Modern Technology Helps Revive an Old Gold Mine

At sunset, grime-covered men emerge from 19th Century tunnels clutching treasure gleaned from a legendary Gold Rush-era mine.

The Original Sixteen-in-One Mine, once described by adoring Sierra Nevada prospectors as home of the highest-grade ore in the world, is back in business. And its miners are using a tool the old sourdoughs would have coveted--a metal detector.

“It’s there. You just have to get it,” said one man as he removed his miner’s helmet after an eight-hour shift.

The mine, a 25-mile-long tunnel network cut into an isolated canyon 180 miles northeast of San Francisco, is yielding top-quality gold from quartz veins, much to the delight of strapped mine owners who were forced to lay off crews last fall.

In January, two jobless miners approached mine company chief Michael Miller with a deal. They asked permission to use an old metal detector in the dank, abandoned passages, retaining a percentage of what they found and giving the rest to the company.

“I said, ‘Sure, go ahead and give it a try,’ ” said the skeptical Miller, 47, a lanky, congenial man in flannel shirt and jeans who looks more like a professor than a mountain gold hunter. “As far as I know, this is the first time metal detectors have been used this way,” he added.

Almost immediately, the two prospectors struck gold. Two ounces the first day, 150 ounces the first week. The following week, they hit a 50-ounce trove in a single spot, bringing the value of their find to more than $70,000.

Since then, Miller’s crews have resumed work; they now enter the aged tunnels with the most sensitive metal detectors they can find. They must find about 4 ounces of high-grade gold each day to break even. So far, they’ve succeeded tenfold, Miller says.

At the entrance to the mine, Miller sits on the tailgate of his pickup truck and unwraps gold-encrusted quartz, nuggets and flat gold slabs--about $40,000 worth. The gold doesn’t shine or glow; it is dull and discolored.

A 4-ounce nugget might be worth about $1,400 in gold content, but fetches $2,000 to $3,000 or more when sold as a piece of jewelry.

Gold has lured prospectors to the canyon since 1851, when a group of Hawaiian sailors jumped ship and joined the Gold Rush, ultimately settling in the steep canyon below what is now Alleghany.

The “Original Sixteen-in-One Mine” is a sort of hodgepodge super mine formed over the past 140 years by combining some of the most hallowed diggings in gold hunt lore--the Minnie D, the Morning Glory, the El Dorado, the Golden King, among others.

A Department of Mines and Geology publication describes the Sixteen-in-One as “one of the most productive and profitable gold mines that California has ever known . . . one that provided many thousands of jobs and tens of millions of dollars of gold annually.”

Roughly a million ounces of gold have been mined there since 1911, when the modern Sixteen-in-One was founded. Most of the gold and gold-quartz was top grade, offered to bullion dealers, jewelry makers, collectors and museums.

The mine remained active during the Great Depression and World War II. It finally closed its doors in 1965.

It reopened in the early 1980s. A succession of lessees engaged in a seesaw battle with the Earth, digging out 13,000 ounces of gold worth nearly $5 million through 1991.