Female Gold Miner Discovers 50 Million-Year-Old Skull Rock at the Bottom of an Ancient River

Placer County, CA, October 27, 2011 --(PR.com)-- Female gold miner Jada Kelly has spent this past summer living and mining with her boyfriend on their gold claim which is at the bottom of a 300-foot-deep section of an ancient Tertiary gold-bearing river in Placer County, CA. This ancient river dried up 50 million years ago and then in the late 1800s miners blasted this dried up river bed with millions of gallons of water to extract the gold. When hydraulic mining was outlawed in the 1890s due to the resultant environmental damage, the miners left a large portion of the bottom of this ancient gold-bearing river un-worked. This is where Jada spends her days mining for gold. Jada shares, “It is grueling and muddy work to be sure, but at the end of each exhausting day if I find gold at the top of my sluice box all of that hard work is quickly forgotten and a sense of hope and elation fills my heart once again.”

One thing that makes Jada’s job interesting, aside from the gold, is the variety of different rocks that she comes across in her mining. “I can honestly say that I have tossed over a million rocks this summer while mining for gold, and every now and then I see some really interesting ones shaped like familiar objects. With Halloween coming up next week, I guess I was thinking about skeletons and ghosts and things, so this past Friday the thought crossed my mind ‘Wouldn’t it be neat to find a rock that was shaped like a skull’. I don’t know why I thought that, but apparently the universe was listening.” Since it was just a passing thought she didn’t give it much notice, but then the very next day Jada was working a new section of her claim and she noticed a white quartz rock on the ground that looked like a rounded top hat. This caught her eye so she walked over to pick it up and when she flipped it over what she saw sent chills up and down her spine. It turned out that the other side of the rock looked exactly like a deformed human skull, with the teeth and everything. It was even the size of a human skull. “I must admit, it looked so real it gave me the willies and creeped me out a little bit. Then when I brought the skull rock back to camp to show my boyfriend he said it gave him the creeps as well. Even though it was creepy I decided to wash it off and keep it because I still thought it was very cool. I also thought that there could be a collector of skull items who might be interested in it.”

When Jada has not been occupied finding gold and interesting rocks, she has been busy writing her new, highly-entertaining book entitled “The Millionaire Miner: Gold, Ghosts, Celebrities, and Other Stories” which chronicles her adventurous, and sometimes dangerous (yes, bears, rattlesnakes, and mountain lions!) life as a gold miner in the California gold country.

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