We decided this great historical spot needed a cache. This cache is in honor of the early miners in the area and their ingenuity. You can continue down the road and follow the pipeline to visit the remains of the Sturkey cabins. You can also follow the pipeline down even further and see where the pipes get narrower and where the placer mining took place.
It was in 1895, Sturkey and Challis, in partnership, located one of the largest and best known placer diggings in the Stanley Basin. The site was 12 acres of rich placer ground on the divide where Kelly Creek gathers its headwaters and at the very head of Joe's Gulch. Names of the claims were "The Producer," the "Red Jacket," "The Delight," and "The Bingo." Challis, although a partner, spend most of his time in the area of the town of Challis, and Sturkey was in charge of the mining operations. This was known as "The Sturkey Placer" for many years. The site is thought to have been located originally in 1863 by a man named Matthews, and who, like Alvah P. Challis, had numbered in the Captain Stanley party.
To work the ground, Sturkey, of German extraction and learned in the fundamentals of hydrostaticsm devised a way to turn the operation into a hydraulic works. In doing this he developed a series of ditches directed to a kind of reservoir at the head of Stanley Creek (Located over the ridge) by damming off all the small streams in the vicinity and forcing a heavy flow to a large ditch that followed around the mountain slope and graded down to a 12 inch pipe and into a canvas hose with a nozzle attached to the end. The large ditch was dug by hand to 15-20 feet deep in places, depending on the contours along the mountainside, and ran a distance of four miles to where it connected with the 12" pipe. When filled with water, this provided ample pressure with witch the hillsides of the placer ground could be sluiced down to bedrock. When this was done, the loose gravel and sands were run through a series of sluice boxes, and thereby most of the gold and associated minerals were saved. While worked this way by Sturkey, one of the claims is reported to have yielded $11,000 and another claim in the same vicinity yielded $5,000... a rather tidy sum in the early days.
In 1919 Sturkey said "That's all boys" and that August he sold out to J. J. Hohman of Pittsburgh, Penn. What Hohman did in connection with the placers is not known, but eventually the site was abandoned and lay idle until re-located by John Weidman in 1931. It then became known as the "Weidman Camp." Weidman, also German, constructed the reservoir still much in evidence today, a short distance from the Sturkey cabins location.