Pleasant Exterior Hides Ancient Catastrophe

The setting at the start of the video seems like a peaceful, pleasant scene in the forest, no? Picturesque, historic cabins occupying a clearing in the forest... It could easily be a scene in a painting. Well, that impression is accurate. However, as you’ll see, the evidence of an ancient catastrophe lies just beneath the tranquil surface of this scene.

This entire region was obliterated in a massive volcanic eruption that sent a devastating pyroclastic flow ripping through the ancient forests, scorching them with superheated gases and scouring them with a rock-filled wind traveling at hundreds of miles and hour. The devastation was not complete though as this pyroclastic flow was swiftly followed by a crushing volcanic mud flow (lahar) that buried what was left of the incinerated forests and the streams and rivers within them.

Several years ago, we found a layer of burned plant matter in another mine farther north of this one. As seen in this mine, that layer was deep within the earth, but it was almost entirely made up of leaves and small twigs. My take on this situation is that smaller, more delicate plant matter was pushed farther out from the core of the ancient volcano’s destruction. The large trees that I found in the mine in this video suggest to me that this location was closer to the volcano. Simply put, a large tree would not have been hurled as far by the volcanic blast as leaves and small twigs.

I hope that many of you have visited Mount St. Helens, or are at least fairly familiar with it, as it is a template for what happened here in that, almost instantly, a lush, thriving forest was transformed into a wasteland.

The twist here is that most people don’t see how this looks underground!

Of interest to the miners of the past (and present), the volcanic destruction also locked in all of the gold that the ancient rivers were pregnant with.

YouTube limits the space we have to write descriptions. So, if you’re curious for more detail on the ancient rivers seen frozen in time in this video, I go into more detail on how these were formed in the description of the video below (and this is also one of the best underground placer mines I have explored):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_HQr1WacDw

They’re a fascinating phenomenon that appear to be unique to the Sierra Nevadas of California. To be clear, there is underground placer mining throughout the world, but I know of nowhere else that taps into ancient river channels rather than contemporary river channels.

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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

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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 Pleasant Exterior Hides Ancient Catastrophe канала TVR Exploring