things.


Son Doug above an old drift, the tailing are hard to see but they make quite a step below the mouth. The hole is caved in.


Theres a mine across the river there at ld Glory,its hard to see


It gos back quite a ways, but I wont go in...

Up past Utica used to be Jack Hoogendorns, and he had a drift that went around a VW sized bolder.....was fun checking that stuff out when he was wanting to show us stuff.

Best thread on here in a long while. Wondering how long it can go before someone pollutes it politics.

We honeymooned in Breckenridge, Colorado, and I can remember looking up on those slopes and seeing abandoned mines all over the place. I bet they must have hit some when they put in Arrapohoe Basin ski runs.