SNOWING INSIDE OF THE HOUSE

The weather in the Chariot Canyon was much different than the weather in San Diego which was located on the Pacific Ocean and surrounding bays. San Diego has a most agreeable weather pattern with sunshine and warmth about 90% of the time. But San Diego County, which was on the same latitude as the State of Israel, had many different climates across her landscape. There were the extreme deserts found in the far east of the county which were covered with wildflowers during the springtime and had hidden springs and creeks that were fun for body-surfing and created little oases in the desert year round.

Then there was a high range of mountains that covered the middle part of the county and this area had strong and sudden snowstorms and lightning and thunderstorms that sprung up out of seeming nowhere but did not last for long. We lived in those mountains but right on the edge of the desert-where we lived was called the high chapparel. The water from the mountain tops ran down the mountain in streams that fed the water table for the entire Imperial Valley. We had to be very careful of what landed in the streams because it would inevitably work its way down into the vast farmlands of the Imperial Valley where it was measured by specialists in the BLM, whose offices were in the Imperial Valley. We were watched for a lot of reasons by the BLM who had the task of keeping the public lands safe and in good condition. The officers who worked with us were very kind and understanding of our various problems and they asked us to keep a BLM weather station at the millsite to track temperature, rain, snow, and wind speeds so that they could keep a handle on how dry the vegetation was getting and if there was the possibility of wild fires occurring and the state the vegetation was in and whether it would go up like a tender box, or resist the fire if the plants had a high water content. Usually, the vegetation was very dry and we had three fire storms in the canyon while we lived there that cleared off thousands of acres of underbrush and trees. Watching the plants and trees make a come-back after the fires was one of the joys of living in such a dangerous place. The vegetation would start blooming and new green shoots would sprout miraculously and pretty soon, the mountain's scars would be once again covered with new vegetation. We lived at the 5,000 foot level and (just an added note) there was a huge wolf sanctuary situated on the top of the mountain behind us and we could hear their howling all through the nights and parts of the day. The sanctuary was actually just outside of Julian proper and was the source of a lot of angry debate, but no wolf ever escaped because they were surrounded by 8 foot high chain-link fencing, and they were kept fed well.

Anyhow, we were not very well prepared for the cold and snow and winds of winter. Our house still had slight cracks in the walls because they were made from used and sometimes slightly warped lumber. When the wind blew and it was raining or snowing, we would get little drifts on the floor of the house. To combat the cold-sometimes getting as low as 7 degrees below zero-we had our one little pot-bellied wood stove which Bruce would spend the winters filling with logs and kindling. The pot belly would turn red from the heat and we all stood or sat right around her. We would be dressed in several layers of clothing and our jackets 24/7. When it was time to go to bed at night-none of the other rooms were heated-we took big flat rocks and baked them in the propane oven until they were very hot. Then we would wrap the stones in newspaper and slip them into the foot of our beds, under the covers. It was sheer joy to get into bed then and the rocks would be warm for about an hour so you could get to sleep without worrying about being cold. Waking up in the mornings was a lot of fun because the fire would have gone out and the cabin would be dark and icy cold. It was Bruce, who woke up at 5:00, that would stagger out to the stove and start the fire roaring again so that the children could run out to the stove and get warm and get ready for school. Since we were always dressed in regular clothes and several layers of them, the children would actually wash up the night before when the house was at its warmest, and put on clean clothes for school, which they would then sleep in so they didn't have to try to put clothes on in the freezing living room the next morning.

Our windows, which totally surrounded the house, were simply screening over large cutouts in the walls. During winter, we had plywood pieces that closed over the screens like flaps and were locked close with a bent nail. We lived in a wooden cocoon in the winter. In the spring, summer, and fall, the open screening kept the house cool during times when the temperature could rise to over 110 degrees.

One day a wind and rain storm came up unexpectedly and the winds were about 50 miles per hour. The wind caught the wooden flaps that covered the windows and they blew wide open letting the rain-soaked wind straight into the house and destroying a lot of our property.

Our friends, Mike and Tony from the Santa Ysabel Indian Reservation, would come up in their big old wood-hauling truck to check on us during the winter. They always brought food and goodies for the children and their happy dispositions went a long way to making us feel safe and cared for, and their advice saved our lives several times.


Tomorrow we will hear about how we survived wildfires and wild animals, and hear about Bruce's constant battle with rattlesnakes and sidewinders and why he would leave their bodies lying around the millsite. I cannot tolerate snakes coming from all directions; they freaked me out.

THE HATFIELDS AND MACCOYS OF CHARIOT CANYON

One day dad, George, decided to hire a workman to help him put up his monuments for the year. He chose a couple who had come up from the Imperial Valley to escape the law. They were personable and dad was taken in by their willingness to help him run the dozers and walk the mountain sides putting new papers in the monuments. Dad figured that they could help him out for months and in return gave them a trailer to sleep in and food to eat. What he never took into consideration was that Bruce would become very jealous of the man and his wife and decide to run them out of the canyon by any means necessary. The man's name was Tom and I don't remember the lady's name as she was as quiet and withdrawn as I was and we never really made contact.

At first, Tom and Bruce tried to put on a good face, but you could feel tensions simmering between them right from the first. All Bruce could talk about was Tom and getting him out of the canyon. Tom also wore weapons (as did dad) everyday, all day long, and even to bed at night-just in case a problem should arise. Bruce screamed at Tom in his sleep and in the daytime he plotted ways to get something on Tom to go to the sheriffs with. He had the boys break into Tom's trailer when they were gone one day in order to look for marijuana or other drugs-which they found and stole. Bruce told the sheriff what they had found and the police told him to mind his own business that they couldn't just accept his word to arrest a man; they had to find a reason on their own and they promised to keep a close eye on Tom as they had already had complaints about him from the Julian merchants.

That was not good enough for Bruce who fussed and fumed all the way home.

Then one day the fight escalated when we left to go to town and when we came to dad's property, lying in front of Tom's trailer, in the middle of the road, was a dead fox who had been shot and then laid out on the road as a "death threat" to Bruce. Of course, that was Bruce's interpretation of the dead fox. It was kind of odd and I remember getting chills up my spine as I watched Bruce create a mountain out of a molehill on the spot. Bruce began to carry a shotgun and a high-powered rifle with him at all times and lean them against the wall at night by the side of his bed.

At first I thought this was just another incident of Bruce's outrageous temper, but the man began to obsess about Tom 24 hours a day and could talk of nothing else. Then he began to stalk Tom in order to see if he had a regular schedule that he kept. He soon knew that Tom would go to town on Thursdays and then spent the rest of the days going past our millsite to other areas of the canyon. Bruce took this as a personal threat. He believed that Tom was stalking him and had it in his mind to blow him away at first opportunity. Usually, Tom's drive by our house was followed by his return within about two hours. Bruce never figured out what they were doing, but he suspected that they had marijuana growing up the canyon and would go most days to water the crops.

Then one day when we returned from town we saw that one of the neighbors had come home from town himself and returned to find his seven wolf-dogs all shot where they had been staked out. Everyone of them dead. He was devastated; they had been his closest friends and he took excellent care of them. Bruce immediately decided that Tom had been the culprit and that seemed to break something in his mind.

The next morning, after Tom and his wife had driven past the house, Bruce started stuffing guns of all kind from hand-guns to semi-automatic rifles and shotguns into his 4-wheel-drive truck. When the truck was filled he demanded that I go with him, threatening me if I didn't go. I got in the truck and immediately started praying hard that somehow there would be no more trouble and no one would get killed. We drove down the road after Tom until we came to a huge stand of scrub-oak trees. The area was also covered with tall bushes and manzanita. Bruce looked the area over then he backed the truck way up the little foothill and positioned it behind some tall bushes where you couldn't see us from the road. We sat there watching the road in front of us, waiting for Tom and his wife to drive by on their way home. Bruce sat there muttering what he was going to do which was to shoot and kill both Tom and his wife when they passed in front of us. I spent the time pleading with Bruce, but I might as well have been talking to the wind. I was TERRIFIED, and sat there shaking and praying with all of my might that somehow Tom and his wife would never come past. We sat thus for four hours with Bruce having his weapons pointed at the road and never moving an inch. I finally broke down and began to plead with him to just let us go on home quietly. I was sobbing and rapidly loosing control. I begged Bruce, "Please let's just go home and deal with this another day. You don't really want to kill someone and then have to go to jail and never be in the mountains again, do you?"

Finally, after five hours of waiting to kill another human being, Bruce relented, and we drove back home and put the guns back in the house.

That was the end of the madness because Tom and his wife quite inexplicably disappeared that day and never returned, even leaving their belongings in the little trailer. Rumor had it that they were arrested in the Imperial Valley over some of his past warrants and couldn't get back to the mountains again. They never returned and I praised God for what I was sure was His intervention.

I began to hate Bruce and was very much afraid of what he was capable of doing. I had terrors for years about the five hours waiting in ambush to kill another human being. I wanted off of the mountain for good...away from the crazy man, but I did not own a vehicle and Bruce never would let me drive one of his vehicles. I had to get myself in shape so that I could walk off of the mountain on my own two feet.


Tomorrow we will talk about surviving the seasons on the mountain.

HARD ROCK MINING & CLAIM JUMPERS

Bruce was a relatively small man, 5' 8" and had a small frame, but every inch of his body was pure muscle. Hard Rock Mining meant exactly what it said: it was hard work; it was dealing with rocks that were hard granite with pockets of quartz, and the mining was not the kind where there is water and sluice boxes. The face of the tunnel wall-where he would be picking, shoveling, and carrying rocks out of the tunnel to a slag pile where we would keep the rock that wasn't ore (98% of it)-was sheer rock and gave up no secrets as to which way he should next plant his pick. It was an act of faith, but when we found good-looking quartz (one that showed some color) we smashed it up and sent it to an assayer to do a spectographic analysis. Usually we would find a few grains of gold which pointed us in the next direction to dig. We often found silver in the assay and a lot of aluminum, copper, and other, baser, elements. Lots of times, the assay would come back negative and then at least we knew where not to dig.

Bruce's tools were mining picks, crowbars, sledge hammers, and during the last five years a hand-held electric sledge hammer that he used to bust the rocks off of the face of the tunnel wall. He eventually built an ingenious contraption that would move the busted-up ore from the floor of the mine into a waiting mining cart where it was then pushed down the track to the outside and pushed over to the slag pile.

The mine was an incredibly interesting place. Bruce had built the walls and the ceiling as he went along with huge beams and running boards. Finally some railroad track was given to him and he ran the track from the face of the tunnel all the way out of the tunnel, and around a corner to the slag pile where he would dump out all of the ore from the very old (1863) mining cart, then haul the mining cart on the railroad track back inside the tunnel to the face of the dig to be filled up again. We had a generator at the tunnel and an electric line ran from the outside of the tunnel all the way to the face of the rock he was working on. The tunnel was very damp and warmer inside than out. It was filled with a number of amphibians/reptiles such as salamanders, frogs, horned toads, and the occasional snake.

The mine was endlessly fascinating to the general public of men and every week-end we would be deluged with those hardy souls who wanted nothing more than to have a hand at digging in the tunnel. It was like the story of Tom Sawyer and the whitewashing of his aunt's fence. Bruce just supervised and he had all of these strong men who really wanted to work in a real mining tunnel. Bruce joyfully and gratefully let them. After working in the mine for the day, we would put on a big barbecue to feed all of the workers; that was my job, and who could complain, the visitors had all brought meat and fixings to feed everybody.

Then there were the other visitors; the unwelcome ones. They would come during the weekdays with their BLM maps showing what claims were open and which were not. None of them wanted to do the work of setting up a mining claim and putting up monuments, they wanted to find an already set-up mine whose paperwork was out of date, and claim that. It made no difference to them that our papers were all in order, they would just throw our paperwork out of the jar and put their paperwork in and think that made them minors. Bruce said otherwise, at the point of a gun. Two examples will suffice. One day Bruce saw men taking our monuments apart as he was driving back from the mine one morning. He stalked up to them with his guns drawn and demanded that they replace our papers back into the jars of the monuments. The claim jumpers pulled their weapons, but Bruce just shot at their feet. They jumped back and cursed him soundly, but they put their weapons away and said they were going to the sheriff and swear out a complaint-which they did. The sheriff told them they had no business up in the mountains with active mining going on and to just go away and stay away.

Once Bruce caught some claim jumpers who also pulled their guns on him. Bruce just shot over their heads until they jumped in their cars and drove rapidly off of the mountain. Bruce chased after them in his truck all the time firing over their heads. He chased them to the highway. They also went to the sheriff but were met there with warnings to go away and not come back.

Bruce was a legend in Julian. He was the last gunman in San Diego County who wore three guns on his person at all times, even when shopping in town. He wore them on a holster around his waist and another one strapped to his engineer boots. He even slept with one gun on him and his holster laying at the foot of the bed with two other guns in it. It was more than creepy for me. I actually feared Bruce and he was a very controlling man.


Tomorrow we have a blood-feud in the canyon and one man is marked for death by Bruce.

A MOUNTAIN OF CHALLENGES

We arrived at the millsite one afternoon with all of our belongings, four children, 16 chickens, and two cats. Dogs were not allowed on BLM land because they ran the cattle and sometimes attacked them.

We had brought John's old army tent for the children to sleep in until we could get more house built, and Bruce and I decided to sleep in the truck that first night and enjoy the stars. The children decided to fight all night about who was touching who, so none of us were asleep when the rain  decided to arrive about 2:00 in the morning. The rain dissolved the old material in the tent, and pieces of it started to fall off in clumps. The children were screaming and Bruce and I were soaking. We all made a dash for the inside of the cabin and huddled on the floor until morning arrived.

The next day, we started to put up a porch around all the sides of the cabin and when we had finished the floor on one side, we put up the cots and beds for the children. The roof overhung the porch enough to protect them from the rain and direct sunlight. They slept on the porch all summer while we finished rooms all around the house. The rooms were only 8' x 8', except for a living room that was about 15' x 20', but we had three bedrooms for the children and a larger bedroom for ourselves, and there was a large indoor workshop for Bruce.

First order of business was finding a source of water. Our creek was dry and we did not have a well yet, so we had to cross to the other side of the mountain to a little creek that always ran. We had two 55 gallon drums and Bruce had made a siphon to get the water out of the creek. It took 5 hours to get 110 gallons of water and it was 5 hours under the grueling hot sun and swirls of insects. Then we drove the water back to the cabin where Bruce had placed a 55 gallon drum permanently on the roof right above where the sink would be located in the kitchen. When it had been filled, again by siphoning, we set the other barrel down on the ground until the water was needed.

We learned to conserve water usage because getting water was such a hard job. We heated water in a big pot on the stove to wash dishes, our hair, and our baths. For drinking water we had several 5-gallon bottles and a bottle stand. We would take the bottles to our friends house, or the Banner Store, to get them filled once a week. Washing clothes meant taking the clothes to town every week to wash them in a laundromat. We also went to town to get the fuel for our generator-regular gasoline-that we also used 55 gallon drums to hold. It would take four 55 gallon drums to run the generator and mining equipment for a month.

We had two propane tanks and a propane business in Ramona would haul propane up to us about every six months. That was some dangerous trip up our severely rutted and torn apart roads, but they made the trips without complaint. We used propane to run our 1920 stove, and our two 1936 propane refrigerators.

The summer passed quickly and just before winter, our house was finished. It was a tar-paper shack with "windows" that were screening covering wide openings in the walls and then a big plywood board would drop from the ceilings to cover the screened "windows" during the cold or rain, or snow. It was a drafty house because the boards that we had used were sometimes slightly warped and there were some very narrow slits in some of the walls. If I sat just right in my rocking chair, I could see the moon shining outside and sometimes stars.

With the winter came the cold, rain, and snow. Bruce mined no matter what the weather was like because weather didn't bother him in his tunnel. We had an old pot-bellied stove that used wood. We used about three chords of wood each winter that was sold to us-at a discount because of our poverty-by the local tribe of Santa Ysabel Indians. They gave us an overabundant amount and became our closest friends for many reasons. They really understood us.


Tomorrow, a look at Bruce's mining operation and claim jumpers.

FORCES MOVE US TO THE MILLSITE

After many months of work, we had finished a 10' by 20' shack on the millsite. She was built solidly and we even had put down tile on the floor. Her roof was made of tar-paper and tar over sheets of plyboard. She had two windows and two doors all of which were locked when we were not in the canyon. We were immediately infested with spiders and ants, but we were able to keep their numbers in control. We would come up on Saturday mornings and stay until Sunday afternoon. The children helped us and soon Bruce had prospected out a place to start digging on the first mining claim, "The Golden Oaks."

Bruce had found an exposed face on the mountain side about a mile south of the millsite. On both sides of the proposed tunnel were manzanita bushes and scrub oak. The creek ran by about 50 feet in front of the mining site. As Bruce stood there staring at his proposed site to dig a tunnel, he felt the presence of someone standing behind him. Turning quickly around he saw an elderly Native American who was watching his every move. Bruce spoke up quickly and said to the elderly man, "Sir, I have no intention of hurting or disturbing your land. When I mine I will be very careful not to disturb any vegetation or move any rocks that I don't have to move. I will keep the area clean and restore it to its former appearance when I have finished. I respect you and your land and will be a good neighbor while we are here."

The Native gentleman spoke to Bruce then, "I can tell that you will keep your word and so I give you permission to dig at this spot. You will find what you are looking for, but it will take you years of work to get to it. Honor and respect our land and we shall help to keep you safe."

Bruce said "Thank you very much," but even as he did so he realized that the Native American elder had disappeared. Many times as he was drilling and picking in the tunnel that he built over the years, to a length of half a mile, he would feel a presence and hear words that guided him as to where to dig next. We found gold in the tunnel, but never enough to make us prosper, and the work was mind-numbing.

We would have continued week-end mining forever, but a fly flew into our ointment. I was working as a Telecommunication Traffic Engineer for Starnet, Corporation. We were owned by Ford Aerospace and Communications Corporation, and working for them was like working in a dream. The benefits and the opportunities that they gave each of us to grow made us very happy employees. But one day, Ford decided to sell us to a Telecommunications Company in Portland, Oregon. It came as quite a shock to all of us, and devastation to our family. I was offered a job with the new company but we had nine children, many in their teens, and they had no desire to change where they lived and went to school. I could not in good conscious hurt all nine children nor upset their lives. I determined to stay in San Diego and find work there. I was unsuccessful in finding another job and didn't know which way to turn. I was the chief provider for the family. Although Bruce received child support for his four children, he was a stay at home father because he was disabled with severe back misalignments after having taken a fall from a high scaffold while he was welding one day years before.

I knew that I could not afford for us to live like we had been living. We had to downsize drastically and the first thing was, we could not afford to pay rent on our house; we had to move. But where to move nine children on an extremely low income when San Diego's rental rates had skyrocketed over the years. The only answer that I could come up with was to move the children to the mountains and let them have a very unique experience. Ford gave us a very generous separation pay, plus two months pay and Cobra insurance. This was enough money to get us moved up to the mountains and situated.

At this time I was struggling with my mental problems and my psychiatrist told me that I was in no condition to work a normal 9-5 job, let alone a job with the pressures that went along with my position as an engineer. He had me apply for Disability Insurance from the State of California. This went through very quickly and so I had an income that-with Bruce's income-would cover our simple living expenses. A year later, I was given Supplemental Security Income because of my mental condition. This, along with all of the help with mining expenses that John gave us, made it possible to live in the mountains. The children would be going to Julian High School.

We put a lot of our things in storage and then took all of our books, pictures, and homey objects up to the mountain. Of course, we had only the one large room to live in at first, and we were crowded. The older teenagers, five of them, decided to stay in San Diego and pursue their own lives, but the four youngest moved up with us; ages 12-15 years old.


Monday we will talk about the hardships of making such a move into the remote back-country and how we learned to survive.

BUILDING A HOME ON A MILLSITE

We started out by staking out six mining claims and one millsite claim. The millsite was different from the mining claims in several ways. First, it was smaller and was only five acres in a square shape. You do not mine on your millsite, it is supposed to be land that has no mineral value to it. Its use was to erect a millhouse for refining ore, other out-buildings for storage, and a cabin if you were planning to live on the claim. At first, we needed a millsite to store mining equipment and to build a latrine so that we could be comfortable when we spent long days at the mine. By latrine, I mean outhouse. There were rules about building the outhouse. You had to build it at least 100 feet away from any moving water-our creek-and it had to be out of sight of the public view. We selected a spot way up a draw in the mountain side. Our son-in-law, Skeeta, dug the hole for the outhouse about 10 feet deep, then climbed out of the hole with a ladder. We constructed a small shack around and above the hole and put in two seats-a double-holer. We put linoleum on the floor and around the seats and filled the outhouse with magazines and a big bag of lime to sprinkle on the waste material to keep the smell and the flies away, and to decompose the matter. It was a wonderful outhouse because as you sat on the "throne" you could watch wild animals as they passed by on the way to the creek. We saw snakes, skunks, racoons, deer, and once a bobcat. They paid us no never-mind but walked past as if we weren't even there. The outhouse was surrounded by trees and brush and you had to walk up a fairly steep path to get to it. When it snowed in the winter time it was a real challenge to make it to the outhouse because of slipping in the snow and ice.

And yes, San Diego County does have snow in the back-country, and it gets down to -7 degrees in the winter time when it is snowing and the wind is blowing up a storm. Not something you see in the city.

We had made a pact between three of us; Bruce would be the miner, John would be the "money man", and I would take care of the paperwork and interact with the BLM.

We decided that we would build a small cabin so that we could stay at the mine and work her for the entire weekend. Bruce had friends who had friends that were in construction. As they built their apartment buildings there would always be boards that would be cut too short, or doors that didn't fit, and a whole range of material that had been damaged in some way. They were looking for someone to haul it away that could use it and in stepped Bruce and John with their trucks. We hauled that material up into the mountains and began to build a one-room shack. My brother, Charley, was the first carpenter we had and he got the foundation going and started the framing on the house. About this time, the BLM came by and wanted to know what we thought we were doing. Did we plan to live at the mine? We assured them that we were just building a storage shed for tools and equipment and to stay in when we came up on the weekends to work. They asked us to stop building until they could approve our plans.

I drew up our mining plans showing where we intended to make tunnels and how we planned to use the millsite. They wanted to know if we were planning on making roads and just where we were planning to dump the rock we excavated from our mining tunnels. BLM land is public land and many people visited Chariot Canyon on the weekends. Besides, the canyon is ancient Indian land and held many artifacts of their living there and they must be preserved at all cost. Also there were OSHA laws that had to be followed for the safety of everyone involved. So much to consider.

I was working as a Telecommunication Traffic Engineer for Starnet Corporation at the time and I used my tools and training to draw out a plan for all six mining claims and for the millsite. Then the BLM met us at the sites one day and had us explain what we were attempting to do. They looked over my work and then breathed a sigh of relief. They had thought we were going to have an operation like Bruce's dad had with heavy equipment and road building and when they saw our modest plans-a family operation-they approved our plans, although they would be watching us very carefully. One other thing, we must not hurt or scare the cattle in the canyon because the ranchers had a prior agreement with the BLM to run their cattle in the canyon and not be harassed. The cattle became our pets although we didn't see them very often.

So we built a one-room shack out of our materials and would spend the weekends living on the millsite.


Tomorrow we have a crisis in our lives and have to move onto the millsite permanently. With 9 children.

STAKING OUT A GOLD MINING CLAIM

Over the last few blogs I have mentioned several times our 14 years of living in the wilderness southeast of Julian, California, USA. It was such an interesting time in our lives that I think you might be interested in some of our adventures.

My father-in-law was a gold miner, since the 1920's, in the mountains of the Chariot Canyon Truck Trail in the outback-mountains of Julian. He had over 20 active mines that he had extracted enough gold from to raise a family of five boys. During our time-frame, 1986-2000, dad (George Herrington, Sr.) was still actively mining. He had built a millhouse that hung over the edge of the canyon and was refining enough gold to have financial backers putting up hundreds of thousands of dollars for equipment and new outbuildings, workmen and salesmen.

Only one of dad's sons was interested in the gold mine, and that was my husband, Bruce Sr. Bruce had been raised on the gold mines-dad had a huge house on one of the mining claims-and gone to school in Julian. He loved the San Diego back-country and had always dreamed of working in the mines one day, but he had four children to raise and thought he would never have that opportunity.

When Bruce and I had been together for about four years, dad asked us to come up to the mine and have a talk with him. He offered to teach us how to stake-out and set up a mining claim and a millsite. You dug for gold ore on the mining claim; it was hard-rock mining, and you used a millsite to put up your cabin and outbuildings for refining the ore. Once you have gone to the trouble and expense of setting up your claims and brought in equipment to do the mining, etc. you need to stay at the mine 24/7 so that claim jumpers don't try to take over your claim and so that the general public doesn't walk away with the "old" mining equipment.

To stake out a mining claim is a fairly straight-forward job. You first go to the County Recorders to see who has mining claims and where they are located; and if they are up-to-date on their paperwork. You can also get this information from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). You will be looking for a claim on BLM land as that is the only land that is freely available for mining operations. You then go out scouting a likely area, that is you walk hundreds of miles poring down at the ground and looking at the sides of mountains for outcroppings of quartz. Gold is found in quartz; but not in all quartz-you are looking for "lucky quartz", if you get my meaning. Walking the mountain-sides and canyons of the Julian back-country is treacherous. There are rattlesnakes-lots of them-bobcats, wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, and tarantulas. Every insect imaginable-all biting it seems-bats and moths at night, skunks, racoons, deer, squirrels-rabies wide spread. The ground under your feet is either going straight up, or you are sliding downhill on tiny loose rocks. There is poison ivy, stinging nettles, and cat's claw, and to top everything off, the weather is either over 100 degrees or 7 degrees below zero.

But dad had pointed out to us places that he had prospected out before and had found gold-bearing quartz. He had the maps of all of the claims in the Chariot Canyon and so he showed us-on the maps-just where we needed to stake out our claims. So taking a compass, and a 100 foot tape measure, tools, wood to built the monuments for the claims, and water, we started our ascent of the steep mountain's side. Every step we made up, we slid back two. The chaparral was over six feet high in places and we had to hack our way through it as there were no paths. Finally, in desperation, we got down on our stomachs and hands and knees and wormed our way up the side of the mountain. Scratch city! All I could think about was meeting a rattlesnake face to face.

Finally at the top, we found where dad had been talking about and after finding one of his current monuments, we stepped out our own claim; a rectangle 600 feet wide and 1200 feet long. We placed monuments containing copies of our paperwork and stating the name and which corner it was of our claim in a glass mason jar, covered it over with a mountain of rocks, and erected a six foot high pole in the center of the monument for easy spotting in the future with red, white, and blue ribbons on the top of the pole (also a requirement from the BLM). This we did for six points, NE, NorthCenter End, NW; SE, SouthCenter End, and SW. Then we took pictures of the claim and prospected it out until we knew where we were going to make the first cut on the claim, and placed an even larger monument there.

The paperwork on the mining claims is filed with the County Recorder and then with the BLM in Sacramento. You must check and date your monument papers every year, do "X" amount of work on your claim each year, and pay fees to both the County and the BLM each year in order to keep your mining claims valid.


Tomorrow...the decision to live permanently on the millsite claim, and building a cabin out of reused scrap lumber and supplies.