Fire! Flames Take Down Historic Mine Shaft

This is a somewhat tragic first for us… This is the first time that we have accessed an abandoned mine that was ravaged by fire. I am happy that we were able to reach a part of a mine that most would probably have written off, but the circumstances of its destruction are lamentable.

Did you understand what happened from what I described in the video? Someone – or most likely a group of individuals – set fire to the wooden headframe and collar over the shaft of the newer workings. As the fire started burning down through the collar and timber supports lining the shaft, the air flow (from the connection to the older workings along that manway I climbed down) started pulling the smoke and ash deeper into the mine. That is why we saw the “black powder” all over the inside of those workings… It wasn’t black powder, it was soot! And the reason the fire didn’t spread farther than the shaft is because there were no timber supports or wooden track ties for a sufficient distance from the shaft that the fire was unable to spread beyond the shaft. Just the smoke, soot and ash were pulled in. As an interesting "oh by the way" - those conditions would have made the air down there lethal for quite a while.

With the support timbers destroyed by fire, the entire shaft collapsed. Perhaps a drift kept running on the other side beyond where everything had collapsed down the mine shaft? Perhaps there was a skip car still sitting in the shaft waiting for the miners to return? We’ll never know now…

I often fulminate over the destruction of abandoned mines by various federal and state agencies, but I have to give them a pass on this one. This has every appearance of being carried out by drunken locals... And I’m certainly not suggesting that I never did anything dumb or reckless when I was a kid (or even today), but I have never destroyed a piece of history. And did you notice that burning the shaft and headframe was not sufficient? They also torched the hoist house and tried to burn the trestle on the incline as well.

We were fortunate enough to have found an alternative route in to this abandoned mine. Normally, a mine shaft that was torched and collapsed as this one was would be completely inaccessible.

There was not a lot to be found in the way of records on this mine. Gold, silver, lead and copper were mined here, which makes for a colorful geological mix!

A report I saw from 1926 references the “old workings” that we started out in. So, presumably, the "newer" workings that we descended the manway along the ore chute to date to roughly that time as they were at least in the planning stage in 1926. The workings where we started simply being referred to as “old” does not provide a lot to work with. However, in my experience, that labyrinth of stoping we experienced is a feature more associated with mines of the 1800s. More contemporary miners would not have put up with those miserable working conditions if they had access to tools like pneumatic drills and the like.

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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 Fire! Flames Take Down Historic Mine Shaft канала TVR Exploring