Chapter 5

I was wrong.

The old timers hadn’t overlooked the possibility: The crack in the bedrock had been mined. There was a tunnel situated so as to look like the shadow cast by the neighboring stream bank.

The stream bed was the horizontal portion of a bedrock elbow with the arm part rising near vertical until it sloped back to be the underlayment of the uplifted mountain. Tectonic action had caused the bulge of the crust and the act scattered cracks in the bedrock. Hot water under pressure carried dissolved minerals and gold into the cracks. The minerals solidified into quartz.

Most gold-bearing quartz veins will contain at least some minor sulphide minerals as part of their composition. One of the most common sulphide materials is iron pyrite, or FeS2, a form of iron sulphide resulting from the chemical oxidation of the iron inherent to this material.

Quartz veins that contain iron sulphides or oxides are easy to spot since they will display a yellow, orange, red, or reddish-orange coloration. This “rusty” look is just that, rust, and it is very similar to the colors found when when old iron is left outside in the elements to rust and oxidize.

Typically (but not always) these sulphide quartz veins are found along or near major geological faults or in areas where large tectonic processes may have occurred during the planet-building past. The quartz veins themselves will often be fractured or “crosscut” in any number of directions and it is at these junctures, fractures, or crosscuts that the greatest amounts of gold will be found. WIKI

Millions of years in the past this locality may have been underwater; continental drift shifted the patterns and uplift occurred. Wind and water erosion removed much of the overburden ... more planet building may have occurred covering and uncovering the land. Massive volcanism possibly caused the burying and wind and water uncovered the land. More recently in geologic terms, extraordinary winds carried seed and the land developed soil, grasses, trees that lived and died adding to the depth of soil.

Geologic terms:
Soon is within the next million years.
Recent is within the past five hundred thousand years.
Yesterday is ten thousand years.
Historic is someone wrote about it.

The old timers had chased a diminishing vein of gold bearing quartz until it was unprofitable to continue. There were easier prospects farther along the stream. When they stopped they had driven boreholes in the face but never finished the blast.

That this mine was abandoned as a bad job was seen in the lack of timbering. Mines with promise were timbered. Walls were smoothed and balks were used to support overhead planking. Not so this mine ... it was an in and out and move on.

Abby paced down the tunnel from portal to face and examined the lines of mineralized quartz in the tunnel walls. The country rock of the tunnel showed the speed of the minors by the crudeness of the work.

At the face, with its unfinished bore holes she shut her eyes and walked back several meters ... about a third of the way. The line of rusty quartz had nearly thinned to nothing only to widen again on its way to the face.

“Here, Daddy. Pry into that crack and pop off that slab.”

“Step back, honey. Towards the portal, please.”

Setting down the other hand tools, I dropped my pack, fished out my gloves and placed the long bar in the infinitesimal crack. I whacked the bar end a couple of good ones with the five pound hammer, crouched under the bar to the portal side, set my feet and pulled. The bar levered out a slab of rock that ran from the floor to the quartz vein and a meter or so back toward the face.