 Okay, well, my name is Glenn Wadstein and I moved up from the Salmon River, Sirius Bar, California. I don't know, it's fairly close by as far as the eagle flies. And I mined most of my life, mining played a part in my life as far as childhood. And anyways, after years of mining on federal ground, I had pretty well given up, got done fighting the Forest Service and all the other agencies to be, and gave up and moved up, took the last of the money I made mining and moved up to the Applegate of McKee Bridge, Oregon. And in doing so, I was going to make money, I was going to build a washing plant to mine gold with that would be cheap enough that a starting miner would be able to afford. And so I built this plant and we needed a place to prove it up. And fortunately, there was a group of people that were mining at the Sterling Mine, but they really weren't doing, they were just kind of playing. But it was a perfect setup for me to test my plant. Well, after testing the plant for the day, we shut off the plant and for the heck of it decided to pull the ripples and see if we had gotten anything just by chance. We pulled the ripples into low and behold, gold. And I'm talking nuggets as big as you thumb. So well, needless to say, that started it all. And I cut a deal with the property owner and we started to get serious about mining. I had a partner at the time, a guy by the name of George Reed. He's since passed one of the best partners I ever had. Him and I did the mining there for years. And then he eventually went his own way and the price of gold dropped. And so I just maintained the mine on a yearly basis to cover the property owner's taxes. So we'd mine for a couple of days a year and I'd take a loss. But as long as the property owner got his cut and it covered the taxes, it was fine. And the last year that we mined was 2001. And it would be, I think, early July 2001 was the last day of operation. It was just for a short couple of days and then after that the property owner sold off the property and I pretty well quit mining. So if she's going to fire off some of this, I'll kind of narrate these short little clips. And in mining, it isn't just panning or any of that. There's an awful lot involved. You have equipment that you have to maintain and fuel and weld. It's a whole big operation. And once you do mine, then you have to clean up the gold. You have to separate the gold from the sand and you've got to prep it for sales. So this shows earlier the plant, a couple of the girls we had working for us. And that's the plant that I built. This is very early on. This is sometime during the first month of operation. And this is the main box and then on each side is what you call undercurrents and that gets the fine gold dust. The main box there is able to swallow a rock 30 inches in diameter. And you don't want to subject gold dust to that kind of deal. So right where those second set of jets are is a punch plate that will drop out the sand and put it in the side currents so that the fine gold will have the chance to drop out. This is where we're right close to the Stirlingville cemetery and at one time there was a town called Stirlingville and it had quite a few people on it. I've heard in excess of 2,000 people were in that area and the town had a couple of saloons. It was your basic gold rush town. The Stirling mine had been in continuous operation since the 1800s on and off. The last main continuous operation was in the 1930s just before the Second World War. And oddly enough we ran into one of the guys that used to mine in those days and he was a big help that showed me what they did and where they had their plant set up. This shows the surrounding hills and the road. Actually it's a very beautiful area. Right a little bit, you see that where that road takes off to the left? Right over that little rise right here in front of you is where the mine would be right on the rise. Ah, Griffin Lane and Stirling Creek is the junction. This here shows the ore body and then the overburden that covers the ore body. The ore body being the river rock. And what we do is we take off the overburden, we lay the overburden off to the side, take out the ore body and they put the overburden back where the hole was. So here we are taking one of the, we had several cats here to push off the overburden. And once the ore body has been pulled out then the overburden gets spread back over to make a fill. And what we've done is we've took ground that was actually kind of a cliff that was surrounded by tailings and you couldn't do anything with it. And what we've done, we've dropped the elevation of the land to make it mesh with the tailings. We leveled the tailings and spread the overburden over the top of it and ended up with a big meadow. So. Do you have to free to a big filing with stream side people or somebody in order to? On private property there's a lot of different rules that you have to go by. And also the property owner is pretty strict on what is to be done and not done, you know. He sure doesn't want to be left with a mess. And that's never our intention anyways. The piece of ground that we're mining right there was, if you can imagine a piece of flat ground with a spine in the center of it surrounded by rocks, that's what it was. In fact, a good example was a couple of frames back you saw a little piece of ground that looked like a pyramid with a tree growing on top, that's what this would have been except it was bigger. That little pyramid was tailings. No, that little pyramid was the actual piece of ground that they didn't mine because they used it to hold a piece of equipment so they mined around it. The piece of ground that I'm mining right now, they had a mill set up on which is why they didn't mine it, but they mined all the way around it. So it was circled with tailings and the ground is worthless. You can't do any, you can't grow any, you can't build on it, it's nothing. So once we pulled out the overburden, then once we pulled out the ore body, then the overburden was spread over all of it, it was leveled and you ended up with a nice meadow. So you knocked down the tailings and that flattened them out and put overburden out. Exactly, yeah. And that's overburden you're pushing right there. Yeah, yeah, that's what's covering the channel. The channel is the ore body that we're after. The former channel. Yeah, yeah, the channel is a million years old. So where's the current creek channel is further down Hillford? Oh, it's the current creek channel is almost a quarter mile away. Now you can see the little individual undercurrents. Each little thing is adjusted to slow the water down to let the gold drop. And that little punch plate that let the gold drop through. And then those are the ripples that were made out of small railroad iron. They had to be very tough to be able to take the beating that went through it. So now? Yeah, I built all the parts of it and everything. At one point in my life I worked for a company that was up in the Arctic Circle. And they have a plant called a skid plate. And up in the Arctic Circle, everything that requires fuel has to be flown in and stuff. This particular plant has no moving parts. So it doesn't need to be fueled. It doesn't need to be maintained. You just put water in it and go. That's why they like it up there in the Arctic Circle. You don't, you know. And this big machine here will take the overburden or the tailings and it will spread it over area where we'd knock down the old time tailings and it spreads it foot-thick at a time. This is a drag line, drag line buckets. This particular drag line is feeding the plant. And you're now in the old river channel. No, that's decked ground. We peel off the old over channel and we stockpile it and we add water to it so that it melts it down. So did you bring water in and put it on trust? No. We built ponds. And in fact we built almost a three acre pond and it was fed by springs and it was of course seasonal. You know, it's dry in the summertime which works out fine because that's when we clean the pond. So that big hole there, you can see the cat started pushing dirt up there to stockpile for the next day's run. But this drag line here was feeding this stuff that had been fed the day before, it soaked in water overnight. It shows some of the ponds. Yeah, a 12 hour soak melted it down pretty good. You know, see, one drag line feeds the plant and the second drag line. In that picture right now I'm seeing two big pieces of equipment. Yeah. There's a cat just off the side. How many people are on the job right there, would you guess? Five. Two operators, two on the plant and one on the cat. So you need to get out of that five, six ounces a day in order to make this thing very even, right? Yeah. The idea is you have to move the ground and you also have to figure that when you're all done mining that things have to be cleaned up, you know? So that's figure in the cost. So you've got to make enough money so that your cost of yardage that you make a profit. And we made anywhere from a 15 to a 30% profit. But of course it's all dependent upon the world price of gold too. In the middle 90s, boy, the market just fell out. So this was 86 when the gold was at the ground, 1,200. I think this was 88, I believe, that might be 86. But yeah, gold was 460, something like that, an ounce. And you have to remember that $460 is a lot different than today's $460. Diesel was 35 cents a gallon back in those days. Yeah, it's going to show, the plant has to be fed a certain way. We'll show on that. Every time this particular piece of machinery is backing up over an area that we're making a fill, that at one time had been nothing but large rocks left over from the 1930s and the 1920s. Is that big piece of equipment that you haul it on the road that is more than 8 feet wide? It has to be low-bedded in anywhere it goes. You can see how runny the material is because it just came out of the sluice box. And it takes less than 12 hours for it to stiffen up. And then, as you can see, now he makes a fill. And he can put it up to a foot thick, and it looks like right there, he made an 8-inch pad. Yeah, the mind bought it, yeah. We started out with just a drag line and somebody's old little old cat. And as we progressed, we kept buying more equipment. Now, here's where we were talking about. The guy that runs this can in here, he's not beating up pieces of mud with it, he's feeding the plant. And the guy that's ready to drop the material in the plant, this has to last until the bucket comes back again. You do about a bucket about every 57 seconds. So the guy running the cannon has to make that material last until he comes back again. If that material is gone before that bucket comes back and there's nothing washing through the plant, the plant will clean itself out. And you don't want that to happen. What does that mean? So it will actually blow the gold that you've saved out. So it's very important the man that runs that cannon actually runs the layout. If he doesn't do a good job, we lose money. So basically that guy is the most important guy on the job. What are going into that lower pond? Do you recirculate it and use it to re-up the next? It's all recycled, absolutely. So there has to be a big pond somewhere in this place? Oh yeah, yeah. We just grab any bed from upriver or something. No, no, no, no. It's all recycled. Nothing gets, we, nothing leaves the mind. Well where is the gold, you say it cleans itself out, if it doesn't clean itself out, where is it sitting? How do you look at it? The gold will be trapped inside the loose box. That was our talisman. Yeah, I could tell. Yeah, that's our talisman. That's a good luck talisman. Good luck. Oh yeah, absolutely. So then, good luck. You're going to see that. All right. So here I am, I'm starting to, here I am, I'm cutting out the channel and I'm decking it next to where that drag line is digging. I'm decking it so that when they're done with the run that I can shove it in the hole, they can add some water while the crew is cleaning out the loose box. And then that stuff will sit for the next day. We should put in between five and seven hundred yards in that hole. And so here I am, I'm just putting it in there. Seven hundred yards? Yeah. That's a lot of material. The machine runs, the plant was designed to run about fifty-five yards an hour. It's about sometimes more, sometimes less. Now you would run this how many hours a day and then you'd sit for a night, right? Yeah. We tried to get no less than a six-hour run-in. You see, you have two hours worth of maintenance for all this equipment. This equipment is all very old. I mean, that cad pillar is older than I am. It was built in like 1952. And the scraper, the same thing with it, all the equipment except the plant was very old. So it required constant maintenance and we set aside two hours a day for maintenance and then two hours a day for cleanup and stuff like that. So actual operations was about six hours a day. Four hours? Yeah. And just you and your partner did that most likely? Well, the crew did the screening and stuff like that. The actual cleanup took place in the laboratory. I was a quartz vein that ran through the pit, that further up on the hill, about a half a mile away, the old timers had tunneled into it and extracted free gold out of it. In the pit, it turned into a sulfide telluride thing where it probably carried gold but not enough value for us to mess with. Quartz isn't a good sign? Quartz is a good host for gold. Yeah. I like to name all my old equipment. That old dozer there, his name was Christine. If any of you guys have read Stephen King, you would know. And then the one drag line that had the skull on it, that was Pam, and then the big rubber tire scraper that is old ugly. Were young women working on this, were they relevant related or did they just show up? No, this is what happened. We had some guys working for us and, you know, this would have to be equipment. You can't be fooling around. You have to be pretty serious about it. Well, these guys were showing up, they were smoking pot or drinking beer and stuff. You can't have that. So my partner and I got really angry and we said to hell with it, we fired all the men and hired women. Hey, they were great, man. My favorite... On time? Responsible? Thoughtful? Yeah. Yeah, I'll tell you. They were great for the work. We even had a deal where we helped them out with childcare. One of the ladies had children. And my favorite employee was Pam, she's a redheaded woman. She was the hardest working, great employee. Great employee. What did you usually do? I ran cat and then did all the errands, made supplies and stuff like that. I laid out the day's work, a foreman, and made my partner do all the physical labor. Is this mid-summer? I see people out there with tank tops. Oh yeah. Yeah. Generally, the last operation would be first week in July or last week in June, but usually by then we were off on our other jobs. Did you get shut down then because the springs dried up? Yeah, lack of water. And we wanted the springs to dry up because all the silt would start clogging the spring. And you can't handle wet silt. It's no way to handle it. So you have to let it harden up and then you can handle it. You mix it with your tailings and then spread it over a ground that had previously been mined. Yeah, it was a long day. Sometimes it was 12 and 14 hours. I lived in McKee Bridge, just a sterling creek, so it was about 20 minutes away. Not too bad. But yeah, it was long hours. And you got to do that when it's your own, you do anything you can to make it go. If there was a breakdown or something like that, man, it was time to break out the lights and start welding. No, we were really, really fastidious about anybody being in any kind of danger. Absolutely, absolutely death on that. In a former logger, I've experienced and there's no way that anybody take any chances whatsoever. Yes. Everything. What's that? Did you take this equipment with you? No, no, that equipment stayed straight there. Like I say, it was very old equipment. It was just patched together. I mean, we literally had to patch it every day to keep it operating. We didn't have a lot of money. This equipment literally came out of junkyards. We put it together and made it run. Did you notice a lot of variation one day to the next? What part of the thing that you were pulling material out of? Yeah. In two different ways. In values and in geology. There were sand deposits that didn't throw any, what they're doing here, those little square things, those are screens and he's screening the sand into that trash bucket and he's looking through for any little obvious nuggets and, you know, he would pick out nuggets and stuff. This fella here, you're going to see him in a minute, he's taking apart the undercurrents and washing those out and then all that will get screened and all the sand that gets screened is going to go through another process. So like I was saying, it's just not the mining. There's a whole lot more to go mining than there is the actual act of mining and you have to gear up for it if you're going to do it. So he's slide out of trade, everything was made, the whole plant was designed for ease of operation, ease to tear down, ease to put together. At first it was, but after a while it was just, yeah, I mean, I used to get excited when I find nuggets and stuff like that and then after a while it was just, oh good, you know, I made payroll, yay, or oh boy we can order up more fuel, you know, that kind of thing. He's unscrewing the screen and underneath that screen is a carpet and he's going to wash the carpet out. It's a special carpet designed to trap gold dust and we would trap gold dust so fine that if you put it on your finger and then wiped it off you would have a solid gold fingerprint. Yeah, well he's going through it looking for little nuggets. How big would those nuggets be? Some of them were, the biggest nugget we got was about the size of a golf ball, walnut golf ball, something like that. There were some bigger ones but they generally got tore up because of the equipment of lots of those. The gold that came out of Sterling Creek kind of looked like corn flakes. It was kind of flat, it was really pretty, very, very pretty, a lot of character to it. But back to the boring of the clean-out, the clean-up got to be so boring but every once in a while I'd get a coin and I got an 1849 dime once and the best thing I ever found was the 1793 Spanish Real. I got it in the sluice box there in Sterling Creek and I'm thinking to myself, what the heck is this? I took it down to Rogue Coin and this is what they told me. Back in the Gold Rush days silver was silver, didn't matter who or where it came from. So that's what you mean by a flake right there? Yeah, yeah. Now I'm going to show you something here that's me and my big belly. Now I'm going to show you something here, this is this special carpet. I'm going to take a little corner of this carpet and I'm going to pan it out. So anyways let me finish telling you about that Spanish Real. Back in the early days of the Gold Rush, most of the people on the West Coast were Spanish so that was a predominant coinage. And even after the Gold Rush for almost a decade, the money was predominantly Spanish. So it was not unusual to see a Spanish Real but also to get some context, the 1793 I think is the year that Marie Antoinette lost her head, is that correct I think? Yeah man, yeah. Okay, there you go, there's a hundred bucks worth of gold right there. On the left? Yeah, all that top there. It's pretty muddy. That's where the gold dust is. Yeah, I shook it up in that upper corner. And that's because of its weight. It lands different in demand when you slosh the water. Yeah, plus you know I've been panning for so long I know how to move the gold around. Some of these old timers, they could walk and nug it right out of the sand. I've never been able to do that but I've seen them do it. The giant corn planks? Now that's stuff on the left. You just throw that away or is that actually? No, no, that's all. That's all going to go to the laboratory. And you'll see what goes on there pretty soon. I've only been sterling gold versus river gold. You're going to see right now. You're going to see right now. This is the fine gold. Okay, and then she's going to go over. This is some of the coarse gold. You see that larger nugget there is about this, almost the size of a golf ball. Now that's river gold. That's what you'd find like in the Applegate River. You see how round that is and smooth that is? Yeah, it's been traveled. It's been beat up by the river and stuff like that. But you see how rough that is? That hasn't traveled hardly at all. That has formed right there, right literally on top of the sterling mine. That particular pan right there? The big nugget. Oh, that big nugget was an ounce and three-quarter, ounce and a half, ounce and three-quarter, something like that. Now this is the concentrating table. All that stuff that went through the screen that you asked about, it was in the pan. Well, that big trash can held about 200 pounds for the sand and there's no way I'm going to pan that. So we have a concentrating table and that's what this is. You put it on this table, it's about six feet long, it's about four feet wide, and it's tilted down into one side. And depending on how you do the tilt is how you recover the gold. And what we're doing here, you can see the blonde sand walking off to the side. But what you see here, here, this is all gold and this is the blonde sand that's walking off to the side. And you get eight lines that'll be running gold. And when you get lines like this running gold for 10 or 20 minutes, you're talking a powerful bunch of gold. Now this is all tailings here, but this bucket here is going to catch this stuff and the black sand. And that bucket is going to hold what we call supercons, super concentrated gold, and that goes into the laboratory. How much material did you start with at the front end when you're doing whatever that process is? Well, I came out of that trash can that you saw the guy screening into. Like five gallons worth of material? Oh, geez, about 200 pounds. So about this much at the bottom of that trash can. So maybe three, five gallon buckets. So by the time, and the timing for that process to be happening here, is that 20 minutes worth? Oh no, no, it probably takes, you feed it literally a spoon at a time. It probably takes an hour and a half to run those. So you see the table is shut off there so that you could see the gold dust and then the tailings. Well, what's running the shaker? It's a wheel that has a weight on one side. Okay, so you're just using an oscillating thing? Yeah. And was it electric or was it? This was, we rented a place to do this. This isn't on site. Yeah. We had to set up an actual laboratory complete with a furnace and all the chemicals and stuff that it takes to extract the gold. And you see quite a bit of gold running down there. It doesn't take much of that to make an ounce. So our cleanups were anywhere from just under a pound to two and a quarter pounds? A day per day. Well, we went by hour, so it would be for a 12 hour shift. So that would be a two day run, a two, six hour day run. So about a pound over two days. Yeah. How many days were you able to keep that up? From what? September through December through December? Well, no, mining generally started in December is when the spring started to be an active again. And until early June and on rare occasions. What's this? That's where the gold drops into. We're still getting black sand with it. Sure, okay. And that's what was built as the supercons, super concentrates. Now, one, two, three times. So the super concentrate is really the third pass? Well, the super concentrate. Yeah, basically. And then once we have the super concentrates, then that's what goes into the laboratory. And you'll see that, that'll be coming up. And that's then exposed to chemicals? No, not yet. Okay. Some will be, some won't be. Did you say you collected? Yeah, a little over a pound of gold. Six months ago? Yeah. Yeah? John, you got here late. I counted five, six pieces of equipment, five I've been running at a time. Well, I looked at that and I thought, overhead, jeez. Yeah, yeah. Oh, you're here to tell you. And like I say, it being old equipment, the expense of working on it daily, the allowance of welding rod, my God. The main operation ran for about four or five years. And then after the price of gold dropped, we just kept up on a yearly basis for a couple of days just to pay the property owners property tax. As long as we've paid the property tax, he was happy to let my equipment sit there. He got a cut of the gross. Yeah. I do, but I'm not going to say. Yeah.