CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / GOVERNOR : Gold Mine Job Polishes Off Garamendi’s 58-County Work Stint

Democrat John Garamendi sank to record depths in his campaign for governor Monday. He descended 2,200 feet into a Mother Lode gold mine to work alongside the miners.

The work of the state insurance commissioner was somewhat inhibited by the flexible cast he wore on a broken right leg, but Garamendi managed to reach his goal of working alongside people in their jobs in each of California’s 58 counties.

Garamendi, in rubber boots and a hard hat with a headlamp, used a shovel to help clear a mine car track of debris. Then he operated a pneumatic chute to fill two cars with chunks of ore.

On Jan. 4, Garamendi flew to Crescent City, just south of the Oregon border, to begin his campaign to work a variety of jobs with ordinary Californians.

Sierra County, the 58th and last, came Monday as he visited the Original Sixteen-to-One Mine at Alleghany, about 100 miles northeast of Sacramento. The mine has been operating off and on for nearly a century. About 25 miles of shafts and tunnels, reaching a maximum depth of 2,400 feet, honeycomb the Sierra foothills here.

Garamendi said it was important to him as a potential governor to learn the problems facing firms like the Sixteen-to-One and its 22 employees, such as safety and environmental regulation.

Some political experts have said it was a mistake for Garamendi to spend so much time working odd jobs, many of them in thinly populated rural areas with few voters. But Garamendi called it a matter of “personal dedication” to learn firsthand the problems facing such companies and workers.

With three weeks until the June 7 primary, Garamendi is fighting an uphill battle against the better-financed Kathleen Brown, the state treasurer. State Sen. Tom Hayden also is seeking the Democratic nomination.

The Sixteen-to-One, named for William Jennings Bryan’s 19th-Century proposal to fix the price of gold at 16 times the price of silver, is one of the few productive and profitable underground gold mining operations left in the state.

Company President Michael Miller told Garamendi that a revival of the mine began in 1974, aided by metal detectors to find gold in quartz veins that was overlooked by the first miners.

The company is preparing to sink a new shaft into virgin territory between 2,400 and 2,600 feet below ground. Workers have mined as much as $1.5 million worth of gold in a single day within the past two years, Miller said.

Garamendi and other visitors Monday got to the 2,200-foot level by riding four at a time in a skip, a form of metal bucket suspended from a cable and operated from a hoist. The skip first descended at about a 60-degree angle, then plunged nearly straight down for the rest of the five-minute trip through a darkened shaft about five feet square.

About 200 feet from where Garamendi worked Monday, miner Randall Yager touched off a dynamite blast in a side cavern. An hour later, he emerged with a small sackful of sparkling quartz rocks that contained, by his estimate, about $4,000 worth of gold.

On Friday, Yager found a pocket with about 15 ounces of gold, nearly $6,000 worth at current prices.

“It’s an Easter egg hunt,” one miner said.

Garamendi said his family “never should have left the mines” that it operated in the area near Mokelumne Hill, which is where he broke his leg earlier this month when he fell from a ladder.