I’m here at another abandoned mine right at the portal. You can see the daylight streaming in
behind me. I'm here with Joe, Justin, and Todd. There will be links to their respective YouTube
channels in this video's description. Check out their videos! They have a lot of great content,
and their channels are growing so please be sure to subscribe and look forward to more of their
outstanding content! There’s a little bit of water in this mine. It’s just coming over the top of my
foot and pretty much up to my ankle. Further in, however, it does dry out, and we're going
to be climbing a lot of ladders in here today. Here’s a timbered section just inside the portal.
Once again you can see here in front of me where my light is that the water is,
indeed, flowing out of the mine. That’s a good sign in mines that are flooded.
There is
some pretty cool timbering here! Look at how these are all cut, square pieces,
but right up here they used a tree trunk right there. It’s the only one that's like that!
Yes, you can really see the water here flowing out of the mine, so that's a good sign!
Here is where the timbering stops, and we're into the mine proper.
Here’s an example of what they call “cribbing” in a mine where they stack
up these timbers crisscross style for support up there at the top. They call that cribbing.
You see that often in some of these mines. You see it every so often, and that's what that is.
It looks like that might go somewhere back there. There are ore cart tracks,
but we're going to stick to the main haulage tunnel this way. That looks like a dead end there.
And here's another timbered section.
There’s a shot looking back at the portal and Justin.
Okay, here's an intersection with some collapse there.
There’s a bottom of an ore cart. Just the wheels are remaining.
That goes somewhere back there, but we're going this way.
We’re approaching another intersection here in the tunnel. We’re branching off to the
right, and here's a power station. Yes, it's probably where all the power equipment was —
generators and all that kind of stuff. That’s not the shaft,
is it? JUSTIN: “That is.” Oh! That is the shaft! Oh yes! There’s the vertical shaft!
Here’s the safety gate. Oh, this is the shaft you said was flooded! Look at that!
The water is coming up out of this shaft and is flowing out of the mine.
That is flooded clear to the top there. See that?
Here’s a break room over here. There is a
picnic table up there where the miners would have taken breaks.
Here are some steps going up there into it. Check that out! This is looking back at the portal.
Here’s another power room on the left.
Alright, we'll keep going down the main haulage tunnel.
It’s finally dried out for the most part. There’s a little bit of water there on the left
but not here in between the tracks.
So we're still continuing down the main haulage tunnel, but do you notice this dark band right
here? It comes up and goes over the arch in the tunnel and comes down here on the right.
Justin was telling me this is shale. This dark brown rock is a seam of shale. Otherwise, the rest
of the tunnel is this gray material which I don't know what it is. Pretty cool! It’s pretty wide.
I'm going to keep going down the main haulage tunnel here. We finally got rid of the water.
So we are here at a Y split, and there's a
functioning ore cart! It’s missing a few pieces, but it still rolls on the tracks.
Here’s more break room seating and then a tunnel branching that way to the right through that door.
So we're taking the tunnel to the left here from that break room area at the Y junction.
Check out this retaining wall here! It looks like right here is a little bit of damage.
Look at all that rock that's being held up by this retaining wall!
Right here is some miners’ graffiti. Check out this drawing! That looks like a Native American
riding on what I'm assuming is a horse, I think. There is a name here.
Somebody Garcia. No date. I don't see a year. Miners always left their names and dates in the
mines. It’s kind of cool to see that because some of them date way back sometimes over 100 years!
Okay, we’re approaching an intersection here.
It looks like we're going to the right. That’s where everybody else is. See the track switch?
Let’s
see what's over here!
So this was an explosive storage locker. A lot of these paper fragments on this table are from
explosives or from inside the boxes and stuff, and they date from 1918. But there are no explosives,
though. No dynamite, no blasting caps. They’ve all been removed.
We’ll head back out here to the main tunnel and see where everybody went. They went
down this way, I guess. We will maybe check that right branch on the way back.
These mines are just so massive and there's a lot to see, so you can't see it all in one trip.
We just came from that way where the explosives locker was and, yes, that tunnel that was on the
other side is right here, so it just comes out right here. We are not missing anything.
Here are two sets of ore cart tracks. You don't see that very often in these
mines. I think I've only seen it one other time in 14 years!
Here’s a track switch for the tracks right here. It’s still in place!
We came to this room, and check this out! Here is a mucker on the tracks! There’s the scoop.
That’s pretty cool! It’s rare to find these inside these mines.
Here’s what I thought was a hoist but it's not. It is a drill sharpener!
That’s what Justin was telling me. I don't know how it operated. I don't know how it worked,
but it looks like a hoist. It’s a drill sharpener, though. I have never seen one of those
in an abandoned mine. Here is more power control stuff.
Here are some drill steels stored here on these racks. There is
more miners’ graffiti back there. Jose something. I can't read the last name.
1926 and 1927.
This here is an inclined shaft.
It’s flooded. Instead of a ladder there was a staircase,
and over here is where the ore cart came up.
Let me zoom in on that flooded area.
We’re not going down there! Check out these pipe fittings here
right at the top of the inclined shaft. There are a bunch of them just hanging here,
and the tunnel goes this way and we just came from that way.
Okay, that's the way we came from. We took a detour there to the right
and were in that control room where the inclined shaft was which is right there.
We just came back out into the main tunnel which continues this way.
Down this little, short dead-end passageway are two ore chutes. This is raise 9122 and it’s clear.
It’s empty! See that? It goes way up into a stope and probably turns vertical up there. Next to it
is a ladder that the miners would have used to get up there. Yes, you can see the ladder up there.
It turns vertical right there. This chute is totally blocked with rubble. It’s a massive chute.
These dots you see right here at the end of the tunnel are miners’ dots. I guess every dot was a
cart load of ore, and that's how they kept track by using dots.
Here’s some miners’ graffiti. Here’s somebody's name. I saw his name earlier in the mine.
So we'll head back out here to the tunnel and see where everybody's at.
Here is more miners’ graffiti! Check this out!
It looks like that's a miner there
and someone's running in front of him and maybe that's a dog or a cat — a miner’s cat!
We found this vein of some really colorful minerals. There’s a lot
of dark blue, and Justin said that's azurite. There’s also a lot of pyrite in there as well.
Yes, it's pretty spectacular! It’s a deep, dark blue in some spots.
We’re continuing deeper into the mine.
It curves here to the right and then to the left. There’s a lot of miners’ graffiti through here.
There is
one of those red explosives lockers
next to a big ore chute.
More miners’ graffiti. 1928. 1916.
Here’s a Y split.
Yes, I believe you could seriously get lost in this mine. I've only been in one
other mine that was like that. It was the Lincoln Mine up by Rachel, Nevada.
I believe this mine is the same way. If you don’t keep track of your route,
you could easily get lost. That says alternate escape-way
through this door. There are just branches going off everywhere, and it's multi-level too!
We just came from that way, and here is one of these
side tunnels that they dammed there. They put in some pipes and valves. They stored water
back there. They must have broken into a flooded part of the mine or an underground aquifer that
flooded the workings, so they installed this wall to hold back the water. It’s actually made
out of bricks. See that? There is one of the valves down there. Here’s a bigger one up here
and then something up there. There’s a lot of graffiti here from the miners.
They wrote their names here. I see 1921 as one of the dates.
So this was a source of water for the mine. We are going to continue
and we're going to go down here and climb some ladders way up into some other levels.
Okay, so we're climbing these ladders to an upper
level. It’s about 150 feet of ladder or something like that.
Here’s an ore cart without wheels.
Well, the tracks stop there, so we have to go up into the stope, I guess.
Here come Todd and Joe up the ladder.