Cobalt Headframes — DNF

A did-not-find, written up in full, because the found ones teach you almost nothing.

The theory was that a clue referencing "the shaft that drinks" pointed at one of the flooded workings on the Cobalt silver field. There are, depending on how you count, between nine and thirty of these. We picked four on the strength of a phrase in a 1908 inspection report and walked them in a single day.

Where the reasoning failed:

• We treated "drinks" as necessarily meaning flooded. It is at least as likely to be a reference to a drift — the miner's term — and we never tested that reading.
• We selected our four candidates by driving distance from where we parked, and then constructed a justification afterwards. This is not a method. This is a schedule with a story attached.
• We stopped at four because it got dark, and then wrote up the day as though four had been the plan.

Nothing was found. Nothing was going to be found. The value of the day was entirely in noticing, on the drive home, that we had reverse-engineered our reasoning from our convenience — which we have now caught ourselves doing twice, and which is the actual failure mode of armchair treasure hunting.

We will go back. We will go back with a reading of "drinks" that we chose before we chose where to park.