Exploring The Abandoned Fortuna Silver Mine: Mechanical Delights

We wrap up our explore of this abandoned mine with “mechanical delights” in the middle adit… In this case, they take the form of a Hendrie and Bolthoff geared friction hoist. It weighed 1500 pounds and would have produced about 10 hp. The drum was designed to hold 600 feet of ½ inch rope (as a reminder, miners call metal cable “rope”) and it would have been able to hoist 1500 pounds at 225 feet per minute.

I found some good information on Roth & Co. too at the following link:

https://pre-prowhiskeymen.blogspot.com/2018/10/sixty-years-of-roth-co-sans-roth.html

In case it wasn’t clear in the video, the hoist was for that void dropping down in front of the hoist. As I found out later, that drops all of the way down to that ore chute that we encountered in the very first video (the bottom adit) that the air was blasting out of. Remember that? So, were they hoisting ore out and dropping waste rock down? Or vice versa? Or were the ore chute and the hoist used at completely different times and had nothing to do with each other? It’s impossible to say now… Obviously, a significant amount of work was being done down that pit/winze for the miners to go through the cost and hassle of bringing that heavy hoist into the mine. Think of how much effort simply maneuvering it into place would have taken! So, it feels pretty safe to say that there are some respectable stopes or drifts down there. I would say that this is one where I wish that we had had the ropes with us, however, that ground looked pretty bad around the winze. The concern with being on the ropes in a situation like that is with rocks dropping down on you from above. Even a rock the size of your fist can put a world of hurt on us – or even prove fatal – if it falls a sufficient distance.

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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 Exploring The Abandoned Fortuna Silver Mine: Mechanical Delights канала TVR Exploring