Reeds Travels

[Reed Lukens]

Reed's Travels

Today we will be detecting at Carpinteria State Beach in Southern California just outside of Santa Barbara and we will be here until Friday morning in space 126. It's past time for me to have started my own thread on our travels, so here it is

 

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[Jim in Idaho]

So, Reed, are you two coming back to the BB next spring? Really nice gold by the way!
Jim

 

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[IMAUDIGGER]

Well, we are gone from the LDMA Blue Bucket finally. Eastern Oregon was fun and there is good gold. I was able to run my friend Rick's trommel whenever I wanted to and it does work well. It's a simple design made from 2 old water heaters. I ran 26 buckets thru in a little over an hour and walked away smiling
View attachment 1627601View attachment 1627602
I had a lot of fun, did some exploring, saw Todd Hoffman's old operation that was upstream from a friend's claim, saw and walked all over the Sumpter Gold Dredge, and they even gave me a Gold Hog Raptor Pro Flare to run while I was camp host there
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Looks like fun.

 

[Reed Lukens]

So, Reed, are you two coming back to the BB next spring? Really nice gold by the way!
Jim

I'm not sure right now Jim, we just left and it is a great spot but our plans are up in the air right now. I'd love to dredge again, so we may go east.

 

[Jim in Idaho]

I'm not sure right now Jim, we just left and it is a great spot but our plans are up in the air right now. I'd love to dredge again, so we may go east.

In any case, best of luck, and keep us advised.
Jim

 

[KevinInColorado]

So glad we were able to visit you at the BB. Fun times!

 

[Reed Lukens]

Now you can come visit us on the coast in Florence, Oregon if you're heading this way. We'll be here for a month or so.

 

[KevinInColorado]

Now you can come visit us on the coast in Florence, Oregon if you're heading this way. We'll be here for a month or so.

We are in northern Montana right now. We are headed home to CO as I have a bunch of book promoting to do. Sometimes I wonder how I let retirement get so complicated lol!

 

[Reed Lukens]

We are in northern Montana right now. We are headed home to CO as I have a bunch of book promoting to do. Sometimes I wonder how I let retirement get so complicated lol!

Some people don't have schedules on purpose
I figured that you were in Montana from the stops

 

[wildminer]

Some people don't have schedules on purpose

That's a good line Reed. I'll be using that one. (particularly on the wife!)

 

[Reed Lukens]

Wow! It's been a year
I'm finally back in Stanton, Az and will be out hunting for gold again next week after a great year at our claims in California repairing roads and damage to our houses and mining claims. Someone decided that our kitchen at the claim was needed to keep them warm, so it was hacked up and burned mostly with a full truckload of garbage left for us to pick up. Not a big deal really, but it was a nice kitchen one week, then we came back the next week to a cut lock and no more kitchen. Wierd right?
So we hitched up the trailer this week after shutting everything down in California, and got pretty much finished setting up our site here in Arizona until spring. We've made a lot of friends down here in the last couple of years, and today, even though it was opening day weekend here at Stanton, we never made it to the party because friends stopped by here one after the other, all day
It's been 2 years since we left Arizona to help the LDMA with their Blue Bucket camp in Eastern Oregon after being asked to take over caretaking up their during their emergency.
So once again, I'm retired... technically... lol. At least we're back to gold mining
Reed

 

[russau]

Reed, That's good news to hear !

 

[Reed Lukens]

(Can one of you moderators move the whole "Reeds Travels" journal to the journal pages please)

The Lukens Gold Mine
Eldorado County California
The mine itself is still rich, but it was permanently closed by the Auburn Dam property takeover but it's still listed on the topo maps.

Years ago a man who worked in the mine came to our house and told us a story about how they were higrading the mine to death after it had been rented out to the company in Nevada. They had broken a piece of the quartz out and dug a huge hidden compartment behind it. Then they would put the piece of quartz or "the door" back into the opening and it looked totally solid and kind of snapped into place. They would take the higrade gold and stack it in there to retrieve later when the time was right. They did this many times, filling the little storage area full... In the end, when the mine was closing down, they had the storage cave full and they were ready to empty it. But the mine was closed by the company and everyone was let go that day... To this day, he swears that the mine was rich with specimens of all types from the wire gold shown below to pure nuggets beyond compare. He also swears a little differently... about having to leave that little hole in the wall full of many pounds of specimen gold ready to be cashed in... There is still a way into the mine through an air shaft that is only known by a few people and to this day, that stash has never been recovered.


The first is and old pic from before a fire destroyed the area

And the rest of these are from during the rebuilding of everything.


My Grandfather, Earl Lukens with his hand on my Grandmother's shoulder around 1920, 100 years ago

Then this is my Aunt Eleanor in the center with her cousin Dode on the right and little Marjorie 5 years before my father was born.

 

[Reed Lukens]

Then here's a pic of the office and some of the gold from the old mine.

The old mine office and bunk house

Notice the pen for size.

 

[Reed Lukens]

The mine was originally located just south of the old town and mining camp of "Hoggs Diggins"


Here's a link to one of the old newspaper articles.
https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=AJ19080...Di9h1dpxnWcGD4sf8VpIp6J2PeiPKKZ5Ghvt9SA3fvd5M

A picture of the old
G.E.Lukens & Sons Hardware store in Auburn, CA.


Incidentally, the ICMJ magazine was started, printed, stapled together and made ready for delivery in the basement of this old store when my Grandfather was contacted by Arthur Willoughby, who wanted to start a mining journal full of all of the mining news from around the area. So the California Mining Journal originally known as the CMJ was started by Arthur with my grandfather's donations of money, time and commitment of support on giving Arthur use of the basement to help him start printing the ICMJ.
My father was around 4 years old when it was started and I drove him down to meet and talk with Scott Harn, the owner and editor of the ICMJ a few years back and he was able to tell Scott and I about the ICMJ's humble beginning in the old basement of the store. Because at 4 to 5 years of age, even though my father didn't know how to read, he was damn sure old enough to sit down there after school every day and staple the magazines together and stack them up for shipment. He said that he would never forget Arther and my grandfather putting the magazines together by hand as fast as they could and then handing them to him, to staple and stack into the boxes.

A few more of the ore sample pics

 

[Reed Lukens]

So... it's been a lot of years since I've wanted to write...
I still remember it clearly, so long ago, that day when I said that I would never write again... I had finally finished and posted my story about our gold mining adventures in 2005. I used to take a month or so and write huge articles and back them with pictures like I did above in the Lukens Mine article. I was a moderator on the 49erMike web site that was originally started by Tom Ashworth. Mike bought Armadillo Mining in Grant's Pass Oregon from Tom and the web page was a part of the deal. It was a good site, "The Prospectors Cache" and many articles can still be found on the way back machine today...
Anyway, it would take me a month or so to put just one article together and arrange it perfectly so that all of the pics would come up in the right places, there were no spelling or grammar errors. The last one was 7 pages long, so I'm talking about huge articles! So, I posted it and everything was great, people were reading it and commenting just fine... Then Ron got drunk again... posted a bunch of crap on it, called me a bunch of names, and I lost it... I read his bs and swore that after spending over a month in my spare time between work and raising a family, getting that article ready, that if that was how much my work was appreciated and that nobody really cared about my stories at all... I was done. I haven't written an article like that since.
I've thought about it here and there, but that web page was special, in that it had no boundaries other then picture size. And I might have 30 pictures in an article that would be 7 to 10 pages long! You don't find web pages like that these days and it was a ton of work for everyone involved just to keep it up. I would spend hours reformatting other people's posts so that everything of theirs was perfect also. It was one of the leading gold mining web pages until like so many, it went down and was basically lost forever. I used to be able to pull up my stories, but they are gone now mostly. That was 2005... so it's been 15 years and today I feel like writing again after all these years more or less, maybe not 7 pages but hey, it's a new beginning and I'm happy again and not consumed with the thought against picking up a pen again
Here's one of the old articles that you can check out if the old wayback machine works for you. Sometimes their links just don't work for everyone.
Prospectors Cache Forum - Viewing topic #71042 - Boulder Nets 101

 

[DizzyDigger]

So... it's been a lot of years since I've wanted to write...

Glad you're wanting to write again Reed...keep it up..you're good at it!

Written a few articles myself over the past 30 years, and as you say
the return rarely seems to equal the output required to put it all
together. Still, we do it for those that are going to gain knowledge
from reading it..and there is much satisfaction in helping someone
find success.

 

[oldbones]

Would love to read some of your writing Reed. Your family has quite the history here. Do you have any desire to go find that airshaft? That would be bugging me to no end.

 

[Reed Lukens]

Yes I do want to hit it, but it's just not at the top of my list yet, someday

 

[mike(swWash)]

Careful Reed, sometimes...... some day never comes.

 

[Reed Lukens]

Back to the future....
We left the Blue Bucket and went over to the coast for 10 months and I had made this video of where we were staying the year before, but I never opened it up to the public until today because we wanted to be sure that Mom stayed safe. She moved out of this house and into town a few months ago, so I made it public for everyone today