Gold Mining

Our plan today was to visit two small historical towns - Kellogg and Wallace - about an hour from where we’re staying, but we had so much fun at the first stop we never made it further. 

Kellogg is home to the Crystal Gold Mine (here). Once a working mine, today it offers mine tours, gold panning, gemstone sluicing and spray painting VW Bugs(!). Something for everyone.

I was surprised how much we all enjoyed panning for gold. One of the employees gave us some useful pointers, then left us to it. Pop and Leo were very good at finding gold flakes, while Jac and I found mostly pretty rocks. 

The ‘gemstones’ were in a pre-packaged bag of sand so the girls were guaranteed to find gems. (Pay more, find more…) They were both glued to their sluice screens, concentrating on finding all they could. 

The mine tour was interesting, one of the better ones we’ve done. The mine opened in 1879, operated during the 1880’s, 

then was boarded up and forgotten until a century later. It was rediscovered in 1991 during nearby freeway construction.

Interesting tidbits: gold was found only in veins of quartz; no white rocks, no yellow gold. 

The mine is 900’ underground 

and (Jac was not happy to discover) it is pitch black when the lights are out. 

Several flooded areas have healthy groups of fish; the water is clear and fresh. 

Colors of Smithsonite reflect the minerals in the rock - purple is manganese, blue is cobalt, green is copper, orange/brown is iron and black is silver. Although there’s silver in the rock, it wasn’t mined because it wasn’t valuable in the 1880’s. 

Black lines are silver

There are a few places with gold still visible. 

 Small veins of gold

There’s also a rare example of naturally-occurring silver wire, which is 100% pure silver. 

 Rare silver wire

We weren’t expecting a lot but this turned out to be a great place to visit. One nice thing about visiting off-season is the lack of crowds and more personalized attention. Nobody was rushing us and we ended up staying almost 3 hours.