Helmut and the tunnel of gold
Helmut was a hard man to understand, (speaking psychologically,) and for the life of me, I can’t remember how or when I met him. I took it for granted that he was Dutch or possibly German. I do know that I met him sometime in the 80s, and almost every thing since we met.
I’m not sure, but I seem to have a dim recollection of a friend bringing him to my house and introducing us, telling him that if anyone had the answers to gold mining, it would be me. But then, I met a lot of people over the years that were looking for answers. (lol)
Anyway, Helmut was always dressed in white bib over-alls. Heck, until I met him, I didn’t even know they made over-alls in white. (lol) He was over 6 foot tall, thin and had a long white beard. All-in-all, let’s just say; he looked different. (lol) And, I might add; he didn’t know the first thing about mining.
I gathered that he had heard about a “lost mine”, and wanted to find it.
This is where I came in. After hearing what he had to say, I figured that it sounded like a worthwhile project, (and was pretty sure I’d get some enjoyment out of it.) Though, as it turned out, that was the only thing I got out of it. The thing that really sold me on the search was, the mine was located in a location called “Specimen Hill”.
For those who are not familiar with the term, a gold specimen is usually quartz that’s heavily laced with gold. Whoops, I’m off again. (lol)
Anyway, I agreed to meet him the following morning at his “mill site” and go with him to where he figured the mine should be.
The following morning, I arrived at his “mill site”(which was on the North side of the river, just past Bagby,) at about 8am and after being given a tour through the area, we loaded ourselves into my pick-up and headed down his road towards the hiway.
As I made a right turn onto hiway 49, he said to drive slow as it was a short way to the turn-off to his claim. Sure enough, we had hardly gone (less than,) a quarter mile when he told me to turn onto a dirt road. We went down the dirt road maybe a half mile, when he had me turn onto another road that went further down the mountain. A couple of minutes later, he instructed me to find a place to park the truck. Since it was a large flat area, (obviously man-made,) that wasn’t hard to do. (lol)
We got out of the truck to look around and he held his arm out and made a sweep with it that encompassed about 180 degrees of the hill side directly in front of us. “The mine should be in this hill somewhere”.
I almost told him I didn’t have x-ray vision, but then, I thought; after all, it is a “Lost Mine”. (lol) So, I walked back up the road we came in on, then I came back and walked about 100 yds. the other way to where the road ended. I came back to the flat area and studied the side of the hill. I had noticed a pole sticking up near the base of the hill, and though it was pretty well rotted off, I decided it was probably for running wire into the tunnel for lighting.
Then looking at the side of the hill above the pole, I could see where there had been a slide of materials sometime in the past. I walked over to the slide (slough) and with a handy branch; I scratched an X on the face of the slough. And told him, “I think if you dig straight in here, you’ll find the portal of the tunnel”.
After taking him back to his mill site and visiting for a short while, I returned home.
I didn’t hear from Helmut for about 3 weeks after that. Then one evening, shortly before dark, he came to my house all smiles. He said that he had dug where I said, and had uncovered the portal of the old mine. He was pretty excited about it as there were ore cart rails in it, which is a pretty good indication that someone had figured it was worth working.
It also turned out that he didn’t know how to go about “proving it out” for filing on it. I told him; “You know, ore carts had one problem. They are never tightly closed. I mean, with ore being thrown in them, if they once sealed good, it didn’t last long. The metal gets bent and stretched and before long you have cracks around the edges, where fine materials and small pieces of ore leak out”. “So, my advice would be to dig up the material between and on the sides of the rails and run it through a sluice box. If there’s any worthwhile gold there, it shouldn’t take long to find out”.
As it turned out, he had a good supply of running water at his mill site and figured he could haul the materials in a bucket, from the mine to his mill site and run them through the sluice box there.
Again, I didn’t see or hear from him for about 2 weeks, then one evening, he called and wanted to know if he could come out to my place. I told him sure, come on over.
I met him at the door and invited him in. I could see that he was excited. He pulled something from his pocket and told me to see what I thought about it. I let him drop something into my hand and when I looked, I found I was holding a vial with what appeared to be about 3 oz of raw gold in it. He told me that he had sluiced the materials as I had suggested and after running 5 buckets, this is what he came up with. I guess I should mention that looking at it, it was obvious that this was not placer gold. It had definitely come from a “hard rock” mine. It was also a fairly dark gold, (kind of like some Alaska gold I’ve seen,) indicating that there was a bit of iron in it. If I had been asked, I would have estimated that it ran about 80% pure.
I only saw Helmut one time after that. He showed up one day to bring me some fresh picked cherries and to tell me that some one had gone into his mine and high-graded a hanging vein of quartz with “a lot of gold”. I guess some materials had fallen from the ceiling and exposed about 20 ft. or so of quartz that was shot through with gold. Whomever it was had chiseled out most of the exposed vein.
It’s just an educated guess on my part, but from the way he described the vein and the visible gold it held, I roughly estimated they got away with over 3 pounds of gold. Now that would tend to irritate me just a little.
When I was in Mariposa this past August, I drove on up to Helmut’s mill site, only to find that the BLM had evidently bulldozed everything down. Nothing is left, other than scattered timbers and various odds and ends.
I also thought about driving down to the mine, but the BLM had blocked the road leaving the hiway. Of course, I’m not overly concerned about that as I believe I could still find the spot. Perhaps this summer, I’ll be up that way. There are some interesting washes coming down that particular hill that I think could stand a little metal detecting. (lol)
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Coming up next; A flip of a coin spells success
). Are you heading up this way anytime soon? 
