We stepped out of the drift, our eyes squinting in the unfiltered light 11,000 feet above sea level. To the left of the adit as we faced out, built right against the cliffs banded iron and yellow, the remains of an old cabin were strewn on the bench that hemmed in the mountainside.
The unmortared walls, constructed of native flat rock that the miners fit ingeniously together, almost as if they’d cut the stones, was about up to our thighs. Old ventilation pipe the width of my calf lay crumpled and collapsed everywhere, oxidized in some segments, but otherwise well-preserved.
“Look,” Tern said, picking up a nail that may have helped hold on the roof, which was reduced now to gray, hollowed flotsam the color of the granite all around us in these peaks. The old nail was rusted, its machined-shape barely discernible beneath layers of rust. “They didn’t use square-headed nails like this after the 1920’s. So this mine is a hundred years old at least. But maybe older. Could be late 1800’s.”
Tern knew how to dig. After our discovery, he came up with old geological surveys that showed the adit we’d just plumbed had been excavated in the 1870’s.
In the rectangular floor plan of the old cabin, along with the stones which caused us to walk unevenly up and down the 12′ x 20′ cabin built into the cliff, were the remains of an old cast iron stove with a large, artful ‘B’ carved into the door. The stove was manufactured in Belleville, Illinois, sometime between the 1850’s and the 1950’s. Tern turned that fact up later, but it didn’t help us narrow down the date of the mine any.
We sifted through the rubble and detritus of what we estimated was the work and lives of 3, maybe 4 men. “Why is the stove in pieces like glass like this?” I wondered.
“Cast iron’s pretty fragile. It breaks like glass.” Hinges, the doors with the filigree they used to decorate buildings and even small, manufactured handles. The remains of their only means of heat for body and food lay everywhere. The necks of brown glass bottles. “Could’ve been whiskey,” Tern remarked. I shrugged.
“Look at this, Tern.” I held up a thick circle of clear glass. “Looks like the bottom of a jar.”
“It does,” he agreed. And then he held up another shard, clear, but untempered. “This, this is window glass.”
“Really. They had windows for their cabin. How’d they get ’em up here without breaking them?” I answered my own question. “Mules. They used them to work the mines and carry out ore.”
He surveyed the vast boulder field that spread about before us in an apron. “My guess, Mike,” Tern said in his usual, polite way, “is that if we climb down this rock pile, we’ll find all sorts of things. They probably just tossed all their garbage over the side here.”
As soon as we started our climb down the slide, we lost sight of the mine. We were high in the mountains, far from any trail. The black shape of the adits we’d explored, painted like the eyes of tombs into the mountain, weren’t visible from any trail. And even the trails below us weren’t well-used.
The boulders were huge but stable. The smaller scree had long ago sorted itself, dribbling down into the streambeds in uncountable rockslides. Everywhere, we found cans, well-rusted tin. He held up a short can smoothed with rust with two holes punched in the top by a can opener. “What do you think was in that?” I wondered.
“Condensed milk,” he said, and I nodded. I remembered the old cans of Milnot my mother used to buy. A lot hadn’t changed in the decades since the miners had been here, the three or four souls who spent at least two years here mining gold. We wondered how long condensed milk had been around and guessed since maybe the 1920’s. Which meant that other miners had picked over the site and followed the color in the rocks all the way from the streams trickling below us in the forests up to the three adits we’d discovered.
“What about this one?” I asked, holding up a larger, rusted can. “Coffee,” he guessed, and I pursed my lips and nodded again, tossing the can back into the midden in the talus slope.
There were dozens of cans like it, along with flecks of glass embedded in the rusted, bouldered skin of the mountainside.
Climbing on all fours, we finally made it to the bottom of the rocks, and discovered what neither of us expected or wanted.
© 2022 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23
Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Four of his short stories have recently been published online:
Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)
The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October
Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within