Winter Comes to Goldfield.

Winter comes to Goldfield.

A couple days later, John told Linc the butcher had called and said
the pork was ready to pick up. Did he or Lucas want anything from
town. Linc told him that he never did get that haircut he went after
the other day. He would take Gramps and go into town himself. He
could pick up the meat. John said good, because there were a few
other things he had to do before the snows came, and he would help
Trudy arrange the meat still in the freezers to make ready for this
years meat.
Linc wanted to go to town, because he had to go to the dump, then go
to the retreat, get the garbage, then on to town.
At the dump station, Linc pulled off to the side out of the way and
went to the retreat and got the two big bags of garbage and brought
them back. After putting them into a bin, they went on into town to
the barber shop.
The barber and Lucas were old friends, and he gave Lucas a bad time
for letting his hair grow so long. Lucas said, 'Maybe I'll just let
it grow out more and grow a beard as well". The barber agreed he
might look good with a beard, but he would have to braid his hair or
it would always be in his face. He told Lucas he was lucky to have
hair, when so many older men are bald or almost bald. After the
barber shop, they went on over to Annie's café, and got some lunch.
Gus came in and saw them and sat with them. They talked about the
Chinese mess, then Gus told him that the home office had been looking
at some property down south, almost at the border. He told Linc he
would know more about it later. They may even have him check it out
for them.
Lunch over, they went to the butcher shop to get the pork. The butcher
told Linc the main ranch had already came in and got their share.
Lucas always raised three pigs, two for the main ranch and one for the
farm. The main ranch always provided a young beef for them every
year. They would be having them butchered a bit later. They carried
the boxes of frozen meat out and put it in the truck and went back to
the farm.
After unloading the boxes, Linc went to the office and went on Google
to try and see what property down by the border that might interest
the head mine office. He knew there was good gold at an old ghost town
called Kawich, because Gramps said he and his old prospecting partner
went over there, but came back to Goldfield, because the state was
going to turn the area into a wilderness area.. He looked around
Coalburg and Beatty both. There could be gold in those areas, or
maybe silver even, Well who knows. The main office had heard
something to whet their curiosity.
The snow came and blanketed Goldfield. Real heavy in places. Linc
wondered if the cabin was doing okay. Since the metal roof did a good
job of shedding snow, it sometimes could pile up along the outside
walls all the way right to the edge of the roof. Gramps said he had
that happen the last winter he spent up there before he was married.
Well they would just have to wait til spring to find out.
Linc loved it up there in the mountains in the summertime. He even
had thoughts of building a larger more sturdy cabin up there. The
kids always wanted to come over and spend two weeks there in the
summer. It was still something he thought about. He still had the
French money and the diamonds, so he was not without any means of
funding things. He also wanted to enlarge the farm house here in
Goldfield.
After a couple of weeks the snow had melted some, so Linc drove into
town to pick up the beef that was all cut up and ready to put in the
freezer. He got everything on the long list Trudy had given him too.

Three months finally passed. Linc did take Lucas and Angel to the
retreat several times a month during the winter. This was easy to
do, because he would go to Lucas's room and go from there and spend
three or four days, before coming back to the farm. It sure did make
the winter more bearable and made it go much faster. Lucas said he
wished he could have done ths when Grandma was alive. She would have
loved it.
One day, Gus called and said the main office had decided to look into
some old mining claims on the desert not far from Death valley. He
wondered if Linc was interested in scouting the area out. The old
mines were mostly silver, but a man new to prospecting, had been going
through the old tailing piles and retrieving samples of ore that
contained sulfides that were heavy with gold in some areas. He had
brought the samples to an assayer to be assayed, who told a guy at
the main office. The prospector saw the sulfides and thought that it
was raw gold. He was not interested in opening an old mine to get a
tiny bit of gold from ore that had to be smelted. The main office
wanted to use a geologist who was not known in the area to check the
old mine tailings out a long with other areas that might contain
sulfides as well. Linc said he was willing to take on the job. Gus
said he would call him back in a couple of days and let him know if it
was a real go ahead.
Linc told the rest of them at supper that night, that he may have a
job lined up out of town pretty soon. He would know in a day or two.


A week later, Gus called and said that he had the office book him for
a weeks stay at a pet friendly motel in Beatty, all expenses paid and
gave him the co-ords for the area the head office was interested in.
That should give him plenty of time to check things out. The next
morning, he and Angel drove on down to Beatty and checked into the
motel They spent the rest of the day looking around Beatty to see all
of the amenities they had to offer.
Early the next morning they drove out to the first locations on the
list. After looking around for quite a while, Linc could not find
one thing that would even be an asset to a mine company, and went over
to another not far away. Driving out on the desert, he did see a few
tailing piles from old vertical digs. None of them very large but a
couple did have a few chunks of ore with some sulfides in them. They
could be explored more with some equipment to dig with, since these
were all hand dug holes. He marked the co-ords down, and place a
stake with striped flagging to mark them. Driving out farther onto
the desert, he came across an old stone cabin that had no roof, and
was partly fallen down in places. There was an old beat up jeep
parked by it. Now that's strange, he thought, because he could not
see anyone around. There was an old partly collapsed head frame by a
pile of tailings. Pile wasn't real large so the dig couldn't be
really deep he thought. He and Angel went over to it to check it out.
He tried to look in, but it was too dark down in it. Angel looked
down too, then barked. All at once Linc thought he heard someone. He
called out. Asked if there was someone in the hole. A man yelled
out. " Help me, help me. The ladder has broke and I can't get out of
here. I've been down here for two days. Help me". Linc asked him how
deep it was, and was told, about a hundred feet or so. Linc told him,
he had no ropes or anything but he would call for help to the search
and rescue outfit. Linc called them and gave them the co-ords and
general direction he came in to the area. They promised to get some
men out there with ropes as soon as they could get them together.
Might be an hour or so before they could get there. In the meantime,
Linc took a skein of para-cord , tied a bottle of water to it and
lowered it to the man in the hole.
About forty five minutes later a big van drove up and men jumped out,
bringing ropes with them. It didn't take them long to rig up a
harness to drop down the hole fro the man to get into so they could
pull him out. They set up a device with a pully, passed the rope over
it, dropped I into the hole and had the guy out in a matter of
minutes. The team leader then gave him a lecture about going into
vertical shafts alone, and with out safety devices. The man thanked
them profusely and promised never to be so stupid ever again. Linc
also thanked them for responding so quick to his call.
After the team left, Linc and the man sat down by the old cabin and
talked, The man claimed he had been prospecting this area for quite
some time. He had found the sulfide bearing ore, but thought it would
never provide enough gold to make it worthwhile mining. Linc agreed
with him about that. Linc knew that it would take a lot of ore, and
it would have to be high grade or it wouldn't pay out. He told the
guy he best look for silver instead since it looked like that was what
the older prospectors were looking for. The guy said he knew of an
area Down closer to death valley he had looked at years ago, but he
never got back down there. He said he did find silver ore, but was
more interested in finding gold. Linc wished him good luck, and went
back to Beatty.
The next day, Linc drove back out where the old rock cabin was. He
wanted to check out the tailings from the shaft where the old
prospector fell into. , He picked up a few of the rocks around the
pit and broke them open. There was a definite smell of sulfides, but
if there was enough to mine is another question. He took samples and
marked the cords in his records,and took pictures. If the mining
company was interested, they could do some test drilling to find out
just how much sulfides were in the vicinity.
Next he drove on across the desert to some low lying mounds he could
see off in the distance. He came to a ditch that was too deep for his
truck to cross so he took off on foot over to the largest mound. In
the ditch he found a large chunk of silver bearing ore. He broke it
open and there was a very strong smell of sulfides. He held the rock
down to Angel, and said, " smell this girl, this is what we are
looking for". She sniffed, then sneezed. Linc had to laugh at that.
So she thought this was something to sneeze about. Well we will see
he thought, as he walked on over to the mound.
Right away he could tell this was a small blow out. He picked around
in it and uncovered silver ore, along with some rusty quartz. Strong
sulfide smell here. Tool a lot of samples, then covered the hole he
had dug, flagged it good. Took more pictures of the area. This was
the best find he had made so far. There were a couple of other
places not too far away that he got samples, co-ords, and pictures of
when he flagged and reordered them. He felt pretty good about this
day. He had found three very likely places that the mining company
could be interested in, if they were looking for new territory to
expand into.
It was getting late afternoon when he decided to go on back to the
truck, and back to town.
It was almost dark when he got back to the motel. As he pulled into
his unit, he could see there was a new party moving in next to him
that was celebrating a recent wedding and they were very drunk and
noisy. He decided to take the tote, with the sample bags and notes,
into the unit with him. He was tired and didn't want to have to put
up with that bunch. Besides he was hungry as well. He took the tote,
his, notebook and stuff in the tote and he and Angle went to the
retreat. He wanted to just get away from it all right now.

To be continued