Treasures At The Rainbow Mine - Part 3

I am off of the fire lines and can finally relay some of the history of this wonderful gold mine to you as I now have the reports in front of me… The rich quartz vein that made the Rainbow Mine its fortune and glory was discovered by accident in 1857 when a group of miners running an adit for an underground placer gold mine in Chips Flat stumbled across it. Perhaps needless to say, it got their attention.

The mill and other equipment we saw outside (in the first video in this series) date from a boom period during the 1880s. The amount of gold being pulled out of the mine during that time (including one chunk of free gold that measured two and a half feet long and one foot in diameter!!) allowed for a - at the time - highly technologically advanced mine to be developed with the 10-stamp mill, the first Pelton Wheel and one of the first aerial tramways constructed by A.S. Hallidie. The whole mine was running on electricity in the 1880s! Yet, many people believe we didn’t even have electricity harnessed yet during that time…

After the 10-stamp mill was completed and the Pelton Wheel was running, stockpiled ore was run through the mill and in just four and a half hours, 149 pounds of pure gold were recovered! Do the math on how much that would be worth in today's prices...

The famous North Star Mines Company of Grass Valley worked the Rainbow Mine from 1921 to 1925 and the Sixteen to One Mine acquired the property in 1943.

There are actually upper workings to the Rainbow Mine as well that were also tremendously rich, but it is my understanding that they are not accessible. The upper and lower workings were connected by an internal shaft (a winze) and I suspect that that section where we were blocked from proceeding to the end (where all of the water was cascading down from) may have been the winze in question.

Around the middle of the video, I show a map of the underground workings. I know the map looks like spaghetti, but there is a logic to it. That main line going down the middle with the dashed lines in it is the main haulage adit that we followed. Also, near the middle – do you see that chamber where “hoist” is marked? That is not the first chamber where that awesome headframe was, but that is the chamber where that second flooded winze was (the winze with the gradual decline and where the frame and ore bin had apparently toppled forward). The map kind of makes it seem as if the workings leading off of that winze are on the same level as the main haulage adit, but if you look closely, you’ll see that they run underneath the main haulage adit. All of those workings that are shown there run off of that winze and they are all underwater. I would love to know what is down there. The same holds true for all of those raises and stopes we passed too. Hopefully, the layout and the structure of the Rainbow Mine make a little more sense with that map included.

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All of these videos are uploaded in HD, so I’d encourage you to adjust your settings to the highest quality if it is not done automatically.

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

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 Treasures At The Rainbow Mine - Part 3 канала TVR Exploring