So a couple of months ago my friend from England and I headed out to our mine. Although we are up there to work at the mine we usually take a couple of days to explore abandoned mines in the area.
I haven't been able to identify the name of this mine.
So we drove up the trail leading to the mine and see a good sized mine building. All around the area are small tailings piles indicating a lot of prospecting. Right behind the building is a large tailings pile and a vertical shaft. We decided to explore the building and mine first. Then rig the rope to drop the vertical shaft to see where it went.
We parked up the truck and started walking around the area. Everywhere we looked there were "scratches" (that's what we call small diggings) on the hillsides. Some were sizable while most only went back 10 to 20 feet.
The mine building is in pretty good shape for its age. It makes the exploration more fun to find them mostly intact. We generally find these collapsed on themselves.
Tony wanders around checking out the site. Although all of the machinery was removed, there were close to 50 ore sample bags scattered around the back of the building. The samples were labeled to be checked for gold, silver, copper, and a number of other minerals. We found a large shaker table with an air pump so we are pretty sure they were primarily looking for gold.
Sometimes it's the small details that make an explore interesting. The old miners used bottle tops as washers when they nailed the tin siding to the building. Pretty neat.
The ore was pulled up an incline out of the mine, then was pushed along these tracks to be processed.
Although there were interconnected diggings all along the face of the hillside, this was the adit where the ore was winched out.
The main incline in angled downwards at about 30 degrees. It looks pretty impressive but only goes back about 75 feet before ending. The workings beyond the end of the incline were not very extensive.
Given the size of the mine building and the tailings piles, this mine just wasn't large enough. Either we were missing something, or the large shaft just beyond the mine building was the "main" mine. It still didn't explain why the winch pad inside of the building was orientated towards the incline, not the shaft. Then we make a find! Tony finds a shaft that leads down. Wayyy down.
The shaft has a ladder and an ore chute. Evidently the miners were dumping the ore down the chute, loading it at a lower level, then winching it out from somewhere else. Did this connect to the vertical shaft that we had found?
After a long climb down we found ourselves in a horizontal drift. Time to explore! One of our little friends can't be bothered by strangers exploring his mine. They were everywhere in this mine.
At the top of the vertical shaft we had noticed burned wood. That's pretty common since people love to throw burning trash down these mines trying to start a big fire. With all of the old, dry wood laying around they often succeed. When we got to the bottom of the ladder we found a drift with lots of smoke on the walls. That pretty much confirms that the vertical shaft connected to this drift.
The walls got more smoked covered until we came to a pile of dirt blocking the drift. The dirt was coming from the roof and didn't have any smoke particles on it so we were pretty sure we had found the shaft. Tony decided to see if we could dig our way into the shaft.
It took about an hour of digging with makeshift tools to dig our way in. We were able to clear an opening just large enough to squeak through. Yes, it's as small as it looks. The girls got a little "squished" if you know that I mean.
Here's a shot looking straight up the shaft. Although not visible in the picture, there were a whole bunch of birds flying around just below ground level. I'm guessing they had nests in the upper few feet of the shaft. Unfortunately their flapping wings rained dirt down on us the whole time we were down there.
Overall it was a pretty neat explore. We found another shaft up on the hill above the mine. It turned out to be about seventy feet deep. We rigged a rope and I dropped down the shaft. Probably the most interesting part of the explore was the condition of the ladder. The top twenty feet were rotten and couldn't be depended on. The next 20 feet were good. The next 10 were held in place by by two nails and swing back and forth. Then that last 20 feet were missing all together. Oddly the shaft just ended as if the miners had just decided not to come back one day.
This little mine "complex" was certainly worth the time to explore. It would take about two days to really explore it all, poking your nose in every little crack and crevice. Of course that's the best way to explore since you find things that the "all ahead full speed" explorers miss.
As we close out 2015 I'm looking forward to more explorations in 2016. Although I do have some pictures that I still haven't posted up from this year's explorations.
Abby Normal