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In my previous blog I sent out an appeal for someone to join me in the challenge. Youth and brawn are needed to help conclude this exciting but slow motion adventure. I met a couple of individuals who seem to be just the right balance of smarts, age, and willingness. However winter descended too quickly and harshly for any development to take place this year. That’s not really a problem for me as I’ve been living in next-year country for nine years now anyways. So what’s one more… It just means Christmas won’t hold any big celebration this year, other than enjoying life in the age of Covid-19.

This isn’t the conclusion I expected. Yet here I am, admitting that I did not recover at least one of the two lost gold bars. And the exceptional high price of gold these days rubs salt into the wounds of defeat. My return to the area of this great adventure buoyed my spirits and enabled my emotions to absorb the silence and calming effect of the natural world. I needed that after the near constant bombardment of excess noise in the urban sprawl of my environment.

I feel the target is correct. The eight years of research and investigation still has me believing I know where at least one bar lies, within one cubic meter. My old body is the problem. At sixty-nine years of age, my ability to work with strength is gone. My lung function is good as the previous few years of walking several kilometers a day has proven. But while digging in ground the consistency of wet cement, my arms and hands ache and I rapidly run out of energy. I admit now that I am no longer a treasure hunter but a writer, one who wishes he were a younger man. Yet I can’t complain about the aging process as the alternative isn’t good. Still, this is not how I wanted the quest to end. “How I Almost Found the Lost Gold Bars of Camp McKinney…..”

Who wants to buy a treasure map? Highest bidder not necessarily accepted. This is a part of BC history and is not meant to be melted into scrap gold. Treasure, after all, is more valuable than scrap gold. After subtracting the smallest bar that evidence suggests had been sold by Roderick in 1896, roughly fifty pounds remains. One bar should weigh about twenty-five pounds and court evidence reveals the Cariboo-Amelia gold bullion, unrefined, ran about sixty-three percent give or take a fraction. That still gives close to sixteen pounds of pure gold at twelve troy ounces per pound for well over one hundred and eighty ounces. That’s for one bar about the size of an old vhs tape.

Perhaps I should’ve had my book ready to hit the market, composed a cryptic poem and let the public have a go at it. If Forest Fenn is remembered for anything in the history books, it should be that he encouraged others to embrace and enjoy the quest for gold. I assure you, despite my age, the adventure brought a lot of excitement into my life at a time when the the looming years of retirement had little to offer.

I hear Shirley Bassey singing the theme song for Goldfinger on the oldies station playing in the background. How appropriate. So dear reader, does anyone out there appreciate a good challenge?

Recent discoveries about my personal nature and the understanding of my psychic abilities have encouraged me to take a bigger step towards embracing and sharing these often mystifying experiences. The theme of the story is embracing the obsession of the lost gold bars while exploring my experiences involving psychic abilities I knew I had but never understood. This doesn’t change the story written to date but merely adds the content to this blog. The mysteries of spirituality and nature are an integral part of the story but weren’t as apparent to me when most of this blog had been written.

One great relationship lost due to my obsession

Two metal detectors bought and used

Three injuries including  head trauma, scratched eye lens, torn hernia repair

Eight years involving the quest

Over thirty-five thousand dollars spent searching and writing a novel and screenplay

Twenty-six pieces found directly related to the robbery

Seventy-six trips to the forest

Eighty-four countries shown visited the blog

Close to fifty thousand kilometers driven in all seasons

Two visits to the archives allowed me to investigate a wealth of material for a future book. The first happened last October and the more recent trip in February.

Best of all, a senior on a tight, fixed income can travel from the lower mainland to downtown Victoria and back for less than eleven dollars. Seniors travel free on the ferries from Monday to Thursday, perfect for my needs. Public transportation worked well on both the mainland and the island although patience is required. I took food along and stayed at a great location just blocks from the museum. Hard to beat Airbnb in the off season.

In October I photographed correspondence between the BC Provincial Police and the Inspector Hussey in Victoria. My focus centered around the gold bar robbery and subsequent inquest from 1896 and 7. New information helped to clear up misinformation about the robbery and following events. Having used a straight pen and bottled ink as late as my grade four class, I was amazed at some of the beautiful handwriting in the days before ball and gel point pens. There is a sharp difference between the educated and less educated from the 1890’s. The shaky signatures revealed a man not used to handling a pen. My two grandfathers were such men. The Englishman had an education in a private boys school and came to Canada to farm the freedom of the prairies. The German from Odessa could only pen his name but he built barns that still stand and fiddled with the best of them. Education starts when you decide to listen.

The February trip included a few rare gems. I watched the last shift to work at the Camp McKinney mine on a 1966 tape. The fifty second clip goes all too fast but we see the cable man working in the wheelhouse, the last miners coming up and later the last ore car pulled up with the help of a 1950’s GMC truck. Rare good luck to see the clip and perhaps in the future I can share it with you. It appears on a video shot on the old Dewdney Trail. The tour of the trail showed a grave for one of the Royal Engineers, a fact I hadn’t seen listed on other sources. The fee to use the Dewdney was listed as one shilling or twelve pence per fifty pounds of freight. I also listened to part of an interview with an early resident named H H Stevens. He drove the stage from Penticton to Grandforks and back in 1897, a rough journey that took two days one way.

I took photos of mining affidavits from the 1890’s. The legal requirement dictated miners had to swear they did a minimum amount of work in their or someone else’s mine before the mining licence was issued or reissued. I’m well acquainted with Hugh Cameron’s name and connection to the camp. He made an oath several times but for uneducated miners I believe. Expenses were listed as well. Dynamite, always a necessity for hard-rock mining, varied from a low of thirty-sevens cents a pound to a high of forty-seven cents a pound with an average of forty.

My book for this adventure, now in its eighth year, continues to grow. But I am nearer to the end, closer to an exciting conclusion.
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