Great Finds At A Gold Mine In The Sierras - Part 3 (Final)

I can state unequivocally that I have never encountered a forked portal before as we discovered at this abandoned gold mine. Never… I have never seen or heard about one either. The reason for those twin adits branching off from the forked portal is a complete mystery to me too.

If the lower adit had just been for drainage, why did they put rail in? If the upper adit was too small (and as small as the lower adit was, the upper adit was even smaller), why did the miners not simply expand the upper adit? This mine was too little of an operation to have had traffic that would have justified needing one route in and a separate route out (It wasn’t set up inside for that anyway). The upper adit intersected that large quartz stope and so it is not as if the miners missed what they were looking for and had another go at it. The two adits were only a few feet apart. So, any ideas from the audience? I’d love to hear them.

It crushed me to not be able to access that upper level in the “forked portal” section of this mine complex… I did everything I could to get up there and there just wasn’t anything available for a foothold and there just wasn’t anything to grab onto to haul myself up. I think even Alex Honnold would’ve struggled in the heavy waders too. I took a lot of pictures and enlarged them as much as possible when I got home and it just wasn’t possible to see how far back that section went. Considering that the miners dumped most of the waste rock into the creek, it could go back a fair distance. The sketchy adit in the last video was fairly large (we didn’t even see all of it because of the caved sections) and yet it had no accompanying waste rock pile since it had all been dumped into the creek.

As I was exiting from the upper adit of the forked portal section, it seemed there was a more contemporary bottle on the ground. I don’t think anyone came in the mine and left that. Instead, I think someone tossed that into the portal and when the snow melted in the spring (the point where there would be the most amount of water in the adit), it floated back there. I saw no evidence that anyone had been back there for a very, very long time and few people are willing to endure what I did to get back there.

How about that rock test in the upper adit? Wherever that rock went, it dropped for a long time. One might assume it drops to that upper level I was unable to access (the one I discussed above), but that isn’t guaranteed. For one thing, it seemed to fall for too long. For another, it didn’t hit water and it seemed like that section I couldn’t access was pretty wet. Lastly, it isn’t possible to tell in the video, but the location didn’t seem to match up too well with the “forked portal” adit. Perhaps there is another adit that we missed because it was eroded shut? So many questions about this lode complex…

As I mentioned in the description below the last video, the adits we discovered during this day of mine exploring were progressively older and so this was the oldest. How old? It is difficult to say with certainty, but this could go back to around the time of California’s Gold Rush given the history of this mining district. At one time, I believe this mine was completely separate from the mine complex we explored in the first two videos. However, it may have been incorporated into that complex at a later date, making all three videos of the same mine. The records on that are not entirely clear, but they suggest that possibility and it is fairly common for many mines to become consolidated into one.

The amount of stuff along the creek was unreal. We weren’t looking for any of that either… That was just the stuff that was easily visible since it had been churned up by the creek. It provides a real sense of how much historic mining activity took place in this area. Imagine what someone with a metal detector would turn up!

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

You can click here for my full playlist of abandoned mines: 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.

I hope you’ll join us on these adventures!

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