A few weeks back, before the snow started, we had a visit from 2 old miners who have purchased the claim that is at the top of our property. There are new rules these days, you have to prove you are active on the claim or you can lose it. They were mostly here just to get a bit of proof. Barry climbed up to the claim with them, they had the coordinates marked on their GPS so they knew when they were on it (Chris and Barry had climbed a lot further into the claim when they went up looking for it). They had pans with them and Barry helped them get a few pan fulls of dirt from the banks but they found not even a hint of the yellow… black sand but no yellow! One of them was a little older and had a hard time getting up there, the other man was in better shape and didn’t have too much trouble. They said if they were to work the claim (very unlikely) they would come in from above, not through our land. There is a road up there from when they did some logging years ago, they could branch a road off of.
On thing we did learn from these men was more about the shovel heads we have found on the land. Some of you might remember when the cottonwood tree fell across the creek, we found an old shovel head in the root ball. After doing a lot of research we found out it was from the late 1800’s because of the rivets. This is that shovel head…
Right around the same time Barry was building the pad for our woodshed and parking lot taking dirt from the gravel pit at the entrance to the property. After working the gravel for sometime he found another shovel head but it was flattened from the loader… this one had come out of the gravel pit. Because it was flattened and didn’t look like much, Barry stuck it at the end of the new bridge (cottonwood tree) and dubbed the bridge Lost Spade Crossing (see the spade behind Barry’s elbow) …
These 2 old guys spotted the old spade and explained that this one is even older than the riveted shovel, it was before they started using rivets circa 1850. Wow! Nice score. You can see sort of with this photo how it was put together…
So this not only gave us information about the age of the shovel but also tells a different story for the land. For that shovel to come out of the gravel pit, we are thinking it is probably a tailing pile, not a natural deposit. Very interesting!