Chaotic Collapsing Mine Maze - A Johannesburg, California Gold Mine

The mines in this gold rich area around Johannesburg, California, have been sealed for the most part. We managed to find a way into the old underground workings of this particular mine and encountered a real maze of collapsing and caving drifts and stopes. We spent a couple of hours climbing and crawling our way through the interesting workings and, after climbing up an ore chute, inadvertently ended up looping back to where we had started. Many of the wood caps on top of the stulls have been severely compressed, indicating that a good amount of ground movement has occurred. This area is not far from the epicenter of the 7.1 magnitude earthquake that occurred near Ridgecrest, California, on July 5th of 2019. It probably won't be too many years until these workings are completely collapsed. We hope you enjoy the video, and thanks for watching!
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