Henry Reinink (b. 1956)

Henry Heinink is a hand miner in the Klondike gold fields who started working his claims on Eldorado and Bonanza creeks in 1985. He is one of only a few modern miners who dug a shaft to bedrock and worked along the pay streak by hand. He says it gave him something to do in the winter. He thawed the frozen ground using a wood-fired boiler and steam heat funnelled through metal pipes. He worked underground using a kerosene lamp for light. A three-foot-high drift took him three months to dig. During the winter of 1990/91 one of his steam boilers was covered by glacier ice while he was outside. He hopes to discover a documented historical shaft that Deep Hole Thompson and his partner dug in 1902. Over 200 feet down, they found a layer of bedrock and three paystreaks of virgin ground but were flooded out before they could mine it.¹⁾