While most teachers spend their summer breaks grading papers, planning curriculum, or simply recharging in the air conditioning, Jeff Schafer is somewhere in the northern Nevada desert, swinging a sledgehammer in the heat.
Schafer, an Akins High School teacher, leads a double life. During the school year, he helps students navigate their education. But come summer, he is a bona fide gold miner, owning two active mines where he digs, crushes rock, and hunts for the precious metal that has captivated humanity for centuries.
His interest wasn’t sparked by the allure of wealth initially, but by family tradition.
“My grandfather got me interested in minerals and fossils and digging up cool stuff when I was a little kid,” Schafer said. “And it just never stopped. I’ve been digging holes in… I mean, boys dig holes, you know.”
That childhood curiosity has evolved into a serious operation. Schafer currently owns two mines in Nevada: “Grandpa’s Gold,” a placer mine where gold is sifted from loose gravel in waterways, and “Copper Point,” a hard rock mine that requires breaking up boulders to extract gold trapped inside.
For Schafer, the transition from the classroom to the mine is drastic. He lives off-grid in a 10-by-6-foot camper he built himself, relying on solar power and hauling his own water. The days are long and physically demanding.
“The most challenging part, I would say, is being disciplined to spend, you know, at least six hours working a day in the desert heat,” Schafer said. “Just the discipline of getting up every day and going out there. Not taking a day off because I want one. I only have so many days in Nevada and every day is important.”
The work is grueling, involving sledgehammers and rock crushers, but the rewards can be literal nuggets of joy. Schafer recalls a specific moment at Copper Point when his luck changed. While walking through an area known for pretty blue and green copper rocks, he spotted something different.
“This year I saw an ugly black rock,” Schafer said. “I picked it up and I looked at it and said, ‘That’s gold.’ And I put it in my pocket.”
The find was so surreal that it took him five hours to even mention it to his roommate and mining partner.
“It was unreal, you know? Like the thing your dream comes true and it’s not… it doesn’t feel real at first,” he said.
Sometimes, the gold turns up in unexpected places. Schafer brought back a ton of ore to Texas to process in his garage. While breaking up the rocks, a significant piece—a seven-gram nugget—went flying into his driveway, only to be discovered the next day.
“That was the most exciting piece of gold I’ve ever found,” Schafer said.
He isn’t shy about sharing these discoveries. Schafer often carries a rock with visible gold flakes and a small vial of gold pieces in his pocket, ready to show students and colleagues the tangible rewards of his labor.
Despite the physical toll and the isolation, Schafer hopes that one day his summer gig could become his full-time retirement plan. He holds onto the dream of finding a legendary “potato-shaped” nugget, similar to those found by settlers in the region years ago.
For now, he is content with the hunt, the solitude, and the unique satisfaction that comes from pulling treasure out of the earth.
“Every time I pick up a rock with gold in it, I smile,” Schafer said. “And I’m like, yeah, another rock with gold in it.”
While the prospect of striking it rich is a major motivator—Schafer openly admits, “I’m a gold miner for the money”—he also sees a poetic parallel between his hobby and his profession as a teacher. He often uses mining as a metaphor in the classroom to encourage his students.
“I talked to the kids all the time about how each of us is like a hunk of ore and we’re all working on refining our gold and becoming better and better,” Schafer said. “Everybody’s like this piece of gold. You got something really good inside of you and you got some other stuff to get rid of in life.”
