Deeper Into The Unknown Beneath Tombstone, Arizona

Well, here we are… This was a good way to get back into things – back in Tombstone, Arizona with some of my good mine exploring friends and testing ourselves by pushing the frontiers of mine exploring. As dusty and as technical as this level of mine exploring is, one is more than compensated for the difficulties by being able to emerge from the underground realms and to literally walk straight over to the Depot or to Big Nose Kate’s Saloon for a great dinner and drinks. One can then make a drive of just a couple of minutes back to the hotel for a shower and time to soak weary muscles in the hot tub. That is a very different experience than the normal mine exploring experience of forcing down an MRE and warm water for dinner and then squeezing my mud or dust-covered body into a sleeping bag on the hard ground. Sure, gazing up at the stars from one’s sleeping bag is an experience to be had, but I’ll take the good dinner and hot tub if given the choice.

It reminded me of when I was covering the war against ISIS when based in Erbil, Kurdistan. Normally, when documenting a conflict, one must spend long nights sleeping in muddy trenches or the equivalent. In that war, the front lines were a short drive from Erbil. So, I could go out in the morning and get combat footage all day and then return to one of the luxury, five-star hotels in the capital that were deserted and where one could get a room for pennies on the dollar (and you can imagine the premium level of service I received by being the only guest in a luxury hotel).

I didn’t plan to save the best for last in this video, but that is how the day played out. I can’t say that I’m sorry to have the “time capsule” experience at the end though because it was nice to end the day on a celebratory high point.

Chasing these leads is very much a numbers game... For every nine stopes or pits or winzes or whatever that one drops into and that end up being caved or going nowhere, the tenth can lead to an area that no living human being has laid eyes upon since the miners walked away a century ago, leaving all of their equipment in place.

In case I wasn’t clear when I was speaking, the miners were not using ore cars in that last section. What they were doing was filling ore buckets and then pushing those ore buckets on that flat car to the end of the trestle. When they reached the end of the trestle, they would have dumped the ore down some sort of ramp or chute (only the remains were left) into another ore bucket that was waiting on that wooden platform. Once the ore bucket was full, the hoist would have pulled it up the winze and into a waiting ore car. Another miner would then haul that ore car away. It was a lot of work for a bucket’s worth of ore!

Haha, and that wooden platform was very rotted. When Graham (Mines of the West) descended onto it, he just kept right on descending through it! It’s a good thing that he was still attached to the rope.

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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

Several kind viewers have asked about donating to help cover some of the many expenses associated with exploring these abandoned mines. Inspired by their generosity, I set up a Patreon account. So, if anyone would care to chip in, I’m under TVR Exploring on Patreon.

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.

So, yes, in short, we are adit addicts… I hope you’ll join us on these adventures!

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