Exploring Cerro Gordo Ghost Town & Silver Mines

hey guys my name is jason with mount baker mining and metals and right now i'm standing in death valley and it's 117 degrees outside but we're on our way up to the cerro gordo ghost town to see our friend brent and check out some of his minds all right we made it we are here at cerro gordo uh with brent underwood yeah thanks for coming up yeah thank you so much for having us no this is this is really fun to come up and see your place and can you give us a little bit of an introduction what we're going to be doing while we're up here and yeah what the plan is i mean hopefully we're going to be finding some ore maybe some slag and uh refining it you know back in the day this used to be such a big silver lead and zinc mine that there's still a lot around and as i've been exploring the minds i keep coming across it and then that's kind of where what i know what to do with it ends right and so i'm trying to take it from you know rock for mineral form and maybe refine it from there yeah so i think we'll maybe go through some mines look around maybe go over to an old slag pile pick up some stuff and uh send it back to you yeah and then let you do your thing with it yeah cool and you we've been talking through email and phone um and one of your big goals is to refine some silver out where you can make a medallion or a charm or that's the hope yeah i'd love to be able to get like enough of the galena to make some silver that i'll then give to a drawer and maybe make like a you know even like something like that size you know a little pendant or something like that yeah so that way maybe uh i can give it to one of the fans or something like that yeah cool yeah yeah and and uh so i mean if we could get half an ounce or an ounce of silver you'd be excited amazing yeah okay awesome awesome well maybe we can start with a little tour of the town and you can give us some history and yeah i'd love to yeah and we'll start there let's do it cool all right let's go so these days this is the museum so anytime i go into the minds i find anything i try to put it in here because i just think that like the history of this place is why i'm here you know it's why i'm interested in the place yeah sure so i think that each piece that i find is part of that history and so if i'm in the mines if i'm using the backhoe no matter what i'm doing i end up putting it in here cool and so uh yeah it's probably my favorite place because it kind of each of the pieces that when i see it it reminds me of the adventure to find it you know there you go oh yeah when i was down at the 700 level we found that and this type of stuff yeah cool um so yeah yeah let's take a look this part of it used to be so the general store was in the front and there's a butcher shop in the back and so back in the day i think we even have a photo around here you know the miners come in here get their goods when they needed it um and then in the back there's a bookstore shop and i realized that because one day we were using the backbone out of the back i started digging there's tons of animal bones you know all chopped up animal bones yeah that was a pretty good giveaway that you know that's what they were using the back there for and so these guys would sell stuff to the miners flower and axes pickaxes and hard hats and stuff okay yeah they have their butcher shop and who are these two guys on the wall is this the two guys you were talking yes so the guy on the left is uh bell shop and he ended up he's the one that really brought sarah goro to its heyday so the town was established in 1865 by a guy named pablo flores and he had a mexican prospector that came up and he was using the old uh avasos like clay adobe kilns you know like making really small batches and i guess the story goes that bell shaw saw some of the silver that he was producing here in san francisco so he came and he looked around and he realized if this guy's getting this amount in quality out of these old kilns what could like proper investment do yeah he came he built a smelter here that we can go to later okay so he built the first proper you know big furnace here and he bought half interest in the union mine which is the main mine here and then he ended up owning just everything he owned the road he had a toll booth on the road oh yeah refinery he owned the mine he had a park ownership in the freighting company okay so the guy who's right is a guy named remy nadew and remy is known as like the king of the desert freighters was his name because the big thing back in the day is like just getting it from here to l.a you know like oh sure it's pretty hard yeah he would run the 20 mule teams he him bellshaw and beaudry who owned the general store uh made the cerro gordo freighting company okay and so they ran all the mules back and forth all day and something that blows my mind is like so at its peak serogordo had about four thousand residents oh yeah and at that time los angeles um had 6500 residents oh no way not that much more right whoa and the the demand of cerro gordo uh they needed a port city to bring in all the supplies i mean look around there's not like they weren't growing anything here you know sure so they're bringing all the supplies from los angeles so from my understanding the demand of cerrogordo forced los angeles to develop quicker than it was going to really kind of bloomed it into the town that it became and for me because like these days everybody knows los angeles you know sure i don't know what nobody knows yeah so those two guys are like you know kind of very responsible for um that back in the day and then that photo um so then the there's like two areas ceremonial errors and there was the first one was 1865 about 1885 it was um silver and lead so they're taking out the galena making the silver making the lead and then that one bust and the town kind of sat dormant for a little while and a guy named um gordon came whose house you guys are staying in yeah okay and gordon came and he realized that everybody was ignoring zinc he started mining zinc for another 20 years and that's him down at the 900 foot level of the line um the guy with the hat on with the suit yeah we got the suit yeah going to the mines imagine like the guy in the suit wasn't working down there he just posed for a photo and probably got out yeah yeah what's crazy is like so if you go down there that this sign next to the miner's head um it's still down there somewhere down there and it's cool to like that connection to history is what kind of gets me excited you know yeah to go down there and see some of these yeah so this is like 19 teens yeah that was like probably yeah somewhere between 1910 and probably 1920. and you go down there and it still looks almost exactly like that pretty similar yeah there's still oracles down there um there's a lot of collapse like any mine probably sure but those signs are still there um and it just gets me really excited to learn about that and then kind of piece together the history you know yeah yeah i like to do cool all right we got your little homegrown museum here which is totally awesome lots more to find you say you're just finding stuff every day when you're digging and looking around so cool where are you next uh we'll go to a place that you may know very well in an assay office oh yeah okay cool going over these to do that up the road and check that out yeah let's do it all right all right where are we headed this is the assay office from outside building cool uh this is the only one that remains i think there used to be a couple of them here but uh let's go check it out a lot of this probably looks pretty familiar to you or at least oh this is wild man yeah yeah this is cool uh rock drills yeah yeah an old ingersoll rand drill so this is like one of the original ones now they or at least the ones i used that were probably 40s or 50s vintage had a pneumatic leg so it's all driven by air all right but this one they wedged it between the hanging wall and the foot wall and like lined it up and then they started going so this is crazy to see so it would have been right up against the face right yeah yep yep and then you okay that hole's done then you'd adjust it down and drill another one or have to swivel it was a man killer for sure yeah when we go up to the hoist house where the main unit mine is we have a massive ingersoll ram air compressor to just i mean the size of this building that just supplied air down to the miners yeah yeah so this is pretty cool um these were the original kind of base bars you know describing oh yeah okay so that's where the size of the ones that you make so this is one of them yeah and we have one of the original molds yeah check this out so this is you're saying this is like the base metal door a they would make so this is this is mostly lead it's heavy as can be but it's mostly lead with a little bit of silver in it and then they would take it down to los angeles to refine san francisco refinement san francisco refined okay and they did some refining here or they just pour the base they would they would do some refining here but from my understanding it was too cost prohibitive to do it all here so they would just i believe just take the galena get it down to silver and lead only and then ship it off and then yeah separate it in san francisco in the um silver go to the mint and then the lead they would sell wherever else okay i got to put this down yeah i get it cool not break your thing there so there's one called the ignacio so this is one of the original molds that they found in the dirt down there you know so those bars are obviously a different size bullion mold yeah wow so they used to make bars out of these pour it in and then dump it and then bigger ones too like that yeah okay oh you got all these little crucibles here are those ones you used are those yeah i used so i used the christmas tree and the little uh propellers from here as well oh nice all the stuff that i found here at thoroughgood like this was me kind of experimenting the other day oh cool and then so i was using like even the you know the stuff of the flux i found here like the borax the potassium nitrate and then i have the lead oxide yeah cool so that was all here you're just like cobbling together yes i tried to like get in the mentality of what they might have been like um back in the day yeah and so that was a fun problem even trying to use you know like this old scale that was here yeah yeah that is wild and so this is where so an essay office is where the miners would bring samples of the ore they were mining and they could they could take a little tiny sample of it and refine it and figure out how much silver or gold or you know precious metals or lead they would they would essentially figure out the value of the ore um and so yeah this is cool this i bet this place was hopping back in the day yeah just cranking through and uh i thought it was a pretty hazardous place to work like lead fumes and you know all the stuff coming off the ore yeah i heard that a lot of times outside the door too a lot of like investors and different people would want to hear about the next big strike you know oh yeah and so they just mingle about and what's also kind of interesting positioning is the building right next to this that you saw i was walking uh was a brothel so i don't know about the location of the brothel and the you know ask the office next to each other like you strike it rich then you go to that or you don't strike racing over there i don't know right depending on the movement it's an interesting uh interesting layout that they chose to use do you have any idea the cost of an assay back then so from my understanding i read about it and like i think that it was a dollar okay i heard okay um and then they the the assailer again this is just from my understanding out of the book like they could do like 10 to 12 a day they were like cranking okay and so you figured that's pretty good because the miners were getting here at saraguru it was a four dollar a day camp so they'll get four dollars for 12 hour shifts oh wow underground okay and three dollars a day if they're above ground okay and so the escalator is doing pretty good you know if he could crank up ten twelve yeah exactly yeah keep going all day well and probably for comparison back then i mean even you know i i know the gold price but the gold is was 20 an ounce right and so i mean a 20th of an ounce every assay that was pretty good yeah that was i mean that was that was pretty good wages so yeah the assayers you know and a lot of times you mentioned it down below with the the general store and the miners a lot of times the people who made money wasn't the miners or wasn't the prospectors it was the guys that were supplying the services right guys selling the shovels doing the assays owning the brothel you know whatever it was but yeah so there's a lot of probably uh a lot of stories like that where these these people came in and made it big yeah not by mine and silver right so i heard eventually like the assay office similar to that originally at cerro there was tons of individual claims and so all the individual miners would take them into here to see if their claim was worth it but as bellshot and beaudry started compiling all the claims uh he became not like an independent asset the the company employed him to assay the different levels of their mind oh i see so he was never do he wasn't doing independent essays for other people then he was just hey what's the 200 level looking like you know so they they fully employed him just to do their essays all day long oh okay i see which is kind of interesting as well yeah yeah that's cool right on [Music] brent was telling us earlier that this this here is the assay office and then right next door this used to be the brothel here and i don't know there's five six doors there and uh in here you can still see the the rusty old bed frames and looks like this one had two beds in it three rooms i guess that's something to put their dresses on i guess and then here is kind of a museum piece of all their powder boxes they found in the mines but man what a crazy place to work and live this was the beginning of the tramway you put that um before that they were just using mules to bring it all up and down oh wow into that like the main lines there we come over go there get dumped into buckets and then sent all the way down to keeler on the aerial family oh yeah and if you can see that that hillside there you see the notch in the hill yeah where they dug out yeah so that was one of the transfer stations so there was a big structure there that where the cable would connect to the cable keep going down from there um and these days as you walk down you can still see the cable along the road some places uh huh where it's laying down now yeah from my understanding when it went bust they sold a lot of the stations that were easily accessible to a different mine over in nevada and then they just cut the line and just fell where it fell oh yeah and so there's still a lot of the cable all the way down there yeah wow oh yeah more of the steel and yeah so back in the day when it was when it was single jack they would have stuff like this or you know i don't know if this is one maybe that looks like it might be a drill but they'd be guys down there just hammering right and then when they started introducing air they would do use stuff like this where it was a carbide bit and the steel was hollow so there's a hole running all the way down and the the drill would inject water to control the dust and so that was like a huge revolution in mining technology because when you're single jacking you're down there you know between the silicosis and the lead and all the base metals it's like you're just killing you're literally killing yourself whereas this one it was it was pneumatic so it was and so it would it would hit and then on the pull back it would turn the steel and it would hit and turn the steel and hit and it goes really right so it goes fast and you're pushing water down to the end and so there's water it's keeping all the dust down so that was that was like big a big big deal for the miners yeah yeah and like you said none of these miners they weren't down there making hundreds of dollars a day they were workers you know and so it's like and that's what i try to think too like so you know i when i before i had to go you just i used to just lump miners into like one group right but at a big camp like this i imagine they all had very specific jobs right like one was a mucker one was the drill or one was the blaster so miners is almost like a misnomer right because there's so many jobs within mining absolutely absolutely it's like calling somebody a farmer right oh you're a farmer you know oh wait a minute i drive the combine or whatever same thing yeah i mean and and each one of those jobs had a different level of prestige right i mean there was there was the miner or there's like the drift miner was better than the stove miner and then like the lowest of the low and this is where i started it was like nipper they call it nippers and it was like the kid and they're like go get me some more steel run over and run down the drift or you know i need a new light or i'm out of this and yeah you're just nipping for the miner okay so and that's a lot of times that's how the young miners got started is they'd work for a miner as a kid and they'd learn the trade right they'd work for them for three five years whatever and then it'd be like all right you're you're a minor now you know get in there and start drilling and so it was kind of a an informal apprentice journeyman sure kind of thing going on so yeah it was cool but you're right absolutely right it wasn't just miners worked in the mine you had hoistman you had muckers you had yeah yeah all that stuff jobs yeah yep cool amazing that's wild that that's still standing yeah i walked out on it still somewhat structured oh did you walk out on it it's too tempting to not yeah right there used to be like so if you look at old photos there used to be a huge building around it that was all enclosed oh sure inside of a building sure um and then over the years like a lot of the buildings here just disappear probably reuse for other wood different places right um and now that's what we got left but yeah if you want we can go up towards one of the old uh furnaces and see some of the old slag and then even jump into one of the mines yeah got out too yeah let's do it so the mine up there is the main union mine and the union mine is the reason sarah was here you know it's the reason that this area is so successful there's 30 miles of workings just off of that mine okay and there's the hoist up there but originally this was the original entrance this is how they got into the mine so the union minded the union yeah whoa this was collapsed as of like three months ago it was totally collapsed but i i always study the maps at night i'm always looking at like where stuff should be there's a little bit of cribbing here you know some old rock and then i was like that has to be it and so uh dave was up here buddy with a big excavator we started digging and sure enough yeah it just revealed itself no way yeah it's really exciting because you're digging digging you're like i don't know if there's anything there and then that portal kind of revealed itself yeah and unfortunately it's like collapsed but this was like the original entrance they were using like 1865 would have been this entrance okay and they sank the shaft i think two years later in 1867 they sank the main big shaft up there yeah so we'll go check that out but it's kind of this is where it all began up here you know wow cool that's cool so they just they were they were tunneling in yeah hit the deposit because they were trying to get to uh the the positive on this side was the union chimney so see up there that like kind of uh they over stoked eventually up there oh and then it collapsed oh yeah that hole is from okay you can see kind of it lines up with that pretty good yeah sure so there's a big deposit went from there down about 700 feet and then up over that way ways there was one that went from the surface down to 1100 feet wow and so they sank the shaft in between the two to kind of get access to both of them oh i see um and so this was that before they need to go to different levels this is how they were accessing it wow yeah just yeah yeah rabbit warren let me get to your point like so this is the hoist house is where the main union mine is it's where the shaft was not herpes straight down oh yeah i saw the hoist that still works you know oh no way really yeah yeah oh geez take down occasionally because the only source of water at cerro gordo is 700 feet down the mine at the 700 foot level water seeping in from the um mountain yeah and so they created a small sump down there that provides it replenishes at about 300 to 500 gallons a day oh so not very not very much at all yeah and so but any water up here is like very valuable to us of course i think i've gone down in that a dozen times trying to fix the water because you have the water over here then the pumps maybe 50 yards from it then the shafts maybe 50 yards from that then you have to pump it directly up 700 feet oh that's a big head that's a lot of head and so the reason i started going down in the mine was to try to fix the water oh okay but now i go down there just to explore check it out so so back in the day did they use the water for the town they were so originally in the 1860s there was a spring about two miles from here oh um and they were piping in from the spring and then that spring went out so they used another spring and that spring started to go out and then around the same time they drained owens lake the massive lake below us oh right yep so i think that messed with the water table or something because all the springs went dry yeah so for the for a period time they're bringing all the water up on mules something like 40 000 gallons a day because you know 40 000 gallons think about how like water intensive mining is yeah plus they were smelting and refining it here plus the guys living here so just like all day long mule's coming and going oh my gosh that would have been a that would have been a a a traffic jam down there just for the water just the water alone all the bullying going and right wow it's then when they found the water source uh i i mean that's 500 more gallons you don't have to bring up every day i guess yeah you start pumping it yeah but the pump down there's ancient so we replaced the pump replaced everything but it's i haven't perfected it yet yeah so you've got like all this head you got to pump up but you hardly have any gallons to do it with that it's like the weirdest and the old pipe was it was galvanized but it's frozen and split in a hundred places so i put new pecs all the way up so a little bit of give oh wow so that was even a process itself like going down in the cage you know slowly stopped and then securing the packs go down a little more stop you know that took forever wow yeah this is the cage that still goes down so that's so that's the cage yeah so this this is this is it i mean this is yeah this is the this is the cage that goes nine perfect down you can see various experiments to not try to have to use the cage i've roped down some parts of it oh wow but roping with 900 foot of exposure is not fun i bet this is kind of terrifying so this this this is it this is what we saw around it goes up you know over and then the voice is over there so how i mean so the hoist or the skip or whatever you call it how you can put what five guys in there and you drop them stand in there you standing there for scale i don't i mean i don't know how to be pushing it we we've only taken you see like rocks so we've only taken down three of the very most okay back in the day you figure some of the guys could get in from the portals that weren't this you know before they collapsed yeah maybe walk in that way but you can see the track so the oracarts would roll onto this yeah bring it up roll off over there they probably had guys sitting in the orc arts you know just because if you look at the volume of waste rock and then you look at this cage you start thinking like how many trips up and down did that have to take yeah and back in the day apparently i used to go a lot faster these days for me to go down to the 700 foot level it takes like 45 minutes 45 minutes to write it down it's very slow how do you communicate with the hoistman up here right so they used to have a wired system um this is our is our system we have oh hold on let's see what we got here this is your oh one stop so that's lights that's flashing lights up to the hoistman so guys to stand over the hole the whole time looking down and trying to see how many lights we do and then he because it's very loud when the hoist is going sure and he communicates with the voice guy with radios up here but the radios they don't like i think the heavy metal on the ground oh so once we get 400 feet down you lost it yeah we finished lose communication um so it can be very tense moments when is that four or three lights and you're 600 feet down in a hole and it's i mean obviously it's straight down right because the hoist so you can see you can still see you still see down it's just the most terrifying experience i had so like if you look here these these dog ears are supposed to engage if the cable were to break they're supposed to clamp into this guide rail and stop the cage right where it's at in theory in theory exactly one day i was riding down and i was kind of in this i was like going and then the cage stopped and i thought it was because the hoist operator had stopped it for some reason i was like whatever what's going on and then i saw the cable start going down past the cage and the cage had been going too fast and these had engaged and these are clamped into the guide really so it works they still work but the thought of being dangling in this cage while these are connected to 150 year old wood or when however old it is isn't a fun feeling um so that's it's just crazy that i mean it's so well preserved it's so dry all the wood is in perfect shape yeah whereas back up in washington i mean we we get so much rain this would be a this would be a compost pile right this would just be gone yeah it's like we're in the high desert you know it's the desert here in the mountains and so that's that's i'll show you [Music] i i mean yes it's a similar thing i i started here just going like with 20 feet of exposure so and then the very first time that i really got into it there's a shaft called the newtown mine over there that it's a vertical shaft and no ladders no nothing for 300 feet but like from my conversation people know we've been down there since like they stopped working it oh yeah it's like i have to go down there yeah yeah the thing is like republic down is fairly easy you know you're wee you're kind then go back up like pulling yourself up a rope for 300 feet yeah it's very exhausting yeah at 8 500 feet yeah it'll wind you wow crazy there's the air i was talking about this is the craziest thing this is this should be like a museum it is your this is what you're doing but it still has like a huge leather belt on yeah and even getting this thing up here and you can't roll oh yeah imagine getting that up here and it came up with mules i'm assuming or something in pieces or on sleds or something wow that's crazy and here's the voice yeah you can walk right so we've added some stuff to try to make it a little bit more modern so we have this psychological system that assists with everything tells you how far down you are which uh as you're looking at it it's not the most precise thing that you're not right now so but those are the levels 86 200 400 okay 550 700 900. and there is an 1150 level that they went uh kind of like a horizontal lead to the 1150 level but like a win yeah but the shaft didn't go there you have to go to the 900 then go over and then go down oh yeah kind of to get to it um okay so let me get this straight so so so you're over there in the cage yeah there's a guy watching yeah you go down yeah scotty's watching johnny's running the thing and you're flashing lights to him and he's flashing usually there's maybe another person just who's still allowed to relay the messages if he can't hear what's going on but yeah it's got to be the guy operating this i mean literally has your life in his hands and so he needs to be watching this cable for anything for slack you know for any type of sometimes it starts shaking because like something's going on yeah he needs to lock it down and so he's watching over there and see if they're and they're watching down the hole to see if i'm relaying anything up to them yeah because occasionally the guy drills so the cage is dangling on the cable but the guy rails keep it from spinning around in circles yes so but the guide rails over the time have like bowed in at places and kind of gone like this so the kids look stuck sometimes and so we always bring like a sawzall with us to like cut off part of the guide rail to let it go past sometimes yeah which is terrifying because somebody that means somebody has to like attach into a harness go below the cage you know what and like saw off piece of the guide rail and get back into the cage so it's uh how did you teach yourself how to use this uh so this my buddy operates crane that's all he does oh okay wpp okay so he came up when we drive a few times we put 300 pounds of weight in it just ran up now a couple times dry you know yeah is it he he figured it out and then um my buddy owns the auto parts store in long time and he figured out this whole thing the hydraulic system um and so it's very much a learning on the job situation but these days you probably take them in 50 times so we have a better system so even for the level that you're down what we did is uh you see this pointer like we spray paint the cable and you can see well sure yeah you can line it up a little better yep and so that way they have a pretty good idea of where we're at yeah we used to do that underground too yeah with our slushers we you know you're going back around the corner you can't see you tie a little ribbon or you tied something so you know okay i'm at the back right right so yeah yeah the classic stuff so it's something like exactly similar thing here and uh it works you know this is just so did that electric motor used to run this and so from i think it used to be a lot faster because i can't imagine that much waste drop having to take 45 minutes ago and it doesn't make sense yeah right with that many people down there too yeah and so i believe back in the day they use that um and then they transfer to this at some point i mean even if you look at like these breaks they're like wood yeah wood wooden shoes huh wow look at all this so who so who runs the hoist is it your is it your crane buddy usually my buddy cody okay uh johnny has learned how to run it so if need be you can fill in uh but it's not one of those jobs where you're fully comfortable just to fill in you know you're right johnny's in i'm not going down yeah someone knows what they're doing and it's all looks like it's lubed up i mean it's not rusty it's not yeah and this you know pour the oil into these you pour the big big looks like probably babbitt bearings and you put yeah you just pour some oil down there and it's probably good enough and the cable looks like it's in great shape so how many guys like at the height do you think worked down in the hole uh like hundreds probably a couple hundreds yeah and i think back then though if you look at the map there was probably uh four portals out of the mine that weren't the chef right so they probably a lot of them would come and go from those okay those have also ever seen one of them was collapsed since oh i've tried to dig them out with the backhoe and stuff but i think a lot of the guys go through those but then also this and i have found um on the property before like the miners tags you know a little hole in those i think they'll put on like a pegboard yeah to let you know who's down there she's not so i just found those around which is cool yeah um so i'm actually pretty busy you know 24 hours a day i was running yeah and the thought of how loud and noisy and hectic it must have been back in here oh but you can't imagine like after a week straight running this you're just ding ding yeah but yeah then over here uh you know you like you said i had the air compressor then before that they had the i think the furnace they were putting in wood probably from the steam so they were they they were just shoving this full of wood making steam to run the hoist and the stuff yeah wild these days this is kind of just storage experiment oh this is this is the little kiln i was trying to use to do all of my oh yeah experiments it's a nightmare but that's a bunch of the crushed up galena in there cool crushed up but failed experiments um that's that and then oh actually i'll show you that uh chipmunk question no let's check it out oh yeah yeah this is our makeshift gym that nobody has ever used uh it's your what uh that nobody's ever used yeah okay ever used to we had we had good intentions but there's like membership so this thing oh this is a beauty here yep and let's say somebody is getting ready to use it again you know yeah i've never used this thing but i understand i guess this crush is raw it crushes rock so so you put the the rock down here and the belts would run you know from here to the electric thing but it if you look down there that thing just goes forward and back all right and so you put rock down in there and it just goes and it you know as it gets crushed it falls lower and falls lower until it goes off right i i i used the the university i went to school in had this exact pressure and i used this crusher to crush rock samples yeah yeah it's crazy had a big big cast iron jaw dies yeah this is these these were the little lab crusher back in the day okay with that that's cool you have one that's what we have oh and look at this thing whoa get this look at this this is a little hammer mill and so there's a there's a plate somewhere that should go on this but you drop rock down here and these hammers would go around really fast okay and they probably had a sucker a vacuum so it would stay in there until the vacuum could suck it out when i got small enough yeah but uh but yeah this is like a real crude little hammer hammer crusher thing that's pretty wild kind of like some oil removers that's cool so yeah they had they must have like a little lab up here at one time yeah they were experimenting around different stuff um [Music] so this as stacy was saying is a shaker table okay and what this did is it's a concentrator oh it's on rollers that's hilarious so so you would you would have a a box here with a bunch of holes in the front of the box and you'd run water down the shaker table and it would wash off all the light materials all the cords and all the calcite or whatever the gang was but you put your crush pour in here and anything that's really dense like galena or gold or silver or you know copper sulfides would get in these grooves and they'd come across and the table let's see so we'll do this yeah all day long [Music] and it would so all the heavy heavy minerals would bump their way across the table all the way out these grooves and you catch your concentration right and you know this this was like the super high grade yeah the mid lanes would come down here this was like there might have been some fine stuff but then come down here and catch it here and then all this was like the tailings yeah and this is some sort of like it provides sluice box with riffles yeah so like if if any heavy minerals got off this end it you know the last gasp to catch catch him yeah but uh but yeah so you could you could crush it in the bronze chipmunk right you would put it through the hammer mill to break it real fine and then you could come around it on the shaker table like that it's just all day yeah you have a whole you have a whole setup here [Music] all right so we're going to go back into some of the underground workings now so if you want to see some of the underground workings and stuff check out uh ghost town living with brent on his channel on youtube so we'll get in here we'll see what we can find yeah there's actually a lot of cool air blowing out of here there's some ventilation shafts above us uh-huh and this is what's the name of this one again this is the bullion the bullion portal yep the bullion tunnel okay i'm coming in see if i can get my light to work [Music] before we're filming each other filming perfect it's filling the inception oh yeah let's see here how do i there we go now let's see i can do i just bought this light there that's a little better okay all right let's check it out underground with brent underwood so this is this is like maybe five feet high four feet wide it was not set up for any mechanized equipment there's no rails they took the rails out yeah they took the rails out okay you can see like kind of the where there used to be the oh yeah the cross members there for the track and it doesn't open up so you know when i have to duck like this the whole way it'll open up here in a second yeah and they so this was done a little i mean after the discovery obviously but this was to access some of the lower workings more easily yeah there's a there's a big uh there's a big deposit over here that that they stopped out you know create this massive room i believe they're trying to get there and they're trying to connect to some of the lower levels of the mine okay oh yeah so they were just and and that rail was probably so valuable that once they were done up here they i think they ripped it all out they moved it this is actually in really good shape yeah it's sticking together pretty good yeah all right so i'm gonna go this way yeah it's gonna take a little bit of acrobatics and stuff sure i've been over it a few times says i've been over it a few times do you weigh more than me i think i think i'm the heavier one [Music] and this is here to be like a like a kind of start this way jump that way type situation a little shimmy in a jump yeah you got it so far so good yep and then this is kind of where the soap starts as you get in here [Music] whoa yeah we like don't have enough light to show the hole yeah stop that's pretty wild okay so brent what are we doing under here are we yeah the hope is to find some more uh galena you know because that was the main uh mineral that they're trying to find here and in the past i found a lot of galena on the floor here and there's some veins still if you start looking around that they didn't quite get and i'm hoping to get collect enough to the galena to even make a small batch of you know pure cerro gordo uh or it would be kind of fun cool so i uh i'll leave you the last thought i found any okay let's see if there's any more around and if not i know where there's another place where it's still in the wall so i don't know if we can see what you got just a big open open stove zero ground control so it's just no stalls no lagging no nothing just in a big hole pretty terrifying well not the not the you know it's a it's a fine place to be i wouldn't want to be in here with a big sledgehammer banging on the walls but so it looks like a lot of the host rock here is uh some type of marble or dirty marble like a calcite looking stuff whereas you know the gold the gold mines that i'm used to are usually hosted with with quartz veins right whereas this is a little bit different mineralogy which is cool yes i mean if you look up there you see some of their old oh yeah i guess so the those old wooden um uh boards or timbers i guess what you call them those are called stalls and so they would stall up the ceiling and then any boards would be called lagging and on narrower veins and kind of what they were doing up there is they would stall between the hanging wall and the foot wall and they put lagging across and they could stand on them kind of making their own uh scaffolding essentially to work off of but i'm assuming i don't you know i don't know i just walked in here but i'm assuming they stopped this down there they probably started i don't is i can you get in is that an access up there not that i found okay but i mean the stop is so big that i don't know how you'd work up on it and there's there's an underhand stoping and an overhand stopping and i think overhand stoping is when you work up from underneath and you're you're drilling overhand and then underhand is when you're drilling down okay maybe i got that mixed up youtube youtube audience is going to tell us if i screwed that up but oh yeah this is like there's a tiny bit in there you know right oh yeah this is not a lot there's a lot of waste rock in that but uh this is i usually when i'm wandering around it's fine and it's not a little tiny tiny tiny piece sure and so we're looking for i mean obviously the shiny stuff and the way is what gives away to me you know i pick one up i'm like that's heavier than it should be yeah sure yeah sure so like what do we got here that looks like you know see but that's kind of shiny i saw the flicker but it's not it doesn't weigh anything right not very heavy i wonder if we can find any up in the face there somewhere i don't want to get too crazy but here yeah right that's right because i kinda i'm really interested to see what the veins or the the deposit looked like and i mean you know they probably wouldn't have left a lot right but you can see the old i don't know if you can see in the light but the old the old beds of calcite laying in here that's pretty cool so i don't know if typically in these in these uh um marble deposits or calcium carbonate deposits are called scarns and uh the fluids would come in i'm talking a little bit out of school here but the fluids would come in the hot fluids with a lot of the metals and they'd react with the marble and deposit out the the base metals the precious metals but yeah it's just a this is this is quite the place here yeah wow it's like i don't even know i i'm not even quite sure what i'm looking for yeah what i've seen before is like fairly narrow little uh you know glittery lines through the wall well like like stringers yeah exactly that's nice okay well this i mean this this is kind of where you know the the the um the structure comes down here it looks like they mined all along this structure so let's go take a look over here and see what we can find boy there's just a lot of there's a lot of rock ready to fall off the wall here yeah very loose kind of hanging yeah there's like sawdust you know from another pack in the dynamite oh yeah i think that's called stemming i think so yeah they would stem yeah yeah it is but yeah so so there's there's little dynamite rooms all over the place then how are you there tons of them in the mines you know and the giveaway for me is always the door you know oh they're creating the door the frame and then the sawdust sure yeah sure and you've been back all through these this yeah this one pretty good uh there's an area over here that goes down i haven't roped down it yet you know i think when i started exploring the mines i took the little hanging fruit first the easy ones yeah now it's just areas of the mine that take a decent or ascent are the last ones for me to kind of check out there's more of the malachite or is it right yeah that's probably some azerite there and if my mineralogy serves me correctly it's a it's a copper um carbonate okay mineral and so that's you know when the when the sulfides and and uh the water react and and then you have um probably a lot of dissolved carbonate in the water from all the marble around it reacts and makes that azerite and malachite yeah it's real they're really beautiful minerals yeah there's a big wall of it over here that i'll show you okay but it's this i mean this mine never produced any copper though right that's my understanding yeah [Music] half of it is remembering where [Music] yeah a little pocket yeah that's exactly and so you know if you were talking about this this area had some gold associated with it i would very much expect it's associated with this copper mineralization oh [Music] i don't know what this is maybe you'll have a better idea than i do but uh um see up there see that oh yeah yeah that's cool it's weird because like you know it's pretty hard rock out there but when we get back here so it's almost clay yeah yep and so a lot of times um and i don't know again i don't know what's exactly going on here but you'll get a lot of clay and a lot of mineralization in fault zones and the clay is from it's called fault gouge and it's where you know the rock has been sliding back and forth against each other essentially grinding it to dust and then it reacts with the water and the and it just it turns into gooey i mean like you can see in this and even this thing you can you can all you can form it into a ball and it's just it's just kind of clay fault gouge stuff so but oh and and so the fault gouge makes it pretty dangerous because you know there's nothing holding the rock together but it's also where all the minerals usually are former so so you it's a double-edged sword right um but yeah and this is these guys were just in here i mean going wherever they were going wherever they they were they were literally chasing this i mean now you know nowadays mines are they've they've drilled them they've sampled them they know exactly where all their bodies these guys were just like this looks good over here oh let's go back over this way yeah i'll show you over there like it seems like sometimes they would find a vein they would just follow it up you know they would follow it in these meandering routes yeah which is kind of yeah cool to see it's just it's very you know very um like hand to mouth it was just they were just every every shot was a new kind of a new exciting adventure you know well what's back here what's behind over here okay brent where are we at now so we're over on the back side of the property and we're at the new town line and this is part of the collective area known as cerro gordo but this specific line um was the big minus day this collection of fencing that you see protects you from falling down a 300 foot vertical hole okay and back in the day there was a hoist here so they had a building a whole voice top right you can see kind of the waste truck they're throwing off um apparently the hoist they had here i guess they didn't have electric it was one where the horse would walk in circles and bring up the buckets no way so there used to be a horse ring i think right over there that's going in yeah this uh if we were to remove the fencing that just dropped straight 300 feet down wow you haven't been down that one yet i haven't done that oh you have that's like where i cut my teeth as far as repelling it was it was it it was such like a interesting mind to me i know nobody had been down there that i pulled a truck up to here uh tied off to the truck oh yeah and then went down and uh going down's fun going back up is not fun sure it's a lot of work we're gonna go to what's called the lower newtown mine and we just opened up the lower newtown mine when dave sparks was here we use an excavator to open it up for the first time in a very long time and in there there's a scope that they've kind of like this and they're still galena in the ceiling and i'm hoping that we can get out some of that galena to maybe refine that cool let's do it [Music] so we're going in here and you guys just opened this up yeah a couple weeks ago uh dave's fox came with an excavator and uh he drove it all the way from town which is crazy train to go over and you see how much sure we had they got maybe 20 feet of claps over the years has fallen in and so this hasn't been opened up in maybe 100 years yeah and then we went in there and just started looking around and it's pretty cool yeah and and dave is the guy that helped you do the redo the um hotel he's the guy that helped pour the foundation and then he had an extra day and we had the equipment up here he's like hey anything you want to do i was like don't open up some mines yeah all right let's do it cool big shout out to dave yeah shout out dave thank you uh you made this accessible for the first time in a really long time and now we're gonna get some glean out we're gonna go get some galena [Music] we'll have to give dave half yeah yeah and so you're thinking back in the day this was like cribbed out to here somewhere that's what the giveaway was i saw some old rock cribbing out to here and there's actually track i don't know where the track is now there's track poking out of this okay so then there's definitely a mine there but you can see like it was way below where we were yeah i know they got a lot to get there yeah i remember it was like the anticipation building and waiting waiting and then finally the portal reveals itself and like all right yeah cool all right and this is the second new town mine or the lower new town lower new town oh these tracks are cool this is uh i've seen this where they were like real cheap miners yep where they put down wood rail and then this little tiny strip of metal on top yeah so they didn't have the big budget of the of the union mine but uh it worked they were trying to make it work yeah coming up there's oh yeah look at that it fell in i think from a ventilation shaft it's a dead fox or a possum or something yeah got trapped in [Music] so that could be like a hundred years old yeah this fox deserved you're pretty pretty short down here maybe to your point because they didn't have the resources they didn't mind as tall tunnels yeah it may have been hand dug back in the day yeah all right so this is going to get a little uh technical yeah it's not terrible ideally right above where the ladder is there's citations of uh galena okay and so if you want i'll kind of go first to show the way a little bit sure and then just obviously try to be a little delicate because we don't want all this collapsing so it goes down the ladder and then down a shaft it goes kind of horizontal so we're not gonna go down it does go vertical eventually okay but right now i think they're just following the ore body down like this and then uh there's they left some in the ceiling basically okay yeah we gotta go try and get that yeah hopefully all right i don't know i was pretty sketch brett i think a bad bad idea i don't know oh actually how about this uh you got some right in there somewhere right here yeah right there there's a little bit okay at least yeah i can get down there yeah i think we stopped here though yeah that's a good idea i usually have roping stuff yeah don't want to end up like the fox oh yeah there we go that's nice stuff there so that is kind of i think they're trying to scrape it all the way down uh-huh um [Music] but we'll get a little bit out there then we'll get a lot more back by the union and uh yeah yeah you can see them just doing whatever they could do yeah that's cool man it's it is just i mean coming from the northwest where our ladders wouldn't last 10 years oh yeah and yours are 150 years old and they're like perfect yep it's crazy all the stalls are you know even like the lumber like hand hewn you see how many traps it took to do that yeah like just like because they didn't have like milled stuff in it that's cool yeah yeah okay oh you wanna try to take out a little bit yeah let's go wild we should have brought like a little pan or something to chip into trying to follow but it's like i mean you know the wedges are still perfect and the nails are good the temperature of it in here you know yeah no humidity i mean these stalls are holding up all this rock over our head but let's see can we get what should we do like something like that how soft is it it's pretty soft okay we did what we came to do oh you can smell it yeah the best thing hey well i mean it's you know if you're going to do it for 20 years probably not but right for 20 minutes probably too bad right almost like someone's trying to get out you see that like almost like an old chisel bit there yeah that's what they were trying to do we have anything to put it in boy a couple of guys did not come prepared let's go get some galena all right now what there we go getting out the big guns i got that big hammer in my in my loop here too oh yeah we're pros yeah it might be easier to get some back here we could put it brian knows how to get it i put it in my hand here oh wait but that's my light well that's okay [Music] sure [Laughter] uh this might not be the place to mine from yeah i wonder if it's easier to just go can you find on the dumpster yeah let's get it i think we get a bunch of other tailings okay let's do that yeah yeah yeah yeah so this was our this is our experiment to come mine and silver this is the show where we're getting it from there you go this is what it would look like if you were to come underground and mine it and now we're gonna get out of a dump yeah yep exactly all the work's done for us i'm gonna dump this out i guess yeah yeah all right get all the lead out of my hat a couple of a couple of rookies here huh we just we just do this on youtube yeah this is okay get out of here without killing you oh so gone yeah oh absolutely there were ladders in our mind there were ladders that they put in in the 80s yeah and in the in the mid 90s we came back and they were all rotted right you go in there and it's just every every rock yeah is dripping wet right yeah see it's all just that like black black marble we saw up above yeah oh this is cool so this is um where a drill hole was yeah and this is the blast that shattered the rock out of the out of the hole yeah so that's pretty that's pretty neat that's right yeah radiated out from the there's another one right there on your left up about shoulder height yeah and this one you can even see the see the hole coming down right and that that looks that looks more like a single or double jack smaller hole than we saw earlier yeah but they they would drill down here by hand and then when they shot it it just radiated all the see that pattern the spiders yes that's cool so it's kind of interesting to like see that this that pie was a comparatively lower budget operation than the union mine i would i i mean from the rail to the hand hand steel and stuff yeah i would think it's a little bit they were they were pinching pennies more yeah i mean i would guess but uh and i mean again we haven't seen the whole mind but i haven't seen anything no there's no big stops like we saw after the union mine i mean you know using that light as well just prevent that from falling please yeah so like but yeah there i mean they were just like they got here you know and they chased so this is this is like a fault surface right here and this little tiny seam that's what they were chasing and they got back here you know two or three rounds and they were they didn't like it but i mean they would go after just little tiny poppy things yeah and i mean this could have been a situation where they claimed as close as they could yeah to the union mine and then they just started drilling right now you're assuming yeah like there's got to be something good back here maybe they used as like their sail fish to their investors like we're right next door to the union line absolutely oh and and there was so much of that uh you know fundraising and and the selling the sizzle and all that when you know back san francisco and l.a and all these boom towns and yeah i mean it was just oh yeah yeah that's crazy just cribbed up there with rock yeah these these poor boys yeah they didn't make it here yeah fairy lie no yeah and like your point earlier like why was it here yeah why give up did they just run out of money yeah who made the call yeah they went to the they went to the general store and they didn't have more credit well we're kind of striking out underground so we're gonna work up this dump pile a little bit and see if we can find some galena here and see we can find a refine down to some lead and silver there's a pretty nice little piece see all the glean in there and that whole black band right across there is all galena so that's what the that's the miners we're looking for and uh that's where all the silver is [Music] look at that piece right there oh that's a good piece got that one broken up it looks like junk on the outside but that black gives it away and yeah that's a good nice and heavy too good piece so brent can you tell me in 20 seconds what you're about to go do yes i'm hoping to go find the union chimney here at saragoro so the two main ore bodies that they were mining was the union chimney and the jefferson chimney and in between they take this shaft and so for the longest time those two have been big question marks but we found the jefferson chimney a number of weeks ago and now i'm trying to find the union so to do that uh you take this hoist down to the 400 level and then take ladders down to the 550 level and then take rope behind that and so it's a little bit of mix of this that and the other and so i've gotten to the last time we went down found this massive hole i don't know where the hole goes but i kind of want to confirm that it is the union chimney because that would allow me to get behind any collapses that previously we were in front of with the chimney like that or the shaft like this gotcha so going down there uh the big part about it was like just finding the way to it but we figured that out last time so we should be able to very quickly get back to that hole okay and then determine whether it's that or not yeah coming back up because that'll be a whole nother adventure yeah so you're gonna go are you gonna go all the way to the bottom of the union or just just make confirm that it's just there and then determine how much rope we'll need in the future okay because right now we're bringing down um you're going to need 150 about 400 feet of rope okay and we'll probably need more yeah it's just a exploratory mission you know they used to do the little uh exploratory yeah there you go this is all right this is your yeah this is your exploratory mission yeah well i'll watch you go down the skip there and yeah wave i'll wave to you as you're going down cool let me get another shot of that little hoist there because that's just you got to fit you and all your gear in that and now this goes down 600 feet 900 it'll go all the way to the bottom yeah wow how long are we going how long are you going to what is it three hours three hours print [Music] wow did we confirm what the time was hey what's the time you want another time two hours [Music] two two two [Music] oh oh you can get up in the ladder yeah you can look down the cable from the head wheel what are they lubing up the rails as they go yeah we're trying it [Music] is there ladders up there or is it just so you can if you come on this side you can see the manhole the ladder that goes all the way down so right here is the manhole entrance oh okay oh okay okay oh and i see the ladder going right down the side yeah yeah so you could climb up they've repelled down before where johnny knows what i copy that keeping my eye on the cable so this is fast huh um not really it'll take about 30 minutes for them to get there no it was 23 minutes when i went down we were going johnny speed this is gonna be like 18. damn yeah this is what you can see when you're in there oh yeah and just uh just a hole and yeah you get off of the levels you know wow and there used to be bells or there used to be a wire there yeah you can see the evidence of the wires oh okay found this rat king of fuses and blasting caps oh yeah wrapped up in one of the drift took a bunch of pictures wild hey did brent complain about the dynamite bag [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] yes [Music] [Applause] you are giving johnny anxiety [Music] i've got the radio right here [Music] [Music] thank you oh it's hot up here holy sh cow come and stand here like this on the corner you only get to drop something one time oh you're looking right there's the head pulley there he goes down the hole johnny and brent are down there somewhere cable weighs 2.2 pounds per foot 2.2 pounds per foot yeah that's what the cable weighs and there's a thousand feet of it yeah whoa it's a freaking miracle this all still works they built stuff to lost everything's made of iron well there's no moisture to rust it all shut or yeah it's been operated over the years like john uh brent said valve went down in the 90s so there's graffiti down there from the 1970s like geological survey oh yeah it was like that's a cowboy graffiti from the 70s yeah beer cans from the 70s now dr pepper cans from the 80s d cell batteries from when people carry those big dolphin torches so people have been going down for a long time yeah huh that's wild and that much white they're coming back up how long have they been down three hours yeah about three hours with travel time approaching four yeah and this thing goes a foot a second or so about what we're thinking five minutes for every 100 feet okay and that cable weighs 2.2 pounds a foot yeah so 900 feet yeah almost a ton of cable and the whole spool is cast iron the head wheels cast iron all the wheels cast iron the gears are aligned [Applause] they look like mine we are buying they're bringing up a bunch of yeah i'll ship that off to you and you can take wait it from wait wait wait i haven't seen some of that no you guys going halfsies or what i want did you have to mine it or did you pick it up don't find it out of nice i hope you were wearing that in 95. it was oh boy more time y'all get out of his way so we can see [Music] stop nice yeah this is a little fresh fresh from the mind fresh from the mind oh show us what you got here we got a whole bunch of galena pick up the bucket is it just oh yeah what does that weigh 60 80 pounds it's probably pretty good freshly mined yep cerro gordo silver that's it that's the stuff nice i'm stealing the signs now yes i am look at all that good stuff yeah you got some good stuff there did you get that big old rock you were talking about yeah oh you did yeah john johnny didn't like that part that's not there's much in the backpack still too you know we uh did more modern mining you know yeah helped out a lot we got oh yeah get his ropes and stuff out of the way it was it was a successful trip then it was accessible yeah there we go 200 rock yeah that's it there's still a lot more uh there's some of the nicer pieces that went out so oh yeah this is way better than picking up off the dump you just go down there for a couple hours and bring me back stuff you know i need sunscreen i also also found uh 15 drill bits bunch of little star bits oh yeah so how how wide are the veins you're minding this out of like inches or yeah just inches and it was in the face and so it's all just a pocket but it was around uh like that that rusty looking irony stuff that we were looking at oh yeah yeah and then that stuff is really brittle you just crush that out of there and then just this was coming out pretty good hey you know yeah sure [Music] these are like brand new or they're just very sharpened see the striations where they put in the grinder [Music] [Music] yeah more modern thing but [Music] then i found some that was some random shirt but uh i found some pants again i've always looked for the levi i can't identify the buttons because they're too uh rusted oh yeah if i could maybe uh put them in some solution we'll see you know what what they were about wild it's some kind of shirt huh yeah i think so [Music] i'm doing it i want to see how much i want to weightly [Music] yeah whatever get that crap out of here now he's like now he wants something is this high great dude it is good stuff yeah we'll get all this stuff up there too yeah thank you so we're standing next to one of the refining smelters here at cerro gordo and brent was telling me that in the early days they used to refine some of the lead and the silver here on site and i'm not an expert in what this is i've seen small diagrams but i think this is some sort of refining hearth here and what i think they used to do is um build it build a fire get a fire going and load the ore into like a hearth type of thing and the fire would heat it up and it would oxidize the ore and it would get hot enough even to melt it and i don't know if they loaded it down from the top of this huge chimney here behind me but i've seen diagrams where you know they'd have this big tall chimney like this and they'd load the ore down the top and then once it was all molten they would tap the bottom of the chimney and the the metal would come running out the bottom i've also seen them where they're these big long kind of adobe shape things where they would put the ore in these kind of bins in the furnace and they tap the bottom of the bin so i'm not really sure what was going on here but i thought it was pretty interesting thought you guys might be interested and if there's anybody out there that knows you know kind of what was going on here maybe leave a comment in the comment section so we can kind of piece together what we have here um but uh while we're here there's a bunch of piles of slag around and i wanted to collect some slag and get it assayed and figure out you know how efficient they were at refining but then also take it back uh to our shop and maybe crush it around the shaker table or re-smelt it and see if we can get any more metal out of it so now we're standing just uphill from that chimney we saw earlier and this is kind of a situation here where i think they may have had a big hearth here um this might be one of the walls the other wall over here i think may have been destroyed but i think they they used to pile the ore in here and and refine it in this hearth and you can see up the hill these red all the red stone it's not brick it's stone that's turned red and i think they used to they used to kind of push the the exhaust from these hearths up these stone chimneys up the side of the hill so all the sulfur dioxide and all the stuff from the refining could get up and away from the workers but they it was kind of cool they they angled it up the hill they buried it and then up there somewhere i'm assuming it opens up and that's where the exhaust flu was and here's some you can see the slag and stuff on these bricks so i think there was there was some sort of refining going on in this in this chimney and they may have tapped the the slag out here and had the slag or the metal run out here i'm not quite sure but they were doing something in here where they were refining the ore and so we're going to go look for some of the slide piles and see if we can get those some samples of those so here's some of the slag we're after and it looks like just you know black volcanic looking slag um and there's a little pile here we'll collect there's there's several piles spread around so we'll go and collect a little bit from a bunch of different piles but i you know i would expect if they were doing a huge amount of refining here there'd be mountains and mountains of slag and i just don't see that so i don't know if if they dumped it in the wash and it got washed away or they just didn't do very much here and they they shipped a bunch of the raw ore down or they you know this this one wasn't used very often so i'm not sure but we'll get some of this slag here it's pretty heavy it's pretty dense so um that's kind of a good sign if we're going to look for more metals to pull out of it but we'll go through and we'll collect uh i don't know 50 pounds or so on this bucket and then we'll get it back and we'll see what we can get out of it it's all pretty small it's like it got crushed up or something or [Music] yeah i mean that's that looks like matt that's heavy i don't know i don't know throw it in the crusher [Music] but like this is this is actually pretty interesting this is this is uh let me show you up close so this is uh some real glassy slag so it's really acidic and it hardly weighs anything it's not very dense at all and then this stuff here is really heavy it's dense and it's kind of that stony looking stuff here's a piece where you can see the slag and some of that stony stuff together so i don't know if this if this denser stuff is is actually matte and there's a little bit of slag on top or what but if that's matte that's a good sign there may be quite a bit more metal in this stuff that uh that's still there to be had i mean that's a bit that's a big heavy rock there or a big heavy piece of slag all right so we've we've done our expiration yes we've gone down in the mines uh and we've got three different piles here can you tell us a little bit about what each pile is yes so this is from the slag i believe that is from the um victor beaudry smelter down there okay and so this so this still has a lot of weight to it so it still seems like there's something in there yeah i imagine technology has advanced quite a bit in the last 150 years yeah so they might not have gotten all the silver and light out of there so maybe we can get something out of there yeah uh this pile is from the waste rock you know just outside the union mine yeah you you were up there yesterday digging around and came across that so yeah so i i was just up walking around in the dumps um and i i was actually quite amazed at how little ore there's in the dumps most of the time you go and there's quartz or you know or laying all over but these guys separated out really really well but i did find a few pieces so we got some stuff from the dumps and then you you got this yeah and this was down from the 400 level of the union mine okay you know rope down there and came across a really big pocket and i had a roto hammer with me so just drilled it out of the wall yeah and it looks you know just super yeah it's just yeah it's it's amazing just solid galena in this piece and no a lot of these pieces you can you can tell by the weight yeah you can't i mean the viewers won't know but they're really heavy i think the total haul was something like 110 pounds yeah so we got quite a bit that i'll be uh packing up and sending your way yeah and that was that was something that uh um i didn't go down with you that was you and one of your volunteers went down and so um to see that whole adventure you're gonna have to check out brent's channel but uh we do have our samples and so the plan is is we'll we'll box them up bag them up and we're just gonna mail them back to me we're just it's u.s uh flat rate boxes it's super cheap they'll hold a bunch of weight if it fits it ships if it fits the ships so yeah now we're plugging the us postcard so yeah so um that's the plan and hopefully we can get uh get some of this up there we'll i'll play around with it and we'll get some silver outfits i'm excited yeah really excited about that cool all right guys well that's uh that's it for me today so i hope you guys enjoyed the video thanks for watching you can find our contact information in the description below and if you have any questions or comments you can also leave them in the comment section so thanks for watching and we'll see on the next one

Channel: mbmmllc

Views: 58,850

Rating: 4.9322319 out of 5

Keywords: cerro gordo, brent underwood, ghost town, silver mine, brent underwood silver mine, cerro gordo ghost town, cerro gordo mine, cerro gordo history, silver mining, exploring mines, abandoned mine, silver ore, abandoned mines, mining town, abandoned ghost town, ghost town living, mine exploring, mine tour, abandoned mine exploration

Id: ozH0xRF2hjo

Length: 92min 5sec (5525 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021