Special Visit To The Incredible 16 to 1 Mine: Part 7 - The Ballroom

If you appreciate quartz and its associated geology, this is the segment of the 16 to 1 Mine for you… I have never seen quartz like this in any other mine that I have ever explored anywhere in the world. “Ballroom” is literal here too at the Sixteen to One, as aside from this massive section of quartz being the size of a large ballroom, the mine really did host dances and weddings underground here. In case you missed it in the video, the dance floor is currently covered up with a large amount of waste rock. So, if you can imagine it, this ballroom of quartz was even larger in the past! It would be a hell of a job, but wouldn’t it be something to see that forty feet of waste rock hauled out to open things up to the level of the dance floor?

Something that regrettably doesn’t come across so well on the screen you’re watching, given the lack of points of reference for scale, is that that quartz chamber is running off for hundreds of feet in all directions… Then, the stopes dropping off from the main ballroom chamber angle down for hundreds of feet as well to the drift levels we explored earlier. The “ballroom trail” that we climbed up was really just a stope that we followed up to the main ballroom chamber.

The work involved in getting this massive space carved out of the quartz and then getting all of that ore and waste rock (mostly ore) out is hard to imagine. I think it would be very interesting to see production figures specifically for this part of the mine in order to know how much gold was taken out of just the ballroom. In other words, I wonder if it was high grade material with rich pockets of gold or if they milled all of it down?

What the old timers did here is really incredible to me and I can only imagine what they thought as they were working their way through what must have seemed like an endless amount of quartz.

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Another video of mine from a few years ago that covers the ballroom is referenced in this video… If you’d like to see a different visit to the mine and another perspective on the ballroom, that video can be found here:    • Exploring Active Mines: Alleghany's S...  

Our guide on this tour, Duane, has a YouTube channel of his own in which he has posted videos he has taken in mines where he has worked. It can be found here:    / @muleskinnermining8661  

For more information on the Sixteen to One Mine or even to buy physical gold or stock shares from the company, one can visit their website at: http://www.origsix.com/

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All of these videos are uploaded in HD, so adjust those settings to ramp up the quality! It really makes a difference.

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

You can click here for the full TVR Exploring 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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