Buy Photo
53 Photos
Gold mining at Rattlesnake Canyon
I tossed and turned Tuesday night — amped up about a gold mining trip to the High Desert the next day.
Longtime prospector Joe Falcone, 69, a member of First Class Miners, a Yucca Valley-based mining club, offered to take me on a trip to one of the group's gold mining claims at Rattlesnake Canyon, located east of Big Bear Lake.
I got to Joe's house in Desert Hot Springs around 9 a.m. Wednesday. One of his rooms was filled with mining equipment. Joe recently moved his locksmith business into his home, so a multitude of keys filled a wall of his house. A framed pilot's license was displayed nearby.
A very large portrait of Jesus adorned a living room wall. A Bible, sitting on a kitchen counter, was opened to the chapter of Exodus.
I piled into the shotgun seat of Joe's Ford F-150, while his friend, Ann D'Amico, settled into the back for the hour-and-a-half journey. The truck was packed with mining gear and supplies and tons of food for a picnic lunch.
Joe and Ann met in 1997 at the Spa Resort Casino in Palm Springs where she dealt Blackjack and Joe dealt dice at the craps and roulette tables.
I also discovered he'd had an eclectic career, beginning as a police officer in 1967 at the age of 21. It ended after he suffered a personal tragedy.
"I was a policeman in Los Angeles before I got shot. ... I got shot in a liquor store robbery," he said, then quickly changed the subject to how he became a miner.
"A guy took me prospecting and I found a gold nugget — a little teeny gold nugget in my gold pan — it's like I fell in love," he said. "It's like a love affair. Once you catch gold fever, it's all over."
Joe, who began mining in 1999, started a business a couple of years ago — Gold Prospecting Adventures — "I just wanted to lock up the name," he said, but recently started advertising and took his first customer out to Rattlesnake Canyon a couple of weeks ago.
"The guy's hooked," Joe said. "He went out and bought about $2,000 worth of gear — a dry washer, all the equipment. Getting people involved in gold prospecting — especially families — is so exciting. I mean, you get a 6-year-old who finds a piece of gold in a gold pan and you see the expression on his face — it's all worth it.
"People who prospect for gold on a consistent basis aren't normal," he said. "We are a breed of our own."
About 200 people are in the club, which files its mining claims through the Bureau of Land Management. The cost to file a claim is $185. The club, founded in 1995, now has seven mining claims. Two were acquired just last year in the Ord Mountains near Barstow.
The others are in and around Morongo Basin, including Humbug and Lucky Nugget in the Dale Mining area east of Twentynine Palms.
"It costs $40 a year to join the club, and if you don't get your $40 back every year — you're not prospecting,"
Not long into the road trip, Joe said the real charm of mining was the journey itself — not the attainment of the elusive pot of gold.
"You don't go gold prospecting to find gold," he said. "You go gold prospecting to enjoy Mother Nature and to find out about yourself, because there are situations that pop up where you can't solve the problem; you're not going home."
When we stopped for gas in Morongo Valley, I asked Joe about the details of the shooting incident.
He obliged, describing the scene outside the liquor store the day that changed his life forever.
"I had a kid in the car that was out of the academy for three days and I rolled on this call, pulled across the street and this guy comes out with a shotgun and, 'Boom!' the pellets bounced off the floor, catch me in the legs and I go down. So I tell him, 'Get on the radio, call for an ambulance — officer needs help.' This guy came across the street — he opened the double-barrel shotgun and put two more rounds in it and he was coming across the street to kill me.
So I rolled over on my side, took my revolver out and I took his life. Am I happy about it? No. But it was either him or me."
After eight years as a police officer, he'd seen and experienced enough.
"I took a one-lump-sum retirement and I bought a house for my wife and I called it a career."
Life goes on
Settling back into the truck after filling the tank, he said, "My life hasn't been boring by a long shot."
Joe lived in Cabo San Lucas for about five years, beginning around 1987. He'd had a lucrative career as a dice dealer in Nevada — where the tips were plentiful — and parlayed this money into the establishment of a pizza parlor, Falcone's, near Baja Cantina.
As we turned left from Highway 62 toward Pioneertown, Joe gave us a rundown of our planned excursion.
First stop, Vaughn Spring, elevation 5,500 feet.
"It's a natural-fed tank from a spring that's elevated higher than the tank. A lot of residents don't have water back there — or electricity — so they go up there to fill up their water containers. It's a natural artesian well — tapped with pipe. The storage tank holds about 3,000 gallons and it's been there forever."
From there, we'd head up to the Red Cabin Claim, so named because an old homestead-style red cabin — built around the 1950s — is the prominent piece of architecture in the area. The wooden structure sits on top of a mesa in Rattlesnake Canyon.
"It was totally thrashed two years ago — you wouldn't want to spend anytime in that house at all," Joe said. "The club members took it upon themselves — including me — to refurbish this. New roof, new windows, storm shutters, 50-gallon drum heater with stovepipe. We found an old 1930 gas stove we put into the kitchen. Two weeks ago, we camped in this place."
If a disaster were to strike, this is where Falcone and many of his fellow miners would seek refuge. They'd leave their homes and head for the hills.
"God forbid a small nuclear device or an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) bomb in Los Angeles (goes off), that's where a lot of us are going to survive — up there," he said. "You want to get out of the cities. There's going to be mass looting, rioting — just like in Baltimore — only on a bigger scale because people are going to be hungry after a couple of weeks and the markets are out of food — and there's no water. Now, we have water up there, we have game up there — we have deer, we have bear."
Joe stopped for a moment to issue a warning about the wildlife.
"That's one thing, don't go too far," he said. "I have a weapon (Sig Sauer .380-caliber, semi-automatic). I'll put on a shoulder holster when we get into Rattlesnake Canyon. We don't have any problems with bears except for a couple of times and if you crank a couple of rounds off in the air, they'll dissipate — they'll leave. There's quail up there, there's dove up there, there's everything to survive — all you need is the knowledge. Our club ... if something really goes haywire in this country, if we're under martial law, we'll go up there — the ones who can.
"We will form a government up there ... because we're going to need three-man parties to go out there and hunt for game everyday, for deer, because after the food runs out, you're going to have to eat off the land. I'm talking about survival and these are things to think about, but we never do, because we're so blessed in this country — we have food. How fortunate we are."
Joe, who encountered a rattlesnake during a recent trip to its namesake canyon, issued another wildlife warning.
The rattler came so close to Joe — the run-in occurred when he took the aforementioned man on his first prospecting trip — he shot the snake in the head with his back-up gun, an American Arms .22-caliber mag, five-shot Derringer.
Joe also carries a Marine K-Bar knife, sheathed in a leather holder emblazoned with his name.
"The first thing you do when you hear a rattlesnake go off, you freeze. Don't move your head and look for him. Just freeze and get your bearings, try to find out where he is, how close he is and he's going to go the other way. And he can't strike you or bite you unless they're coiled. If they're laid out, you've got a 75 percent chance of just getting out of there. But if they're coiled and you try to move, they're going to be quicker than you.
While Joe won't disclose the dollar value of the gold he finds each year in the mining claims, he pulled in around $750 worth of "color"— that's what the real miners call the gold stuff — a couple of weeks ago. He supplies a jeweler who pays him $100 under the spot price of gold, whose value is close to $1,200 an ounce right now.
"I found a pocket of almost nine ounces six or seven years ago," he said.
When asked, he did venture a guess at the value of gold the club members have gathered throughout the 20 years of its existence.
"You can only estimate," he said. "Since the club was founded, it has to be in millions of dollars of gold found."
Joe supplements his locksmith income through his gold-gathering efforts.
"It sure beats playing poker, where I don't have to take any bad beats," he said, laughing. D'Amico, in the back seat, nodded, knowingly, in agreement.
"What's a 'bad beat,' I asked," displaying my ignorance of card game lingo.
"A bad beat here would be a flat tire … or a rattlesnake bite," he said. "A bad beat in the gaming industry is when you're sitting with a pair of pocket kings, the guy next to you has a pair of pocket aces, and you go all the way to the river with him — which is the last card in '(Texas) Hold 'em' — and you turn over and you think you've got the pot and bam! You get snapped off. That's a bad beat."
He's had a long run of luck finding gold, "in them thar hills."
Not so much at the poker table as of late.
"I don't play as much as I used to — it's like a relationship that's gone bad. You lose your love for the game, right, Annie?" he said, looking back in the rearview mirror.
"Yes, Joe — bad beats are everywhere," she said. "The cards have no heart."
The last of the paved road turned into dirt, and the three of us were about to start the slightly rugged journey through Rattlesnake Canyon.
We stopped several times to take in the view. Trees, scorched by the 2006 Sawtooth Complex Fire, stood branchless on the mountainside. Nearby, a cactus was blooming. Further down, a singular orange poppy stood at the side of the road.
Joe pointed through the windshield to a high mountain with a triangular-shaped top.
"That's Tip Top Mountain," he said. "There are a lot of mining claims up there. The gold flows north and south. On this side of Rattlesnake Canyon, the source comes from that mountain. Everyone's trying to find the Mother Lode up there, but it's such rough terrain."
As we traveled further down the dirt road, groves of yucca trees — taller and fuller than I'd ever seen — appeared all around. Desert brush and grasses were interspersed among the yuccas.
"There's a cattle rancher that leases grazing rights in Rattlesnake Canyon and he always keeps about 50 head of cattle back here," Joe said. "They graze on the grass. They take them out of here in the fall, before winter hits. He dropped them off about three weeks ago.
"Will we see the cattle today?" I asked, enthusiastically.
"We might, if we're lucky ... they'll graze all through here," he said. "I'll take you to a place where the main watering tanks are for the cows."
Twenty seconds later, I exclaim, "There's something right there. What's that?"
A white, speckled steer peeked out from behind a tree near the dirt road. Then I moved to my left and suddenly, there were more steers, a cow and a couple of calves staring at us.
Cattle graze under yucca trees at Rattlesnake Canyon east of Big Bear Lake Denise Goolsby/The Desert Sun
We saw many more heads of cattle on our way to Vaughn Spring, where Joe set up a table, with linens, and served a scrumptious Italian lunch. Soon after, he pulled the mining equipment: a drywasher — a small, motor-driven piece of machinery that sifts heavier materials from lighter materials — a shovel; five-gallon Home Depot bucket; two plastic mining pans; and two tubs — large and medium.
Since the washes in the area are bone dry, the only source of water comes from the gravity-fed well. The tubs were filled with water. The three of us dug up dirt and fed it through the drywasher. After the dirt was sifted, all that remained were the heavier materials. Gold is a heavy metal. Joe took the remains, dumped them in a pan, dipped it in the large tub and demonstrated how to swish the water around to remove all the rest of the lightweight stuff. When all that remained at the bottom of the pan was blackish iron ore, he moved to the small tub and panned the last of the material.
We spent a couple hours mining — we didn't find any gold this time around — visited the quaint red cabin, examined animal tracks, observed colorful birds in flight, and soaked in the beauty of the day, and the brilliant blue, cloud-swept skies.
Joe was absolutely right. You don't go gold prospecting to find gold. You go gold prospecting to enjoy Mother Nature and to find out about yourself, and, I'll add, to learn about incredibly interesting people whose paths you are fortunate to pass.
No comments:
Post a Comment