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Hi everyone, Cody here
So ive been hiking around most of the day and in fact uh
I'm now off the ranch, if i think about it the ranch should be that way a couple of miles
And I'm actually currently on public lands, behind me is a thing I've been looking for
right back there
This uh mine, they were actually mining mercury here
Lets go get a little bit of a closer look at that
Yeah, here's the entrance of the mine here
You can see that somebody's been in there recently, with some beer cans, but you'll notice
that all of the wood is actually fairly new
Now, my dad says that he was over here when he was a little kid and and they were still mining this
I think there were still mining in here till the 80's so that would mean this wood is only like
what... 40 years old, not even 40, maybe even closer to 30
Yeah
see
that was probably bought at Home Depot
It was probably one of the newer mines in the area
Yeah, I don't want to go in there today, mostly because I don't have a light, and second I have no idea what's back there
could be a..
there could be a hole in the ground that was covered up with stuff and I would never know
So! Actually lets head back out and go look at the thing that I actually wanted to come out here for
Now, I actually brought my other camera
you can see it right here
might as well pick this back up
Now unfortunately this thing is a brick right now
because I packed the wrong battery and I don't have a way to get it to run again
So unfortunately I'm using my cell phone here
anyway
Right down there is the thing I wanted to come over here and look at
and here it is
If my sources are correct
this should be a mercury still
they were actually distilling the mercury right here
now
It looks kind of weird and I actually don't know how it works
but uh yeah
they were definitely roasting something
see there's a fire box in there
looks like a hopper
just sticks in it
so yeah
My objective for today was to have a look at this and see how it works
okay..
So I'm up standing over the hopper here..
see it mostly got sticks and stuff that has fallen down in it
and I've been trying to dig this out
a little bit..
using this uh..
what I assume is a
some sort of rake
to see exactly where those tubes go
so I'm still digging those out
but I'm also finding some rocks in here
pulling those up towards me
see
yeah this rock
doesn't look like ore to me
In fact, most of the rocks in here
appear to be more or less random
I think someones throwing them in
lets see, there's a white one there
looks like calcite
let's pull that up
eh that looks promising
oh yeah there we go
there's some cinnabar right there
see this red spot
little bit different color than you would see with iron
see
here's some iron staining right there
see how the cinnabar is a much darker red
yeah so here's our ore
right here
in fact..
if I'm not mistaken there's another piece right there
there we go
ehh
definitely what I would expect to find associated with cinnabar
look's like mostly iron staining there
sure if I broke it open and looked at it a little closer I might find something
but yeah
so that's the ore they're using
and I'm assuming that this thing
I'm assuming this hopper was filled with the ore
and then it fed down
into the heat box
down there
so this would have been full of fire
would of gotten hot
let me look at this a little bit more
Okay, so it looks like the ore would come down this big square shoot
then I've got this pipe that goes through it
now..
that goes down into here
where it would be heated by a fire
Okay, so my current hypothesis is that the rock, after it's been roasted and heated up, comes out this shoot here
and air, I'm thinking, would be sucked in here
possibly there's some holes so that it would mix the air with the rock
not entirely sure on that
It looks like there's a little bit of corrosion here
...maybe I can bust this open and see what's inside.
see here...
It looks like there are some rocks in there
Know what, that looks like a piece of lime
Which I'm assuming was calcite which has been heated up
Excellent. Hypothesis verified.
So the ore did come in here
and then out here
Looking in there
I don't really see a connection
but I'm assuming there is one
So my thoughts are
that mercury vaporizes from the rock
and then it gets pulled along with heated air
up this pipe
goes around
goes down here
and up that stack
the top of that is capped off, I've looked at it
then
hot gasses would go down this
little pipe there
then there's a second stack coming up
So, I'm assuming the mercury would settle down
at the bottom of these things and get collected
So I dug down on this
and it appears that either this piece of steel has completely rotted off
or it was open at the end.
So there must have been a collection vessel right down there to collect the mercury
Possibly even something that, like, screwed on?
Uh, you can see it a little bit better over on this side
See this one's also about the same
It looks like it's quite a bit rotted but it used to have some threads on there.
So they might have had a bottle or something
to catch the mercury
and uh, this tube right here
is vented to the atmosphere
So yeah, these
were the condensation columns to collect the mercury
Awesome
So the rock would go down this hopper
and this chute
get heated up in this box
til it's red hot
then air would pass over it
being sucked in, because it's buoyant
the air would go up through this pipe
down there
up here and it'd get cooled off
and then it'd go down this one
and up that one
to get finished cooling
What an awesome piece of engineering.
Heh, heh
Okay
That's all I wanted to know
I guess I'll go back to my own mine.
Okay, so I'm back at the ranch
I've got a battery for my camera
and, there's an outcrop of cinnabar ore behind me here
which I've extracted mercury from in the past.
Now, the cinnabar ore here is a little bit different than what's on the other side of the mountain
You can see here
it's got sandstone instead of the calcite.
as you can see there.
Now, I would argue and say that the ore is actually the same
it's just had a little bit of different chemistry happen to it
since it was formed.
The rock that's associated with the ore that was on the other side of the mountain
is the same. It is sandstone and it's got those little red specks throughout it
and it does of course contain cinnabar
The thing that's mainly different here is the fact that there's no calcite.
But I would actually venture and say that there used to be calcite here.
In fact there were probably veins of calcite just like this
and because the conditions on this side of the mountain were a little bit more acidic
the calcite has dissolved away over time
leaving these nice smooth pieces of cinnabar behind
Uh, the coloring is a little bit different
but I would actually say that that's probably due to the fact that this has been hot at one point.
I'm not sure if that was because it was in the hopper next to the fire, or if
there was a forest fire that came through and heated it up
but yes it's uh, it's gotten a little bit hotter
Uh, the color is similar,
It could also be due to the fact that the crystal size in this one's a little bit larger than this one
So the ore here is very similar to what they have on the other side of the mountain
But, I'd say that the quality here is quite a bit lower
which is why that I personally have only been able to extract maybe about a pound of mercury from it.
So that raises the question:
where on earth did I get hundreds and hundreds of pounds of mercury to flush down a toilet?
(chuckles) ...if you've seen that video, well link over there somewhere.
The answer to that is actually that a lot of the mercury did come from over on the other side of the mountain
My grandpa was friends with them
and
mercury wasn't actually what they were mining for mostly. They were actually after the gold
which is associated with the cinnabar.
See the cinnabar actually contains a very small amount of gold in it
and what they were doing is they were roasting it out, they were extracting the mercury
and then they'd save the rock and they'd crush it up
probably did a cyanide process to it to leech out the gold.
And uh
as far as I know they were actually selling the mercury
until the price of mercury dropped
and they still had a bunch of mercury they wanted to get rid of
and my grandpa took several flasks off of their hands
and that's the mercury I have today.
That's not all of the mercury I've got though
I did have a dentist
or actually the son of a dentist down in California,
he had a bunch of little one pound bottles of dental mercury
he wanted to get rid of them, I was someone who was very experienced with working with mercury
and... so I took them off his hands.
So I hope that answers some of the questions you had
Hope you enjoyed
and I'll see you next time.