Reopening a Mine That Didn’t Pan Out

With two fuses already sizzling through the granite toward sticks of dynamite, Pat Chiodo ignited a third, then strolled toward the light at the end of the gold mine.

Outside, a handful of dirty miners and muckers, and Ralph Pray, owner of the Falcon mine, waited with the headlamps on their hard hats still shining in the afternoon sunlight--looking as if they had no idea that the gold rush is history.

Prospectors first staked the Falcon claim in 1877. Now Pray and the men working for him are blasting through rock, digging past cave-ins, shoring up tunnels, carving trails, and assaying ore samples in an effort to get the mine running again. If they succeed, this small mine just east of the Angeles Forest Highway--halfway between Tujunga and Palmdale--will become the only active underground gold operation in the San Gabriel Mountains.

The Mountain Shudders

All that stands in their way, the miners say, is a few tons of rubble. And, until recently, the U.S. Forest Service.

Wabooom! The mountain shuddered, and tiny avalanches of sand jittered down the steep hillside. Waboom! Waboom! Chiodo grinned.

In tangles of poison oak and manzanita surrounding the Falcon mine, rusting equipment, abandoned ore mills, a cable tram and the charred remains of a cabin illustrate a story familiar to every sixth-grader in California.

It’s not widely known, though, that the first official gold strike in this state was made in Placerita Canyon, just west of Newhall, six years before the “Eureka” discovery that brought the ‘49ers storming to Northern California.

In the next few years, gold and silver were subsequently discovered from Castaic to Lytle Creek, historian John W. Robinson reports in his “Mines of the San Gabriels.”

“Prospectors rushed into the San Gabriels at every rumor of bonanza, tearing up streams and hillsides in their frantic search for wealth,” he wrote. “The scars of many of these ventures are still visible today.”

The local rush even produced its own rowdy, ramshackle boom town. Called Eldoradoville, it sprang up on the banks of the San Gabriel River, then washed away in the floods of 1862--”shacks, whiskey barrels, groceries, beds, roulette wheels, sluices, long toms . . . “ and all, Robinson writes. That’s about the time gold mining in the San Gabriels began to fade into history.

Although prospectors in the Angeles National Forest still pan or dredge gold from streams, or extract the metal incidentally in other mining operations, various government officials were unable to name an active underground gold mine in the forest. About 74% of the land within the forest has been withdrawn from mineral exploration.

Pray expects to begin the gold production phase of his operation at the Falcon Mine next June.

Now 60, Pray was a teen-ager when he got his first whiff of gold dust. Born and raised in a well-to-do family in New York State, he was 18 when wanderlust struck and he set out hitchhiking west.

“I wanted to make money, and to do it in a tough, Western, manly way,” he said. In Salt Lake City, a recruiter for the Castle and Prince mining company offered him a one-way bus ticket to Pioche, Nev. He accepted.

‘Awestruck by It All’

“I was awestruck by it all,” Pray said of his arrival in the wind-swept world of red dirt and sagebrush.

His unofficial welcoming committee was a man who stood on the outskirts of town, badly beaten and crusted with blood. “A floater,” in the local vernacular, the guy had blown his grubstake and thus fallen from grace with the town’s hookers and casinos owners.

When he got to the mining camp outside town, the sheriff was there, “trying to find the guy who’d blown a big hole in the side of his car,” Pray said.

He quickly discerned that the camp, populated mainly by ex-cons, wasn’t much like Troy or New Rochelle.

“It was tough,” he said. “At least it seemed pretty tough to a kid wearing a green bow tie and a prep school blazer.”

As a mucker--”the guy with the shovel”--Pray earned $7.20 a day, working an eight-hour shift that started with a ride in a metal cage 600 feet into the mountain.

“It was noisy and dirty and folks were packed together,” he recalled.

But after leaving Pioche, Pray continued to work in mines and prospect throughout the West.

Arriving in Santa Fe, N.M., he began hunting for turquoise.

“I’d look for ant hills, and if the ants had brought up little turquoise chips, I’d know to mine there,” he said.

Pray prospected aggressively. “I carried a side arm. People just didn’t want to argue too much. By the time I was 22, I had all the mines in New Mexico. I controlled the turquoise market,” he said, flashing a gold ring containing a big hunk of the blue-green stone.

At 26, Pray enrolled in the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, and in 1965 he earned a Ph.D. in metallurgical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. Since then he’s worked as a miner and consultant “all over the Western U.S. and Alaska, South America and Africa.”

Based in Monrovia

Presently, home for Pray and his wife is an apartment they built in a rambling, white, brick warehouse-turned-assayer’s laboratory in Monrovia. The sleeping bags, ice chests, lanterns, shovels, and assorted lumps of rock scattered through the building hint at the way Pray and the five people working for him live.

Once a week now for the past 14 months, Pray and one or more of his assistants load up his Ford pickup--equipped with four-wheel drive, an electric winch and a shotgun mounted next to the shift column--and head off to the desert or mountains.

New gadgetry, such as a “very low-frequency electromagnetic detector,” tuned to the frequency used by the U.S. submarine fleet, helps them detect ore bodies--which are natural conductors and thus disrupt the transmissions.

But they also chip away at rock samples with traditional rock hammers and scout for the sort of geological formations that suggest ore or mineral deposits. From time to time, Pray or an assistant will strap on a parachute harness and be lowered by the truck’s winch down into an abandoned mine shaft, where they encounter everything from owls and bats to rattlesnakes and an occasional burro.

With new mining technologies and higher prices for gold, abandoned mines can sometimes be made profitable again, Pray said.

If a site looks promising, he stakes a claim, driving white plastic posts into the ground at each corner of a 600-by-1,500-foot plot, then filing the requisite $5 fee with the county.

Rife With ‘Magicians’

California is rife with “half-assayers,” or “magicians,” who for a fee will tell prospectors and mine owners whatever they want to hear about the potential of their claims, Pray contends. But he lists himself among the “four or five legitimate assayers in the southern part of the state.”

His clientele includes other prospectors, an electronics firm that recently sent him bags of computer chips to see if the gold in them could be profitably reclaimed, and folks who want to make sure their gold coins haven’t been filed down or hollowed.

Pray said he currently owns a tungsten mine near Lake Isabella, a silver mine in Riverside County, a manganese mine near Blythe, and a silica mine near Barstow, as well as several “formerly productive” gold mines in the Panamint Mountains west of Death Valley. But since he bought it with a $50,000 note (payable on initial production), the Falcon gold mine in Granite Mountain, has been the center of his attention.

“All of a sudden, I found myself the owner of a mine with the whole Department of Agriculture up against me,” Pray said.

Christine Rose, a district ranger who inherited the continuing Falcon Mine controversy, said the U.S. Forest Service (an arm of the Department of Agriculture) has no desire to stand in Pray’s way. The fat folders of Falcon Mine documents on file at the Tujunga Ranger station are merely evidence that times have changed since the freewheeling days of the gold rush, and that the Forest Service is protecting the resources of a more vigilant public, she said.

Earlier this year, the government dropped its challenge to the validity of the Falcon claim. But the Forest Service still demands that Pray meet various requirements, such as posting a $1,200 bond to ensure that the site be returned to its natural state if and when Pray abandons it.

Volleys of Letters

As various volleys of letters attest, however, Pray feels the bond and other paper work are unnecessary at best and attacks on free enterprise at worst.

Speaking anonymously, one Forest Service official said: “I think Pray is the kind of man who thinks all government is a form of harassment, and we’re just another arm of the government.”

Pray disputes that charge--”I was a government employee (a federal engineer-assayer in Alaska) for five years, and I loved it.”

Forest Service officials say that despite what they perceive as Pray’s cantankerous response to their demands, he is now doing everything required, from posting the bond to posting proper warning signs around the mine.

Before long, Pray and the miners working for him say they’ll prove their contention that there’s still enough gold in them thar hills to make a profit.

“We’re seeing gold here already,” Frank Grossman, 39, said as he sat outside the Falcon’s main adit, swirling the last drops of a muddy mixture of crushed ore from the mine in a plastic gold pan.

Around the pan’s rim, a faint line of brilliant speckles glistened.

“Notice how it looks bright yellow even in the shadows. The other reflective surfaces, the pyrites, the mica, they need sunlight to shine. This gold is 18K approximately,” he said.

Bearded, and decked out in flannel shirt, “Can’t Bust ‘Em” jeans and suspenders, Grossman looks like a throwback to another era. In a way, he is.

Although he’s currently helping Pray work the Falcon mine “for wages,” he spends his free time prospecting--hiking up creek beds and along ridgelines in the San Gabriels with a rock hammer and gold pan.

‘It Takes Money’

As a symbol of the possibilities, Grossman carries a flat, gnarled nugget in his wallet, and vials of the very fine lode gold that is more likely to be found in a mine like the Falcon. So far, though, he only earns enough to live day by day, sleeping in his car.

“It takes money to get into a mountain now, and that’s something I don’t have,” he said. “But there’s bound to be an outcropping (of gold-bearing quartz) around here somewhere that everyone missed. I’ll find it someday.”

Pat Chiodo, who does the blasting at the Falcon, has been in mining for 15 years. “I’m a pilot. And I love to fly. But if I have a choice, and I could fly, or make love to my wife, or go out blasting, I’d rather go blasting. It’s that much fun.”

But blowing up rock isn’t the main reason he got into mining.

“I caught gold fever,” he said.

As Chiodo explains it, there are three levels of the illness or addiction that overtakes a prospector. Hobbyists get the simple fever, which compels them to go out and putter around in a river, panning or using a sluice box.

Gold disease is more severe, and those afflicted dedicate their lives to the quest for the yellow metal.

But the plague is a strain of fever with which “people will actually pull a gun on you and kill you for a lousy 10-cent piece of gold,” Chiodo said.

Fortunately, he and the others at the Falcon only have the disease, he continued. “If you get greedy, you won’t find gold.”

“It’s the treasure hunt, the anticipation,” Grossman said. “If we hit a vein and became millionaires, we’d probably take the money and go see if we could find another mine.”

Pray only smiles when asked whether his years of mining have made him a wealthy man.

“My Mom asked me that,” he said.

“I told her, ‘Sure I’m a millionaire, Mom.’ So she asked me where I keep it all.

“ ‘Underground,’ I told her. ‘In its original form. It’s very safe there, Mom.’ ”