Wow!!!! Has it really been seven years since I wrote that last chapter
Well, I guess I'll revive this thread with a new chapter. Sorry for the delay.........
"Of course, we wouldn’t know right away because everybody knows you can’t enter a recently blasted underground mine until the next day……. toxic fumes and all."
Chapter Five: We Get the Ore Out and Crushed
We spent the rest of the day celebrating what we hoped was a successful blast, back down at the Mill Site on the Merced River, drinking beer around a campfire. The next morning we were very excited to get back up into the mine to see how much ore we had blasted out. We loaded our ore cart with sledgehammers and digger bars, shovels and hand sledges. (Digger bars are 5-foot long steel bars like a crowbar only straight and not curved). When we reached the blast site, we figured we had blasted out maybe ½ ton of ore. Not as much as we anticipated, but we figured it wasn’t too bad for a first try.
We noticed that there was still quite a bit of ore, all cracked and loose still adhering to the wall and ceiling of the blast area. The first order of business was to make our work area safe. Using the hand sledges and digger bars we were able to pry and bring down all the loose ore in the wall and ceiling. We figured we probably brought down another ¼ ton of ore. Now the real work began. Our jaw-crusher could only handle chunks of rock about the size of a cantaloupe or smaller. Our job was to use the sledgehammers to reduce all the chunks down to cantaloupe size or smaller. First, we loaded the ore cart with every piece of ore that the crusher could handle. No problem. Then the hammering began. Although it was a constant temperature inside the mine of around 65 degrees or so, after about 10 minutes of sledgehammering our shirts came off. Covered in sweat, muscles aching, we pounded the crap out of the remaining quartz. And pounded, and pounded, and then pounded some more. Even though we were young bucks in our teens and twenties, this was hard work!! We joked about being on a “chain gang” busting rocks like Paul Newman and George Kennedy in “Cool Hand Luke”.
In the bits of darkness inside the mine we were making sparks fly!! We also noticed that small, sharp slivers of quartz were being imbedded in our arms and chests causing little rivulets of blood mixed with sweat. After a few hours, the task was done, we loaded up the ore cart about ¾ full with all the rock we had blasted out and broke up, hopped on the ore cart and rode it out to the entrance to the mine. We loaded my Jeep and GH’s Bronco, drove the ore to the jaw-crusher where it took about half an hour to crush it all down to minus ½-inch. By this time, it was late afternoon so we loaded the Jeep and Bronco back up with the crushed ore, and drove it down to the mill site on the river where we off-loaded it at the ball mill. J took a sample to assay that night (he had a small hand-size cast iron mortar and pestle to powderize his sample) and we were so exhausted, we all went home and I know I slept like a rock (no pun intended) that night.
The following morning, sore and hurting, I made my way down to the mill site. When I arrived, GH was there along with a Mariposa County Sheriff. Jay had passed away during the night.
