Two Knolls Mine

Two roads connect the tiny Duchesne River hamlet of Hanna with Rock Creek. One of them is rough and rocky, the other a little worse. That first road heads northward following Blind Stream, while the second leads eastward along Farm Creek. One of the clues Caleb Rhoads let slip, perhaps purposely, about one of the places where he found gold was that the trail to it passed between two knolls, one rock and brush covered, the other bare of growth. That trail crossed a small creek and turned up a canyon which led to the left just after those knolls were passed. No doubt similar knolls might be found elsewhere in the mountains, but there is just such a place near the head of Blind Stream.

Several hikers have come upon an ancient looking mine shaft in the area of those two knolls. That shaft is said to be located in Lake Basin overlooking the South Fork of Rock Creek. It is deep, but no one knows just how deep, for many of the foot-holds which had been cut into its vertical walls have sloughed off over the years, so that descending into it now could prove to be a perilous pastime. One brave, or perhaps foolish young prospector, recently told me that he had made his way down those crumbling stone steps while clinging to a rope he had tied to a tree growing back from the edge of that shaft. He descended nearly one-hundred feet before he ran out of foot-holds, from which level a dislodged stone disappeared into the black depths below, echoing as it bounced from side to side into that bottomless pit.--Faded Footprints, pg. 87