Documenting A Historic and Remote Mill

and welcome to the inside of a very large Mill for the area considering it's still standing this is a an excellent spot just show off everything is kind of Left Behind when a mine closes beautiful artifacts here and it's a fairly rare ones as well it's furthermore now there's no way this is that any of this is coming out of this place the road is almost impassable so another year or two I know it'll be able to be able to even get a truck down it exclusively ATVs and side by sides from there so it's like this sir remaining as they are and it's beautiful to see kind of creepy in here because I'm the only person out on this side of the mountain today I have not passed a single other person or even another car I know some people use cabins from other mines down the hill as sort of vacation homes but they're still not in not as far as this one is and not as large very impressive all the way through but this site was a silver mine started me very late 1880s which is very industrious because this is like I'm I'm at 7 500 feet here in the mountains this is not easy country to work in but apparently the mines up here were very profitable loads and loads of gold came out of these these mines this specifically is a 50 ton per day mil I think it was recently used as a 1950s which is sort of suggested by some of the equipment here very very old stuff in here beautiful beautifully well preserved still in great shape for all these very deep Mountain Winters like this year they had over 100 inches of snow 2000 feet below where we are now so you can imagine here's the balls for the ball millets just on the other side of this that's what that large sort of structure in the middle is the ball mill basically a bunch of Steel balls like these would be dropped in along with the ore The Ore will bounce around in there you get crushed by all these steel bottles and The Rock would be far smaller when it comes out the other side and when it comes out the other side it would typically go into further crushing and processing because the ball mill doesn't really do a lot to get it really small which is what they need so from there it'd be pumped into spots like this to get the fine gold out then there's further crushing equipment to get really really fine down here and we'll get down there pretty soon for now though I'm just trying not to touch anything because I want this preserved as much as possible a lot of oil leaking out of that little engine a lot of nice logo on it up there big old Caterpillar motor here that one's really cool it's an excellent shave as well up here past this for the heavy door I just opened it's another door but with this one closed there are stairs all the way to the top of the mill here which is about 50 feet above us so we're going to climb that real fast let's see I think it's a gas tank there yeah it would have been a gas tank for the large Caterpillar motor which probably was a generator for the whole place where you can see the superstructure of it all here there's someone trying to kind of keep it all together up there that's pretty admirable this is technically a claimed site still more equipment I didn't know about over that over there very cool and there's a bunch of signs that say they're going to be working the line but those signs that say they're going to be working the mine have been there for at least 10 years I'd say just doing the stairs here deep very thin they lead up to the intake and this very careful here because there's a lot of chemicals and everything stored above here still I'm out of sheep combined with it being 7 500 feet or more in the air and heart coming upstairs this is a jaw Crusher here all of the ore would come out of the main halogenet which is above this he dropped down into an ore chute that or shoot would be flipped up Rock would tumble down into this jaw Crusher run by this very large electric motor here the jaw Crusher there and then from there The Ore would be passed down to that ball mill just beneath us here or they do uh all the further processing to get the free gold out then there's some other spots that they do more fine working to get the rest out I'm going to head back down those stairs here I'll catch you in a second over there is the doorway that I uh went up to go up the stairs I've come outside now where that Caterpillar engine is it's hidden under the blue tarp there and you can see the electrical generation method they used here very large Dynamo which is driven directly from the Caterpillar engine that would have run everything there it's really cool see the clutch and the brakes and everything in there the assembly it's all really well put together and this is why this Mill is not going to do much longer not gonna be up much longer rather these beams have not taken or have not lasted the best with these various Winters up here we've held up a little bit more this way but it'll last forever here I'm not gonna meet you on the other side of the caterpillar here just a second and I'm now just beyond the Caterpillar engine which is right there pass to the auger here the motors and the ball mill we're heading down these stairs it's a very wet year so it's not unusual to see water around this is the rest of the processing equipment though this would get the gold very fine here in the final processing steps it would make the miners very happy to see gold at the end here in the sluices you can see the small got cages over there that would sit in here where they would collect the gold and the water would just drain right out used again during this whole same process there is an excess of water up here one of the first things you hear when you step out the door is a Roaring Creek coming out of one of the collapsed at it sits above this the actual main haulage added is was pumping out that much water they wanted to reuse as much as possible to make it easier on themselves I think it's a whole bunch of what appears to be a former possible kitchen and assay site in here I'd say more like the assay I wouldn't want to Kitchen around everything else up here there's a nice stove sink all still relatively intact the boards holding the roof up are not going to last more than another year or two I'd say that is exceedingly unfortunate this site is beautiful I hate to see it not preserved that's kind of why I came up here today because I know it's not going to be standing much longer I'm gonna do an external walk around here in a second but I want to draw a few pictures in here first because there's some beautiful artifacts like all this gear as well as the circuit breakers and everything that remains of them there's some other used water and stuff as well too dark there we go so we're gonna go ahead and take a few pictures and then I'll take an external walk around and show you guys what it looks like on the outside I think it'd be pretty cool pretty cool awesome building and now that we're on the outside you can kind of see just how tall the building is this is the room with the fine processing for the gold we just walked out of around the side here now crawl space underneath and the assay room is just kind of on the other side of the tree there but there's lots of remains kind of around this site too lots of things like these old old Wood Pipes fairly well preserved given the dryness outside of the winters but the water that's rushing just beyond me here is actually run off from the inside of the main hologetic so there's a lot this mine I think I'd 3000 feet of development and it's kind of unfortunate that it's all closed up both by collapses in by the people who want to mine in the future lots of things like these rubber hoses also remain there's actually Lots here still the camera's overheating but I'm going to try and walk you this way around the other side of the male building quite a lot here going on it's more wooden pipe leaving the mill building here probably where they dump most of the water is just kind of below everything there's lots of tailings that they did dump out like that that's what the assay room is right in there there's extra water you can see where the electricity was carried inside and outside the building it's pretty neat actually there's some more raw from outside the mill as well and possibly another addict but then that large platform down there is all tailings every bit of it crushed rock some possible gold lots of material there's a whole bunch more of those wooden pipes down there as well I have been down there before not gonna go down there today because it's not not actually a whole lot to see mostly just the wooden pipes over here is the rest of the mill [Applause] there's the rooms that we were in just before us walk around the side here a little bit and you can see the waist rock pile from the haulage at it it is basically as tall as the mill and you can kind of see on the back of the middle bear where the Minecarts would have rolled over a Trestle into the top of the mill to bring in rock material very cool stuff then very picturesque building here as well then if we go in here this is the main side where that ball mill and everything is literally just through this little kind of former side to the building isn't the main entrances here so I just love looking at it it's just a beautiful building I think the mine owners came up this year shoveled some snow out of the way and got in made sure everything's still here there is a very new shovel right here so definitely still some activity up here some people coming up there's a lot going on here and I love it these are the inside of the ball mill by the way right here this pile it's the inside and these would be the steel plates that protect the ball mill from deforming and destruction when it's in use and uh yeah it's Pitch Black in there so camera's not focusing but the whole ball mill itself is about 50 feet tall I'd say just an enormous structure all basically powered by one motor too that's what really gets me pretty damn cool I'm going to take a few more photos of a few different things inside the mill here like that platform where the pack rat's in mice have made home and then uh I'm gonna head out of here thank you for joining me today I wanted to share this site well it still stands it won't for very much longer at all I'll see the next one folks

Channel: SomethingDifferently

Views: 397

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Id: HBLF7ChXim4

Length: 16min 30sec (990 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 12 2023