All That Glitters … Crystal Gold Mine 6.10.21
Sounds like a cheesy tourist attraction, doesn’t it – the
Crystal Gold Mine and RV Park? However,
it is a real gold mine in the Idaho panhandle, with about 20 RV hookups on the
property.
We have visited a diamond mine (in Arkansas), a coal mine
(Nova Scotia), and two copper mines (Michigan’s Upper Peninsula), but never a
gold mine. This mine has an unusual
history. It was worked sometime in the
late 1880s, then abandoned, eventually boarded up for safety, forgotten, and
rediscovered in the 1960s.
The owner, Ray, gives the mine tours. Every visitor gets a hardhat and a
flashlight. The hardhats have labels
with goofy names taken from Old West Lore and cartoons, such as Trapper, Doc,
Sneezy, etc. I was Clem and LCR was Bam
Bam. These labels are actually a clever
device enabling Ray to call out a visitor’s name without having to learn names
of people he will only see for about an hour.
I suspect he also uses it to keep kids focused, because he mentioned
they do a lot of tours with families and groups of kids. As an addition to the tour, they offer gold
panning in large tubs outside, teaching visitors, especially kids, the
technique the miners would have used to sift through the crushed rock for tiny
bits of gold.
Ray is a bona fide mining history expert and enthusiast, and
he gives the history of this area and the mine in a rapid-fire lecturing style
reminiscent of car salesmen: “Step right
up, folks, and look at this . . .” He
explained that this part of Idaho has a lot of silver as well as gold, indeed
some of it in the Crystal mine, but during the 1880s they had no way of
processing silver locally and were only interested in the gold. There is a large quartz vein running through
the mine and that is where the gold and silver are found. There are places where you can still see gold
and silver embedded in the walls. You
have to look closely; that is what the flashlights are for, since the mine is
lit electrically. There is also some
“fool’s gold” (iron pyrite) – it is actually not that hard to tell the
difference. Real gold has a mellower
sheen than the brassy-looking pyrite.
The quartz was mined with shovel and chisel by candlelight, and
periodically the miners would take some of the rock they had freed outside to
see if it was gold. Some of the tools
they used were left in the mine. They
had simple candleholders made of a twisted piece of iron, with the candle
extending in both directions – the origin of the expression “burning the candle
at both ends,” which would have meant a very long, difficult mining day. As always with a mine, we were taken with the
sheer immensity of the task, given the primitive tools and lack of light. (In every mine and cave tour, at some point
the guide cuts the lights so visitors can experience total darkness. Ray then lit a candle, pointing out that the
miners would have used matches, not a Bic lighter, and stuck it into a crevice
in the rock.) Sometimes dynamite was
used to blow out an area of rock for further exploration. The miners would pack in the dynamite, light
the fuse and run like mad, to the outside or sometimes to a nearby tunnel,
until the explosion cleared.
Ray gave more details about the story of the mine. For many years, locals knew there was
something underground in the area, but were not sure what. At some point the land changed hands and several
geologists were sent in to investigate.
They took samples and concluded there was nothing worthwhile down
there. The mine still has tracks from
the rail cars used to transport the ore.
Several times the mine was investigated and the tracks were not
noticed. It turned out the experts were
wrong and a subsequent owner did mine quartz and gold for a time, and opened up
the enlarged mine tunnel for a tourist attraction. By this time it was the mid-1960s. Eventually Ray and his wife bought the
property and determined it should be strictly a historical site.
The area is still geologically active, of course, and there
are stalactites and stalagmites, as well as beautiful and sparkling areas where
the quartz is colored by other minerals leaching out of the rock – green for
copper, blue for zinc, red for iron ore, black for silver, and there are dark
green areas which are not minerals but mosses growing on the rock, likely due
to increased humidity and light caused by human activity. (It’s too bad that the photos of these colors
did not come out well due to the lighting in the mine. The colors were easily as pretty as some
caves we have visited.) There are places
where the owners have left gold and silver in the rock so visitors can see what
it might have looked like throughout the mine, and touch it.
At the point where the mine ends, about 500 feet from the
entrance, we were 900 feet underground.
It is not known who the miners were, when they were active or why they
stopped. Ray continues to research the
history of the mine and is working on a book about it. Based on carbon dating of trees and other
wooden supports left in the mine, which not only have been preserved but are
starting to petrify (turn to rock), he suspects it may actually date back as
far as the 1870s. As to why mining was
stopped, he suggested a number of reasons – partners falling out with each
other, death or injury (life expectancy of miners was very short due to lung
disease from breathing in rock dust for years at a time). The work does not appear to be quite as hard
as copper mining as we saw in the Upper Peninsula – in fact Ray estimates it
might only have taken 5-6 miners to clear out the area as it appeared in the
1960s, before the later enlargements for tourists – but still it was very
difficult, and though they did find gold, it may not have been enough to
warrant further intensive mining.
There is still gold and silver in the mine. The quartz vein still runs through the
mountain. But Ray believes the value of
those minerals, as well as the work that would be required to extract them,
would not be as great as the historical value of this unique piece of Western
mining history.
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