Big Things Have Small Beginnings - Part 4

We finally make it to the bottom of this impressive gold mine! We ended up getting four videos out of what started out as a tiny hole in the ground that we assumed didn’t go anywhere of significance… We thought it was just a little prospect shaft and look what we got instead! It’s all the more impressive to us given the extreme weather in the highest regions of the Sierras and the abundance of serpentine that have combined to take down so many historic mines in the area.

I should have kept my mouth shut about the huge potential of that bottom drift (I was tempting fate), but those were perhaps the newest workings in the mine and were built to more modern size standards? We also thought this may have been one of the levels of the Sierra Buttes Mine and so thought it had huge potential for that reason as well. We now know that this was not the Sierra Buttes Mine, but the location of some of the levels of the Sierra Buttes Mine remain unknown and this was in the right place to potentially be one of them. In fact, I am fairly confident that this mine was hitting the same veins that the miners were working at the Sierra Buttes Mine.

The experience where we thought that we felt air flow was an interesting one as we both felt it and it was even more noticeable when we were leaving… We were, of course, hoping for air flow as a sign of access to other workings. I’ve felt that before in abandoned mines that ended up being a closed space. My knowledge of the physics involved isn’t sufficient to really speculate intelligently, but I’m assuming there is some sort of pressure shift involving the mixing of cool air inside of the mine with the air from the outside world.

After extensive research, we were able to verify the identity of this mine beyond any doubt... There is no record of it extending deeper than we reached and so we can only conclude that the bottom of the hoist that we reached did, in fact, have a sump underneath it. Also, the main haulage adit extended back for about 2,000 feet. We were not far short of that mark from the portal that the Jakes filmed in the last video. So, we probably did not miss much when we were stopped short by that caved fault zone. The stope section where we dropped in was the highlight mentioned in the reports on this mine – and it was impressive indeed!

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You can see the full TVR Exploring playlist of abandoned mines here: https://goo.gl/TEKq9L

You can see the gear that I use for mine exploring here: https://bit.ly/2wqcBDD and here: https://bit.ly/2p6Jip6

Several kind viewers have asked about donating to help cover some of the many expenses associated with exploring these abandoned mines. Inspired by their generosity, I set up a Patreon account. So, if anyone would care to chip in, I’m under TVR Exploring on Patreon.

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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Видео Big Things Have Small Beginnings - Part 4 канала TVR Exploring