It was not our intention at the start, but we spent our entire day exploring the gold mine that hollowed out this mountain, wrapping our way down and around it… The lyrics for “She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain” came to mind on many an occasion! You see, it may not have been clear in the video, but we started at the top of the mountain, as that was our initial target based on old mine maps, and then made the fateful decision to “have a quick look” to see what might be down below. Aside from the error in leaving our climbing gear behind, we failed to realize that we were committing ourselves to an entire day of corkscrewing down and around the mountain as one appealing adit or bit of historical mining infrastructure after another presented itself on the horizon.

What we had here was obvious older workings (the first adit we visited that punched into the huge stope) from the 1800s that may have been worked into the 1920s or 1930s. However, these workings would have been difficult and expensive to access. The lower – and much more accessible workings – were obviously worked up until recently. Ease of access is a big factor with many mines! There are many rich gold deposits in our world that are simply too remote or inaccessible to be profitably mined.

The difficulty in accessing some of the workings at this mine provided us with an interesting look into many generations of mining from the 1800s to today. Many things in small-scale, underground mining have stayed very much the same, while others have only changed slightly (you’ll notice the larger adits and drifts in the more modern mines, for example).

Looking at the large operations of Newmont, BHP, Anglo American, etc. though, mining has changed considerably from a century ago. Think of a modern, open pit mining operation and compare that to some of the shoestring prospecting operations I have featured on this channel. It’s like comparing tossing a rock into the air with a rocket launching a crew of astronauts to Mars.

Underground miners in general are an endangered species and with the larger companies like Rio Tinto increasingly automating underground mining and bringing in robots for as much of the work as possible, that is probably the future until the pendulum swings and human labor again becomes the cheapest input.

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You can see the full TVR Exploring playlist of abandoned mines here: https://goo.gl/TEKq9L

You can see the gear that I use for mine exploring here: https://bit.ly/2wqcBDD and here: https://bit.ly/2p6Jip6

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.
I hope you’ll join us on these adventures!

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