An Insider’s Look At Active Placer & Lode Gold Mine

One advantage of exploring a lot of abandoned mines, and sharing those explorations publicly, is that it gets the attention of miners and the owners of active mines... As such, I have received invitations to visit some extraordinary mines that are not normally accessible to the public (such as the 16-to-1 Mine). The visit to the underground gold mine you will see profiled in this series is the result of another of those generous invitations.

I am exceedingly grateful to Aaron (the miner acting as our guide) for putting this visit together and for securing permission for us (Thank you again, Aaron). Aaron often reads and responds to the comments on videos if you have any questions for him about this mine. He has a LOT of experience working here and knows quite a lot about this mine. I can’t guarantee that he’ll respond, but given that he has a particular interest in this gold mine, I’d be surprised if he didn’t.

This mine has quite a history, which I’ll expand upon in the descriptions of the remaining videos in this series. For now, suffice it to say, the mine is quite old by the standards of California and it has been worked by many different miners over the decades that saw great potential in it. As you can see in this video – and will also see in the remaining videos - it’s a difficult mine to operate, but the gold is undoubtedly there…

Somewhat unusually, this is both a placer and lode gold mine. For those of you that don’t know, a mine is typically one or the other. Rarely, do you have both in the same small area encompassed by one mine. Underground placer gold workings in this area take the form of gold-rich ancient river channels buried underground for countless millions of years. That is why the adit has to be run through solid rock to reach the placer material. Lode mines are the typical mine that most people think of when they think of underground mines where the gold is embedded in the rock itself and has to be crushed to be extracted.

As I briefly touched on in the introduction, I will show the equipment and buildings on the surface, but thought I would start underground as I know most viewers would be itching with curiosity about what was there. Hopefully, after seeing the underground workings, the mining equipment on the surface will make more sense to you and can be appreciated more.

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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 канала TVR Exploring