OLD-TIMERS: ANY MISSED OPPORTUNITIES, REGRETS ?

[Fullpan]

As I look back on my mining days, I sometimes think about the places where I should have spent more time. For instance, a 2 hour
hike up a feeder creek near Downieville, ca. where I spotted two nuggets just laying on bedrock and each sample pan contained good color. Never went back, never checked for claim status - what was I thinking ! Then there was my "beer money" crack. I knew I could
scrape nearly a gram out of a 5 foot long one inch wide crack with an hours worth of effort - never got to the bottom.

So, if you guys have similar stories, how about sharing them? Your stories will make another winter go a little faster, for me at least.

 

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[fowledup]

As a clueless youngster not taking my uncle's offer to be his drill tender for a season. It was up in Montana (still haven't got up there yet). Always wished I'd gone. Would have been good money and good experience. No need to guess what kept me home. It was one of the two things I attribute some of my better dscisions to, and nope I wasn't drinking at the time. Nothing like puppy love!

 

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[Hoser John]

FullPan,that's NOT a fantasy bud,been done,still being done for awhile till these temps hit below 30 all over but quietly. But being a stalworth honest lad I'd NEVER indulge or associate with such prosperous--oops onerous types John

 

[ALewis]

ALewis - I've rafted the north fork of the american several times from Eucher Bar down to the two Colfax bridges. What fork have you rafted?
63bkpkr

63bkpkr - I have no idea why I never made it up that far, but No, don't think I ever did make it up to the NF when I was raftin.... Did run the Middle & Lower forks... Always LOVED the Tunnel chute on the Middle Frk, Can't imagine the work that took. Another really fun trip I took a couple times was the Yuba...Want to say was NF going into the resrvoir. Just about flipped our raft on the "Maytag" rapid once, that sucked, but looking back was great?.... Sad to say this was all probably 15+ years ago. Need to get back at it. Don't know why I stopped.

 

[Goldwasher]

Selling a film canister full of Alaskan Gold in 1999 instead of 2011

 

[Fullpan]

Selling a film canister full of Alaskan Gold in 1999 instead of 2011

lmao - yes, trying to time the gold price market is worse than shooting craps in downtown Reno !

 

[mxer47]

I grew up in paradise ca. Quail hunted untouched spots, hit all the swimming holes, knew the history, even sold my first car to a miner who used the motor to power his pump. Never picked up a pan. I guess I was too busy chasing quail all over or chasing girls to the swimming holes.

 

[ALewis]

lmao - yes, trying to time the gold price market is worse than shooting craps in downtown Reno !

I LOve Reno....

 

[KevinInColorado]

I grew up in paradise ca. Quail hunted untouched spots, hit all the swimming holes, knew the history, even sold my first car to a miner who used the motor to power his pump. Never picked up a pan. I guess I was too busy chasing quail all over or chasing girls to the swimming holes.

Sounds like a life lived without regret to me, quail, girls, swimming holes and now gold :-D

 

[gold tramp]

That I wasn't born 100 years back, when I could had a chance at finding a decent ledge and could of dug a 100 foot shaft on a real pocket, one with pay all the way down.

 

[Reed Lukens]

The Gold Nugget


Growing up on Aeolia Drive with the other Kids sure made for some special memories. We would all walk through the woods and down the hill through what we called Dilly-Dally Land at the beginning of the old Olive Orchard, down past the white-quartz cave, then through the old oak and manzanita forest. We had plenty of trails and tree forts in that old orchard and the quartz cave was one of our favorite forts for playing Army or Peter Pan with all of us lost boys and our beautiful Wendy or in our case Suzie was her name. Suzie pretended she was our mom and she looked after us all and made us go to her school and she taught us everything we ever needed to know. This was long before any houses were ever built on our hill and Olive Orchard Court didn’t even exist so she was a real special part of our life and the one person that we all looked up too.
Then we had a climbing wire, which took us straight down over the cliff and into the old Forestry Station located on the left of old 49 going towards Cool. We would run across the highway right there and follow the old railroad grade which went down the hill for a while and eventually that road crossed the river here at No- Hands Bridge. But we would cut off a long ways up from the bridge and head straight down another trail that we had cut out with machetes that took us straight to our favorite swimming hole at the American River. We were small children when we first started exploring so far from home and I was just 6 the first time that we were allowed to go down there with the bigger kids from the neighborhood having promised our parents to hold our hands when we crossed the highway. So by the time we were 10, I considered myself to be an old timer and I really did know the river currents and the canyon real well. We would go down there and play pirates or gold miners or just go swimming for the day and then get home right before dark.
Now and then we would find a gold nugget which we just added to our secret pile of treasure that we kept buried deep in the sand behind a rock where nobody could ever find it. And back in the 1960’s there were gold nuggets all over the place and we would find them just walking our trails or in the cracks in the rocks all along the river. There were always more nuggets to find if we got bored but we didn’t really care about the gold because it was the adventure that we were there for. My Dad had told us that gold wasn’t worth anything and for the most part at $35.00 an ounce it wasn’t worth much. But to us it was ours, our own Pirate Treasure. And we always had our wooden swords close by to protect it. So we just kept our gold nuggets, special rocks, seashells and all of the little trinkets that we had found along the river, hidden down there deep in a booby trapped hole with sharp sticks and rocks buried in the ground with quick sand and traps all around it. It was our own buried treasure and we sure loved playing Pirates, Shiver me timbers…Arrrgh.
If you tell anyone about this, we’ll make ya walk the plank… And down there in that deep dark hole (as they all point to the deep hole just off the edge of the rock) if you try and escape lives the creature from the black lagoon and he only eats kids that look just like YOU! So you better promise to never tell anyone about this or he’ll come up from the deep in the middle of the night, come in to your bedroom and (as someone grabs your shoulders) he’ll get ya!!! (and then everyone would scream) He’ll take ya back down there in the middle of the night... First he’ll eat’chya and then feed your bones to his piranha babies… and you’ll never be seen again...
We were all told the same basic story back when we were the young ones… And believe me, it worked, we were so scared of that creature from the black lagoon that we never told anyone… Not even our own children… haha. I can still picture the look on my moms face as I was daydreaming about her while I was imagining being eaten alive. I was never going to be able to be there for her or ever see her again… I could picture her calling me from our front porch just like Auntie M calling out from the crystal ball for Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz”.
But our plank was real and nobody ever walked the plank or so we thought… Nobody ever walked it until that one day when they had finally grown up enough to become one of the big kids. The first time we ever saw anyone walk the plank was so terrifying for us because it was our darling little mother Suzie. At 10 she was two years older then us and finally big enough to join in the big kids fun. They told her to do something bad to one of us and she refused and said no… So they tied her hands behind her back, roughed her up a bit and said “If you won’t do what we say then you walk the plank!” As Suzie walked down the plank all alone we were all in tears pleading with her not to do it. She looked back and said good-bye to us with tears in her eyes, and then turned towards the water and looked deep into the whirlpool and jumped. She was quickly sucked under by the current and down into the hole… We all screamed in terror as she disapeared under the rocks… Our little mother was gone forever.

A few years later we were the big kids and nobody knew the whereabouts of our treasure except Steve & Andy & myself. I still remember diving for nuggets and on more then one occasion we would shoot them across the river at the solid rock wall with our sling shots to see if they would break... The gold nuggets would hit the wall and bounce back into the river maybe a little flatter then before or with a new dent, but never broken. We would dive down for them and always return them to our treasure chest where they would be safe and the river couldn’t get to them.
Then came the storm… The flood filled the entire canyon with water. It was so high that the water covered all of the bridges. It was wild and alive like we had never seen before; whirling and churning with huge logs being tossed around and broken like toothpicks. You could hear the river screaming all over town. It was so loud that it kept me awake all night long with the thunder and rain booming down. Dad told us that we had better stay inside and to stay hidden because the Trolls had come down from the mountains to go bowling in the hills again. They used huge trees for their bowling pins and the boulders they were rolling were bigger than our house… The thunder and lightning was so loud and so close that I could feel it piercing my flesh when it came crashing down. I knew for sure that the Troll King was right outside my window waiting for me with a full quiver of lightning bolts, so I was hiding under my blankets keeping still and quiet.
We were wondering if our pirate treasure was still there so Andy and I went down there on the first clear spring day and we dug and dug for them but they were buried a lot deeper now and had sank down in the sand. The sticks that we had buried on top of them were two feet deeper and we dug down another foot or more and just found one of the small ones about the size of our fingernail and some of our seashells. The others had sunk to deep for us to get back right then but we had them safe in a place where they could only drop straight down.
We climbed up on top of the huge bedrock slab that we used as our plank and we were sitting there looking down at the river when all of a sudden something didn’t feel right and we both could feel that we needed to leave right away. So we climbed down our rope off of the rock which was about a 15-foot climb down and started running. Then the strange feeling stopped and we were talking about what had just happened, when all of a sudden we heard a huge bang like the sound of a bomb going off. Then a huge crack and pop and all of a sudden the huge section of the rock wall that we had just climbed down broke off of the mountain and came crashing down right in front of us. It was around 15 feet high, 8 feet wide & 6 feet deep. Andy & I looked at each other just stunned by what had taken place right before our eyes. After that feeling of dread passed we walked over and looked at the huge piece that used to be one of the hardest parts of our trail; now just sitting there broken in half on the ground. It was like 2 huge hands that were held together had just split open at the wrist. And you’ll never guess what we saw…
We couldn’t believe our eyes but there it was, right in the center of the broken slab sat a huge Gold nugget shaped just like a wedge. It was 2” wide, 5/8” thick and about 2” long tapering down into a point. It was as big as the palm of my hand and there it was right in front of our eyes and just out of our reach stuck way down in the bottom of the crack. We stretched and reached down for it with one of us holding on to the others legs, but we were just barely able to touch it because the crack got too small too fast and our arms were just a little too short. It was just that close that we actually tried pushing each other farther down into the crack but we just couldn’t get it to move. We could touch the top of it but it was jammed in tight. A small piece of steel was all we needed to pry it out so we went scavenging trying to find one. But the flood had changed everything, there was no steel to be found, and it was supposed to be a quick trip so we didn’t even bring the hatchet. The Nugget had been hidden in that crack, burying itself deeper & deeper in the rock wall for centuries until it finally split that entire wall and came crashing into the light for the first time ever right before our eyes. We tried using sticks and everything we could find but we couldn’t get the huge nugget to move.
Then our dads showed up because we were real late by then and we were in big trouble for not getting home on time. We tried to show them our nugget but they didn’t want to walk down the other 1/8-mile of the most dangerous, dark and slippery part of the trail over the damp rocks. So they just shouted down at us from the hillside to get up to the car as fast as we could because it was almost dark. We really had blown it this time and we were going to be feeling our way home again and then feeling something else when we got there… So we got up to the car and told them what was going on but we were in way too much trouble for them to understand that we were telling them the truth about our find of a lifetime, and now we were grounded.
Every time I think back to that day it brings a big smile to my face. Because I actually got to see with my own eyes that mountain open itself up just for me… I’ll always remember our prize nugget that was miraculously shown to us by “God”. It may have slipped away, but that memory is something that I will never lose…
What was that? Oh, what ever happened to Suzie you ask? Well she got pushed down under the rock plank by the swift current and then she untied her hands and swam underwater around the rocks and into the cove behind us while keeping totally out of sight. Then she sneaked up over the rocks behind us and said boo which brought those huge smiles back to all of our faces Every now and again we see each other and remember the days we spent together and for me, my favorite memories are of these special times we spent at our own make believe Pirate Ship down on the river and all of the things that she taught us in her own little private school she held just for us deep in the woods…

Today once again after so many years, I live in this old house on Aeolia once again, with a new wife and a new set of dreams. I walked down to the old pirate ship here a year ago and I saw it once again just the other day

 

[Fullpan]

Way cool story, Reed - welcome back !!!

 

[fowledup]

Great story. I like stories that make you feel like you could be one of the characters, brought back some good fun memories. I just noticed the face on the walking stick with the matching moustache, very cool did you carve it?

 

[KevinInColorado]

Great story telling Reed AND quite a trophy too, thanks for sharing!

 

[Hoser John]

HAhahahah yep Reed in daze of old when we were young and bold instead a now old........never stop as to stop is to die a horrendous death of abject boredom. Wish I'd a started in 55 instead a 57 as 2 mo'years woulda been nice too.Them AZ boyz ya brought up to buy the 8" sure wished they'd a started a year earlier I bet...John

 

[Jeff95531]

Fantastic story Reed. Thanks for taking the time to share. Playing with gold nuggets lol....you totally own this thread of regrets!