This abandoned gold mine was an intriguing one for me… To start with, I had extremely low expectations for the mine shaft and only visited the site because the location was extremely convenient to tack on to the end of a long mine exploring trip.
Once inside, I quickly realized that I had set the bar too low on this mine and that there was actually something interesting here. In particular, the cascade of stopes dropping down to the bottom level caught my attention. Sure, we’ve seen stopes dropping down to the lower levels of shafts before. Nothing unusual there. However, this mine was essentially all stopes with a shaft running down the middle of the stopes. In other words, the normal layout is that you have the shaft with drift levels running off of it that lead to stopes (and maybe a stope or two along the shaft). This mine, however, had practically nothing in the way of drift levels until we got to the odd level at the bottom. It was practically just stopes until the bottom… The ore body must have been very tightly confined at this mine!
What the miners were doing at the bottom level is still a bit of a mystery to me as well. Looking at the footage again when I was editing it, I am more convinced that that ramp system was somehow connected to a slusher, but there are other things that don’t quite fit that idea. So, like I said, intriguing…
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All of these videos are uploaded in HD, so I’d encourage you to adjust your settings to the highest quality if it is not done automatically.
You can see the gear that I use for mine exploring here: bit.ly/2wqcBDD
As well as a small gear update here: bit.ly/2p6Jip6
You can see the full TVR Exploring playlist of abandoned mines here: goo.gl/TEKq9L
Several kind viewers have asked about donating to help cover some of the many expenses associated with exploring these abandoned mines. Inspired by their generosity, I set up a Patreon account. So, if anyone would care to chip in, I’m under TVR Exploring on Patreon.
Thanks for watching!
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Growing up in California’s “Gold Rush Country” made it easy to take all of the history around us for granted. However, abandoned mine sites have a lot working against them - nature, vandals, scrappers and various government agencies… The old prospectors and miners that used to roam our lonely mountains and toil away deep underground are disappearing quickly as well.
These losses finally caught our attention and we felt compelled to make an effort to document as many of the ghost towns and abandoned mines that we could before that colorful niche of our history is gone forever. But, you know what? We enjoy doing it! This is exploring history firsthand - bushwhacking down steep canyons and over rough mountains, figuring out the techniques the miners used and the equipment they worked with, seeing the innovations they came up with, discovering lost mines that no one has been in for a century, wandering through ghost towns where the only sound is the wind... These journeys allow a feeling of connection to a time when the world was a very different place. And I’d love to think that in some small way we are paying tribute to those hardy miners that worked these mines before we were even born.
So, yes, in short, we are adit addicts… I hope you’ll join us on these adventures!
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15 мар 2022
