Visiting A Weird California Gold Mine

You never know what you’re going to get when exploring abandoned mines and this weird little gold mine is a prime example of that. Where do I start with this one? That homemade stamp mill that looks like it was made in someone’s garage? I’ve certainly never seen anything like that before. That jaw crusher for crushing the gold ore coming out of the mine? One of the largest I have ever seen… That enormous trench leading to the upper adit? I’ve certainly never seen anything like that before either. That series of cuts spiraling around the center point where it seemed a building had been at one time? That’s another thing I have certainly never seen before.

So, what we were able to explore underground did not end up being enormous, but there were a lot of interesting things going on here. So far, I have been unable to locate any records that outline the history of this abandoned mine, which is a shame because I’d love to know more about it (and to share that with you). It’s difficult to tell with the homemade and repurposed equipment, but if I had to guess, I would estimate that the last work at this mine was done as recently as the late 1970s or even the early 1980s (a time that coincides with a large increase in gold mining activity as a result of surging gold prices during that period). So, it is possible that someone that mined here can recognize it and weigh in with additional details.

As I mentioned at the start of the video, the guys I went out with on this day (and that took me to this site) are the Gold Country Explorers. The link to their page online is below:

https://tinyurl.com/y3galchq

I can’t help but cringe when seeing terrain that is as overgrown as this area in the Plumas National Forest is… The high cost of the criminally incompetent mismanagement of our forests in the U.S. is increasingly plain for all to see (and was painfully demonstrated last year in the deadly forest fire that destroyed the California town of Paradise). For those of you not familiar with natural fire cycles in the western United States, fires used to burn through these forests as a result of natural causes every 8-12 years on average. This process would thin out the brush and clear out dead material. This meant that fires were of a low intensity and large, healthy trees could easily shrug off the minor fires that passed through. The result was relatively open forests, dominated by big trees and supportive of diverse flora and fauna. Then came the policy decision from the U.S. Forest Service that ALL fires are bad and must be extinguished immediately. The results were predictable: dangerously overgrown, unhealthy forests that are filled with highly combustible material and are capable of supporting far fewer species... Now, rather than getting low intensity fires that improve the health of the forest, we get firestorms that incinerate everything in their path, killing even the largest trees. If the above sounds like I am speaking from extensive personal experience, well, I am.

We really have a lot to thank the Forest Service for.

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You can see the gear that I use for mine exploring here: https://bit.ly/2wqcBDD

You can click here for my full playlist of abandoned mines: 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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