We headed back to Placerville this morning, not to the town proper but to Gold Bug Park to visit Gold Bug Mine. The mine, which used to be called Hattie was opened in 1888, and is a typical hard rock mine of the Mother Lode. We got to walk in to the 352-foot drift and see where and how the miners drilled and blasted away the rock in order to find gold.
We started on the self-guided tour that came with an audio guide and got to learn about how the miners worked and the native rock that they had to deal with. There was a guided tour going on ahead and we caught up to them and listened in for a while. The guides were really cool, very energetic, and explained about the blasting and powder monkeys and such, before giving us a demonstration of signaling with bells, and working by candle light. They did extinguish all the lights for a moment and the blackness was absolute – pretty scary.

After we finished up the tour we trekked over to the Joshua Hendy Stamp Mill and learned how the gold was extracted from the rock once it had been blasted from the mine. The rock was fed in to the stamp mill and then huge weights that weighed 1,000 pounds each and that rotate, would pound down on it breaking into smaller pieces. Apparently the noise when the stamps were working was astonishing, and could be heard in Placerville over a mile away. The volunteer at the mill turned on a miniature stamp mill for us and the noise from that was deafening, I can only imagine how loud the real thing was.

Mike: I missed the "mother load" too! I don't know what I was doing!

Afterwards we sat and had a nice picnic at the tables in the park. It was a nice day out, very interesting and in a beautiful quiet setting.