We are at this abandoned mine, and we are going to check it out.
This is the severely eroded entrance. Back in the day you would have been able to walk
in here standing upright. You can see how much erosion has come down off the hillside above us.
So let's go in here and check this out.
I'm sliding in here, and look who's with me! PAUL: "I can't believe you left me here for five years!"
Does everybody remember Paul? There's Paul! You can see behind him that the tunnel looks
like it's blocked with a cave-in. That's from an explosion that happened back in
the 1940s when they tried to close this mine. It looks like it is blocked, but when we get
down there you'll be able to see that we can go up and over that and into the approximately
2000-foot long tunnel that lays beyond. So we're going to check this out and see what's in here.
We're just inside the entry chamber here. It opens up. You can see there
above Paul. Here's this big rock pile that we had to climb up, and that's looking back
down at the entrance. You can see me -- I'm laying on my stomach here, and there's my foot
coming up this pile. This is a really tight entrance, and the rock here is
delaminating. This mine is very crumbly,
but we're going to head that way over the top of this pile. The tunnel continues beyond.
That's looking down at the entrance. We just climbed up this rubble pile. Yes,
we think what they did was they dynamited this in an attempt to seal the mine, but what they did was
they created this large chamber that you see here. The main tunnel continues down
that way, of course, but what happened when they dynamited this is that all these rocks
just fell from above me and didn't completely seal the tunnel like they had hoped.
It left a gap for explorers like us to get in here. If you look at the rock here,
there are different colors. There is gray wtih brown mixed in.
Paul has already gone ahead, so let's go down there and join him.
So that is looking back towards the entry chamber. We just came down that collapse,
and now we're in the main haulage tunnel. It is a straight shot, and we're headed that way.
So we're continuing down the main haulage tunnel. Right here
is a minor collapse that probably came from there on the left and maybe here on the right.
You can see on the right here just how fractured these are. That is just waiting to come off! See
that gap there? So that's why that collapsed here. This is looking back at what we just came through.
Continuing forward, there's another collapse up here. You can see here
on the tunnel wall the marks from the pickaxes that the miners used to dig these tunnels. This
rock is so crumbly and soft that they didn't use dynamite in here. We have seen no blasting
holes. You can see all the pick marks from where this was dug by hand back in the 1920s and 1930s.
Check out all those marks!
There is a lone timber here holding up
that section of rock right there.
The tunnel continues that way
So we've arrived at a four-way intersection. There's a tunnel there, Paul's jacket and a
tunnel there behind his jacket, a tunnel here, and then one here that we're going to attempt
to dig out. You can see down there that it's timbered. We found a map of this old mine that
says that the tunnel there goes for about 1200 feet from this point onward and that the entire
tunnel is timbered. So we're going to attempt to dig this out and see if the tunnel is open beyond.
Yes, that's what we're going to do, so let's check it out!
Here's a close-up of this timbered passageway we're going to try to dig out.
You can see that the timbers in the ceiling are kind of are pointed downward, but we think that's
nothing to be worried about because there's a cavity up in here.
Because these boards are intact, we think that this rubble did not fall from above
these boards. Instead, we think this rubble was put here deliberately to keep people out. So we're
going to try to dig this out. Some pretty heavy timbers here, and that's what we're going to do.
So here is what we've done so far by digging for about the last three hours. We totally exposed
that second cross-timber there at the top of the arch. We can see the ceiling boards in the next
section and can feel the next cross-timber with the shovel even though it's still under
all that rubble. So that's what we've done so far. PAUL: "You can see how much this is all leaning,
too." Yes, it's leaning on the left side because there's no lagging like there
is on the right side to help keep all the debris in. So it's constantly pushing down.
Right here where Paul is sitting is what we've removed. What did you say, Paul? A couple cubic
what? PAUL: "A couple cubic yards, at least." A couple cubic yards of rubble. PAUL: "Basically
all of that in that hollowed-out area."
Yes, that's what we've taken out. So we're going to go a little bit more
and see if we can get further, but this might be one of those ongoing projects.