Exploring the PNW's Lost Mining Camps in Search of Rare Glass Bottles

While I moved to the city my older brother Colby never strayed from our wild outdoor roots. He worked for the US Forest Service and is truly a mountain man, a lover of the outdoors, and by far the most hardcore adventurer I know. His favorite thing to do in the wilderness though, after all these years, is bottle digging.

For the past half decade I’ve been using my summer trips back to Washington to reconnect with my brother through these epic bottle digging expeditions. Colby does all the pre-planning, locating the old survey maps, finding the GPS coordinates for mining claims that might hopefully remain untouched, then figuring out the best route to get there. This often means bushwhacking up the side of a mountain carrying heavy packs with all our metal detecting and digging gear, which often weighs 50 to 60 pounds. The weight of our packs on the way in is rough, but it’s nothing compared to the way out. Once we’ve added the extra weight of our fragile found bottles, it’s a delicate dance back down.

I always feel like I’m on an Indiana Jones adventure when I’m out on these bottle digging expeditions. It's such a trip when you’re that far into the middle of nowhere, start digging, and then end up pulling out a small glass medicine bottle from the late 1800s that has been buried in the dirt for over a century. Through rock slides, falling trees, and all the elements of nature, somehow a bottle can survive in perfect condition. I’ve panned for gold before and I can honestly say that digging up a pristine bottle feels even better.

Finding these bottles deep in the overgrown woods, lost to time, feels like finding buried treasure. When these sites were operational, food often came fresh or in tin cans, but everything else came in glass bottles and jars. The most common bottles we find once held whiskey, beer, or wine. We still love to collect these, but the ultimate score are tiny medicine bottles. They often have embossing that says where they're from and what kind of snake oil or elixirs they once contained.

Once, I found a broken piece that said “Wizard Oil” on it. We typically don’t carry out broken shards and I’m still kicking myself for leaving that one behind. My brother Colby’s most prized find is a little tiny poison bottle that's about two and a half inches tall and covered in little bumps so that if someone was rooting around a candlelit cabin, they’d never accidentally mistake the poison for medicine.

My best find came at the tail end of our expedition this summer, right before we were about to pack up and head back to the car. We had just finished excavating a site, finding a handful of small bottles. We went a little bit further up the side of the mountain to get to where we thought the cabin actually sat. There, I noticed a piece of round glass sitting on top of the dirt. I started to dig at it with my fingers and it just kept getting bigger and bigger the more I dug. In a matter of seconds, I was pulling out an unbroken oil lamp. Colby started losing his mind; he's found pieces of lamps before but never one that was fully intact. It felt like an incredibly serendipitous way to end another great trip with my last find being so rare and special.

That being said, there are times when we get out there and we can't find any bottles or relics at all. This hobby can be a bit of a roll of the dice but that’s part of the fun. Once we wrap up digging, whether we’ve found treasure or not, we’ll go explore the abandoned mine nearby. These mines are a portal into history. When we go into them, they sometimes feel as though the workers just got up and left in hurry, leaving everything behind. We’ve found old denim pants, broken leather soled boots, and steam powered tools.

Just thinking about the lengths it would have taken to get these large, heavy tools this far into the Cascades is astonishing. It always boggles my mind that the people who found and worked these mines over a century ago did so without any of the lightweight performance fabrics, GPS units, fancy water filters, or freeze dried meals that we have today. After a day spent digging and exploring the mines, the thought makes me grateful for my hot dinner and warm tent back at camp.

Spending these adventures with my brother has brought us closer and I’m grateful for all the memories we’ve been able to make doing the same thing we used to love to do as kids. And just as my dad and his friend introduced this uncommon hobby to us, we've been able to introduce it to others too. A couple of years ago, my best friend Cory came on a trip with us and got hooked on bottle digging. He’s been joining our digs ever since. This past summer my girlfriend Madeline, who has a love for antiques, came along. After six miles of bushwacking up the side of the mountain, she made the trip's first bottle find. That alone made the effort worth it—seeing someone find their first bottle and pull it out of the ground, a giant grin of excitement on their face, almost feels like finding my first bottle all over again.