Back For More Pain: Returning to Sierra County's West Coast Mine...

Exploring abandoned mines can be quite a test sometimes. Sometimes the test is physical and sometimes the test is mental. In this case, it was our patience that was tested! We usually can give some background on a mine - especially if we know the name of it and can research it. However, with this mine, we just chased down a site on a map and could not find records on its history. Well, of course, the upper adit that was easy to get to was eroded shut. So, we started down a trail to the bottom of the canyon that went past the second adit that was marked for the West Coast Mine. Aside from admiring the enormous trees on the way down, we couldn’t help but notice that the trail was wide and was in quite good shape. It was very steep getting down to the second adit, but with a trail like this, we figured that a lot of work must have been done at this lower adit. Well, a lot of work WAS done, but not by the miners! We arrived to discover that the second adit did not merit a place on the topographic map at all as it was literally a small hole in a rock. Nevertheless, the U.S. Forest Service had bulldozed the trail we hiked down on all of the way to this adit and had placed an expensive grate over… A. Hole. In. A. Rock. I’m not exaggerating… As if this wasn’t enough, they also pushed all of the mining equipment that was there over the edge of the cliff. A colossal waste of money and time! We decided to keep exploring the area and below the lower adit, we discovered the largest water ditch that either of us had ever seen. These ditches were used to transport water for use in mining and would serve multiple mines in the area. Chuck decided to hike along the water ditch to see if he could find anything interesting, while I decided to hike down to the bottom of the canyon to see the creek down there (Canyon Creek) and also to see if I could find a trail that supposedly climbed out the other side of the canyon to the site where Morristown used to be. Well, I didn’t find a trace of the trail, but I did find an abandoned dredging claim. These are more common now that California has banned dredging, but this one had more gear that they had abandoned than any other claim I have ever seen. I thought it was interesting to see all of their equipment and the spot they had along the creek was absolutely beautiful. It was a long, long hike out of that canyon though…

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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 niche of our history is gone forever. But, guess what? We have fun 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 hundred years, 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 Back For More Pain: Returning to Sierra County's West Coast Mine... канала TVR Exploring