Digging Open A Lost Gold Mine

The existence of this gold mine is not a secret. Knowing that something exists does not prevent it from being lost though – even if we’re talking about a gold mine! A vague location of this mine is known by a few people as it appears on a handful of old maps. However, the workings of the mine and the locations of the entrances are something that many people have hunted for and have failed to locate over the years. When I was hunting for it, I actually walked right past the portal the first time, although I thought it looked a little off (one does get an eye for such things after visiting hundreds of abandoned mines). On the way back, I climbed up the cliff to take a closer look and realized that I was looking at the top edge of a mine portal that had eroded shut. The dig was on!

Locating this portal was not sufficient though. After a considerable number of hours of digging, we broke through to see down to an adit that was completely full of very deep water that had built up behind the earthen dam created by the portal eroding shut. Given the way that bits of floating pine needles were slowly moving in the water, we concluded that another, lower portal had to exist. Sure enough, after further hunting (and aided by a better sense of where it should be), we located this lower portal.

We knew that the only way that we could get in to this gold mine would be if we could drain some of the considerable amount of water inside as the water level ran up to the top of the adit. So, we spent two days digging through the huge amount of rock and dirt blocking the lower entrance to the mine until we could begin releasing a sufficient amount of water. As the lower portal had even more (and deeper) water backed up behind it, we then trekked back to the portal I located and dropped inside from there.

The flooded false floors are a little sporty to cross because it is impossible to know how rotted the wooden supports are. Further, as soon as one approaches them, the silt that is churned up by walking clouds the water and one can see absolutely nothing. So, the technique we developed in that situation is to locate the rails with your feet and to then duck walk across the pits on the rails. Only one person at a time goes across and one does not step off of the rails until feeling around with their foot to make very sure that they are off of the false floor.

Toward the end of the section of the mine that we were able to access, it appeared that that branch off to the left had been badly caved for a long time. The branch going off to the right seemed newer and, I presume, it was intended to circumvent that ugly caved area. However, as you saw, this newer section caved as well! So, there is definitely some bad ground there. Serpentine is notorious for caving like that.

This underground lode gold mine dates back to the early 1880s and within its first year of production, it is estimated to have delivered in excess of 3,000 ounces of gold. Efforts to design and build a mill in the 1890s failed, leading the mine to be abandoned. Since that time, there have only been a few brief and half-hearted attempts at resuming the mining of gold.

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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 Digging Open A Lost Gold Mine канала TVR Exploring