An Insider’s Look At Active Placer & Lode Gold Mine: Part 3 - Quartz Veins

In this next video of our explore of this historic placer and lode underground gold mine, we start encountering more of the lode elements… There is, of course, still virgin ancient river channel underground at this mine that, if the numbers proved to be anything like the miners of the past encountered, would mean there is still a staggering amount of gold underground here. However, this mine also contains several large, high grade quartz veins and many small fissure veins.

The adit at this mine was run for gravel, but miners are not too picky about where their gold comes from. So, when they encountered gold in the quartz veins, they did not complain. The description of the discovery of the veins is reported as follows: “…[the adit] driven for gravel encountered a quartz vein 35 feet wide on a contact between the slate and serpentine with perpendicular walls. Twenty feet next to the footwall rich in sulphurets and free gold. Sulphurets show galena, zinc, and iron pyrites assaying $1500 per ton. After drifting 100 feet on the vein no deterioration in the quality of the quartz is perceptible. The quartz vein does not show anywhere on the surface being entirely lava capped."

As a reminder, that $1500 per ton was for prices in the 1800s. It would be considerably higher now!

Also, to put that mention of the lava cap above into some context… The lava cap has a thickness of over 600 feet in some locations at this mine. That is a LOT of lava. Imagine the kind of eruption(s) that would have taken place to produce flows like that!

So, to recap the geology you observed in these three videos: The adit initially cuts through serpentine, then encounters a fault contact with the lava, goes through the lava, enters a belt of amphibolite, re-enters the lava and again goes into the serpentine and amphibolite.

We are wrapping up the underground portion of this mine with this video. In the next video, we’ll go into great detail showing you the buildings and equipment on the surface – everything you need to know to get a gold mine of your own up and running!

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All of these videos are uploaded in HD, so adjust those settings to ramp up the quality! It really makes a difference.

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

And a small gear update here: https://bit.ly/2p6Jip6

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

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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Видео An Insider’s Look At Active Placer & Lode Gold Mine: Part 3 - Quartz Veins канала TVR Exploring