Wire Gold

I had a question come in about Marker Bed and figured the response could make a great blog post that would wreak lethal damage upon a pair of fowl avians with one ballistically-launched projectile: supply an answer to their question; and offer up a shameless plug for my book.

Here’s the plug:

Marker Bed, my novel and geology primer is now available on Amazon. With heroes and a villain — and Xoix of course — the story takes place 300,000,000 years from now and documents the recognition of humanity in the fossil record. It is a must read for anyone who loves the earth and hopes that it will survive our tender mercies. If you haven’t already obtained your copy, I encourage you to do so now. Click here to go to the Amazon website and lock in your copy.

The question was fairly straightforward, and surely worth asking:

Much of Site Zero almost sounds autobiographical, with accounts of real events. What’s up with the wire gold you describe in upper Lost Woman Creek? Can native gold actually form wires and, if so, have you ever seen any?”

I’d like to start by confirming that yes: Site Zero is in large measure a retelling of one of my earliest projects — and one very memorable day — that I had back in the salad days of my career as an exploration geologist (green and freshly tossed). The description of the wire gold revisits a separate experience I had with an obscenely rich gold deposit, so it too was worth remembering (and sharing).

Here’s the answer:

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT! (This caution is for those of you who have yet to obtain a copy of Marker Bed — no cookies for you. If you’ve already read Marker Bed, THANKS! This post will hopefully add some relevant background information.)

Let’s start with the passages about wire gold from the narrative that most likely piqued their interest:

Even before the turn of the century when the placer potential had started to wane, exploration had begun for the lodes—the bedrock source of the precious metal. The gold had to come from somewhere, and the obvious place to look was upstream.

Prospectors rapidly located a swarm of high-grade pockets filling vuggy quartz veins in Lost Woman’s rugged headwaters, just below its confluence with the South Fork. Some of the native gold had been especially showy—masses of bright yellow wires filling voids in the quartz, which was itself held together by even more wires—and valuable specimens could be found in museums and private collections worldwide.

Sherman, set the WayBack Machine for late-Spring 1975 and take us to the northern end of the Collier Tunnel on Highway 199, just south of the Oregon/California border.

My partner and I were cutting, mapping, and sampling a geochemical survey grid, much like as described in Site Zero of Marker Bed. We were searching for copper in the rugged terrain of Broken Kettle Creek, immediately south and along the favorable horizon of the Turner-Albright massive sulfide copper-gold deposit. This was before any usable jeep trail had been established into the canyon, so we were forced to park along the highway in a wide spot just before the entrance to the tunnel.

Being the rookie on the two-man team, I was at the mercy of a 60-year-old miner/wanna-be geologist named Holly who — with a lot more experience than I had at the time — had obviously been put in charge.

Holly was a truly unique individual — calling him a crusty old fart would most likely be an insult to both crusts and farts. He was difficult to get along with on his best days, and the hour-long drive from Grants Pass to where we parked at the Collier Tunnel to begin our Bataan Death March into the expanding grid was usually pretty stressful.

He lived alone on a remote mining claim in the headwaters of Foots Creek; a tributary to the Rogue River between Grants Pass and Medford. As such, he was out of practice regarding interpersonal relationships, and had some pretty grim personal hygiene. He was also an absolute magnet for yellow jackets, which surely contributed to his rank fear of them — the “Bees on Patrol” scene in Site Zero could have easily involved him. Holly fancied himself a professional and expert miner, and he possibly was — as difficult as he could be, I did learn a hell of a lot about practical mining from him. He even gave me a tour of his underground mine on Foots Creek, which dated back to the late-1800s.

Holly’s workings followed a six- to ten-inch-wide calcite vein that had been injected along the faulted contact between basalt on the hanging wall and gabbro on the foot. The vein was fairly steep, dipping at about -70° from the horizontal, and had a smattering of gold wires within the calcite (which is apparently what had prompted the old-timers to develop the vein in the first place). But Holly wanted more, and continued to drift along it in the hopes of finding a pay streak worth his time and effort.

One Monday morning he was extra twitchy on our hour-long transit to Broken Kettle Creek. Nothing I could do or say prompted him to share what was chewing at him, and we had an even surlier drive (and workday) than usual. Same on Tuesday and Wednesday, and by Thursday we were both pretty sick of his attitude (I know I was). Holly was also just bursting with the news, which likely contributed to the ultimate loosening of his tongue.

It was quite the story…

Over the weekend, he’d started following the vein downward from the floor of the mine (called a “winze” in miner’s parlance), and was drilling into it when he hit a void (called a “vug” in GeoSpeak). Well, running into an empty spot in the ground usually indicates that something unusual had transpired, which sparked his interest. So… he backed off and drilled several additional shallow holes down to the same depth and then, utilizing a very light charge of “prill” — a mixture of ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel — popped the top off of the vug to see what was inside.

Oh my!

He’d started by scooping out thirteen POUNDS of pure gold wires that filled the void, which was about the size of a soccer ball. Holly had next drilled and shot the surrounding “country rock” and recovered the edges of the void itself, which were even more remarkable than the loose wires, if that was possible: pure white calcite held together by 10-gauge golden wires, with clumps and masses of more gold attached to the edges. It was all very impressive.

The loose wires were certainly a worthy find, but the world-class sample was a chunk of calcite laced with gold, with a mass of interconnected golden wires the size of a turkey egg sticking out of it.

God, I wanted that specimen! While I begged and pleaded, Holly was inflexible and wouldn’t take less than $500 dollars for it. Any temptation to waver on my part was moot. Susie would have killed me on the spot: she was agreeably unemployed, I was pulling down $40 per fourteen-hour day, and we were living on bean burritos and rubber chicken.

Holly was driving an old beater Datsun pickup (this was before Datsun changed their name to Nissan), with a busted rear window and no door locks. The gold — all of it — was hidden in a shoe box and shoved under the driver’s seat (due to The Magic of Density, thirteen pounds of gold is smaller than a can of Pepsi). He was too scared to leave it in his cabin.

Anyway, Holly’s box full of gold sat there in his unlocked Japanese pick-up on a turnout along Hwy. 199 while we were hours away on the ridge south of Broken Kettle Creek for five days a week while Holly fretted — no wonder he was fit to be tied!

Anyway, a couple weeks went by, and two Monday morning’s later Holly arrived in Grants Pass to pick me up in a much calmer frame of mind. “You must have sold your gold,” my astute mind determined. “Yes, I did,” he sheepishly replied.

But all was not bleak. The official, non-black market price of gold had been fixed at $35 per Troy ounce until 1971 when the United States was compelled to abandon the gold standard due to inflationary pressures leading to an acute shortage of the metal (the sequence of events was called the “Nixon Shock”). Since that fundamental shift in U.S. monetary policy, the spot price for an ounce of gold had continued to skyrocket, and by 1975 had reached the staggering price of $160 per ounce.

So, Holly had disposed of his burden. Now a rich and happy boy — and calmer to be sure — he was still looking for something to maintain his interest on the weekends. He continued sinking on the vein and the following Sunday ran into an 8-pound pocket; resulting in another box under the seat, more days of angst, and yours truly began to realize that working with Holly was never going to get any easier.

Lather, rinse, repeat; but that was the last pocket he found (or at least admitted to). Life — and the trip down Hwy. 199 — returned to its normal crusty and stinky routine.

I would very much like to be able to report that our relationship improved after this, but such was not the case. As I look back on these two months of my life, I comfort myself by saying that at 24 years old, I really had no idea what it was like to be 65, much less 75! I understand where he was coming from so much better now than I did then.

I also wish I’d held up the local 7-Eleven to get the $500.

But no matter any of my personal introspections and regrets — and to circle back to the original query — wire gold definitely exists, and yes, I’ve seen some.