Alaska Mine Exploring Adventure

Alaska is a place that I have wanted to visit for a long time. However, given the size of the state and given the time and costs to get there, I had the impression that one would need two to three months to see it properly and to make the trip worth it. I was never able to find a block of time like that and so Alaska always remained a project for the future…

You know those people it is impossible not to hate out of jealousy because they have a relative that works for an airline and so they are always getting free flights? Alaska is a place that is great for someone like that who can’t devote a block of 2-3 months to exploring, but instead can break the visits up into a couple of weeks at a time using the free flights. Well, last year my sister started working for Alaska Airlines. So, now I’m one of those assholes with the free flights! Let the hate flow, I understand perfectly… Perhaps needless to say, Alaska is the first place I opted to go.

The scenery was pretty incredible in Alaska and I could not have shared a video from Alaska without at least some of the scenery being a part of it as well.

It was quite the expedition to get to the mine seen in the video, but, as you’ll see in future videos, this mine was not the only reason we flew out to that area. The need to fly out to mines is not unusual in Alaska. Surprisingly few parts of Alaska are connected by road and so flying is often the only practical way to get somewhere. A town may have roads in it, but the roads will not leave the outskirts of the town and go anywhere else. With such towns, everything has to be brought in on a ship if it is along the coast or flown in. I’ve read that one in five Alaska residents has a pilot’s license and that doesn’t surprise me. It probably would have been cheaper if I had gotten my lapsed pilot’s license up to date and rented the plane myself, but I would have been so busy looking at the views that I probably would have flown into a mountain. Better to let someone that knows the area do the flying anyway…

Alaska is famous for its placer mines, but it had – and has – plenty of lode mines, such as the one in this video, too.

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

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. 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 Alaska Mine Exploring Adventure канала TVR Exploring