Treasures At The Rainbow Mine - Part 2

I know that last week I said that I would get into the history of this gold mine and some interesting “oh by the ways” about it when we started the videos of exploring underground… However, I am typing this up at the fire department and, aside from the distraction of forest fires burning all around us right now, all of my reports and notes on this mine are at home. So, I shall have to postpone my “oh by the ways” and history until the final video, I’m afraid.

Given how busy we are with fires right now, this will be brief, but I did want to get into a couple of things… First, in case you missed it in the video, that awesome headframe was actually built when the gold mining work was done in the 1990s. That is why, despite being made of wood, it is still in reasonably good shape. As I understand it, all of the mining in the 1990s was done off of the workings down that winze. Sure, the miners looked around and did some surveying in the 1990s, but, as was told to me and as I gathered from the reports, no gold was extracted from elsewhere.

Secondly, how great were those quartz veins in there? The miners tapped into a brilliant, big blob of it around that chamber with the headframe. No surprise then that they drifted all around it as well as down through it! I thought that maze of quartz on the side of the chamber as I was heading down the side drift was revealing. For the quartz to be all wrapped around on itself like that, the ground must have been very fractured. That, of course, is suggestive of some violent geological activity in the past.

Also, we hustled past a couple of interesting things on the haulage adit on the way in. Don’t worry, we’ll stop and take a closer look on the way out (in the next video). We overlooked some cool stuff!

Oh, and because some people were asking in the comments last week... The Rainbow Mine is on private property owned by the 16 to 1 Mine. And if you haven't seen that series, I would very strongly suggest that you type "16 to 1 Mine" into YouTube's search bar and check those videos out because that is an absolutely incredible mine.

I’m going to click “Publish” now and get back to the fires. However, as promised, I’ll go deeper into the mine and its history next week.

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All of these videos are uploaded in HD, so I’d encourage you to adjust your settings to the highest quality if it is not done automatically.

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

As well as 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 Treasures At The Rainbow Mine - Part 2 канала TVR Exploring