Empire Mine

This is gold country, and my friends encouraged me to visit the nearby Empire Mine (now a California State Historic Park).

Standing at the the top of the shaft, my internal soundtrack conjured up the Cowboy Junkies. [Of course.] I certainly had no concept of hard rock mining. Till now.

There were a few numbers that stuck with me. The bottom of the shaft was nearly a mile below the surface of the earth; the shaft (11,000 feet long) cuts through the earth at an angle. The museum displays an enormous and intricate scale model of the shafts and side tunnels of the Empire Mine and its neighbors.

I wondered where the tons and tons of discarded rock ended up. Some of it was used to construct the buildings onsite. Some of it was likely used to form the beds for railroad tracks, as I now recognized the curious specimen I'd pocketed back near Graeagle as granodiorite.

It was possible to wander through the offices, to climb the well-worn creaky stairs, to marvel at the redwood used to panel the walls. So many tons of rock drilled and crushed to extract precious ounces of gold. The scale of it! How can gold be affordable, at all? Here, in 1956, this operation stopped being profitable. The pumps were shut down, allowing the groundwater to rise to its natural level and flood the complex warren of tunnels. By one estimate, 80% of the gold is still down there.

The “cottage” was closed; I was too late for the last tour of the day. What was it like to live in such grandeur on the site of an active mine? The pounding, the shaking, the shattering of the earth?

When the mine began to run on electrical power, there was enough to go around. The cottage was among the earliest electrified residences.

It was cooler in the garden than on the barren grounds above the mine, baking in the sun.

Back in Nevada City, the evening cooled down nicely. I chose to dine on a creekside porch.

My thoughts turned to one of the many stickers adorning the colorful spot where we'd enjoyed our smoothies: Earth Bats Last.

Remember that.