Exploring the Mountain Chief Mine - The Upper Workings (Part 1 of 2)

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] okay we are at the middle at it and the lower stuffs way down there it hike from up here small trestle looks like they had a tram system starting from this at it there's a large blower down there we'll check that out more detail in a second and then the adit is over here all right here's the add it up close you can see this looks like a kind of an ore chute right that in the portal there with a bunch of weird timber above it tram cables on top of that there's a tiny collapse and then tunnel continues in hard rock past it okay so just inside the portal is this door old wooden door has a interesting wooden latch on it as well shut up close but pretty cool to see that so we'll head past the door into the mine so that's the latch got some hinges and then tunnel continues beyond this so I'll go on and check okay they right inside past the door see your rails on the ground there and a lot of cold air blowing through this thing feels very nice on a 85 degree day in the desert okay so there's a junction split rails something going off to the left that looks pretty short and or shoot up ahead and then the rails continue the right as well looks like there's another or shoot that way I will go to the right first it seems to be a lot of air coming out this way something off to the left this is an horseshoe and it has the or tally board on it and then the ceiling above us is timbered for the chute I'll stick to the right and check this way yet another shoot that's a dead end cutout area just the vein of some sort of copper sulfide looks like that's pretty pretty cool as shoot coming down overheads timbered so there must be some Stokes of the above us you can see more of this blue green colored rock here as well okay so now we have another decision to make and go left or right both have rails since we've been going right we'll continue with that train and go this way all right so we're gonna go right again there's a carved out area here nothing much though there's a hanging wall above us that's perfectly flat which is kind of interesting and then continuing onward looks like there's something going on up here down another doorway okay so here's this doorway second doorway I should say and beyond the doorway is a large room with a hoist and some other declines and winces and whatnot this is a gas hoist it's a fairbanks-morse gas waste it's missing some parts missing the gas engine but still very cool to see this flywheel is about four feet maybe five feet diameter and on the other side is a ladder going up into the stove now it looks like they had a horse swim in here too so what we concluded but it's kind of been dismantled it looks like and down here is a decline I think this is also piece of a horse of the horse win and then beyond the tongue continues back there's another shot of the hoist room we're actually not entirely sure which which wins this hoist service but the cable goes over here and this wins isn't too significant so it drops down about 20 feet so not sure if they really needed that big of a host for that tiny wins but maybe there's something we don't know anyways I'll take a closer look at the hoist and probably go check out some of these wins you I don't know what these are but they look like they're packed with like a powder or something I don't know what those are some sort of board there maybe there's a sign or something you okay so we're gonna complete this level before we go up or down so that's back toward the hoist room and we're just gonna check off all these other junctions that we saw earlier so I remember that chute there is this Junction off here to the left this looks like it just goes to an or pass you know tell you out there there's quite a bit of air coming out of that I think so looks a little tough to get down but there might be another way all right so let's go find another Junction that one's a dead end okay so there's another chute remember that from earlier we'll go to the right here okay so walk down this drift and there's a Stolp going up so I'm just gonna finish this level before we go up there so we'll get to that in a minute this way the dead end so back out again and we will take a straight shot which goes to and horseshoe so or shoe is some debris that's falling down this is a little tight so I'm going to turn off the camera and meet you guys on the other side okay so I just came over that collapse and unfortunately this just goes back to a face and the tunnel terminates here so I think there's one more branch we can take and then we'll start ascending and descending to different levels that's back toward the portal that's the chute dead-end Junction over there's toward the hoist room now this way looks like just a back field dead end [Music] that's just a dead end so we will start ascending and descending to different levels of the might now see if we can find it okay so we're on this intermediate level lower than the addit we entered and I'm actually starting from the back here this is the face of this level there's a cutout area to the right as well which terminates and then right here is a drill column used to support the very very heavy drills that we were using down here so if we turn around this is back toward where we came in on this level actually there's an ore chute here and Tunnel continues onward as far as you can see okay again we're working our way backwards in here toward where we came in on so this is just looks like a cross cut for haulage and not much mineralization a bit here though and bend the off to the right and we have another or shoot here so it's kind of collapsed a little rotted but it's actually open and then that's kind of cool you can see it going all the way up there to the Stopes so there's that our chute and if we continue still going backwards away from the face more cross-cutting continuing around the bend here and here is the centerpiece of this level I'd say front tipping or car and see the lock mechanism there to prevent it from tipping next to its a shoot this is where we came down actually right behind this shoot and the cars empty it's a pretty big size or car its riveted and beyond are some rails that go into an or pass [Music] you you [Music] okay so this is a front tipping car right now I have the stop lock engaged there but this door would have pivoted when the car tipped and the oort would have come out this side here you can see you can actually see grease in the wheels and this thing rolls really smoothly and on the back here unfortunately the nameplate is gone so we can't can't know for sure who manufactured this but there's a coupling and the locking mechanism and that's about it you okay so this is where we came down there's ladders and a shoot we moved the or car back where we found it deeper inside the drift but yeah this is the shoot there's some gobbing just stacked Rock some waste timber bit of interesting geology in here as well and then the only other thing on this level that we haven't seen yet is this chute which we believe goes all the way down to the lowest level of the mine which is a good 300 feet below us the reason we think this is there's a ton of air flowing through this this chute and it feels to me like it's getting sucked down the chute it could be wrong it's hard to tell there's certainly air flow going down there and the only the only openings that are below us are the lower level so we will likely see the bottom of that chute momentarily for now I'm gonna climb back up there and visit some of the other areas that we have yet to see you okay so this is looking up a decline notice these boards with the like tie rods sticking out of them so we're fairly certain that this was the decline that was serviced by the hoist up there and they probably had rollers or you know these these had something to do with keeping the cable from contacting the rock and then this is the man way we just we came down to to see that lower level and then on the left is the chute so I'll just show you guys going up this again I'm kind of working my way backwards in this one a lot of blue everywhere so that's up toward the hoist to the right here are some Stopes as most this areas filled with waste material that's back down toward the or car you can see a lot of blue in here that whole area is the Stolp with some backfill not much else one last time this is the ladder that we came down to get to the decline oh cool look at that and there's the mortality board right there I didn't notice that first time I went down this so they'd used that to track loads of or and that's looking down so I'm gonna climb up this ladder and to the main level okay so that's the hoist room down there the ladder we just came up on and then we are in a Stoke now so head up here I already been up here and some interesting features up here so coming around the corner you enter in this really big room there's this retaining wall here and then we'll get up on that ledge these are all dead ends or or passes so we're climbing up pretty big step okay so kind of at the top most point that you can walk to there's a ladder going up here to a very sketchy looking platform to another ladder to another stope and that's where we came from way down there retaining wall is like eight or nine feet tall shows you how big this step is those are or passes and that's a dead end but kind of cool to see Stoke this size you

Channel: Mines of the West

Views: 503,917

Rating: 4.7622666 out of 5

Keywords: abandoned, mine, mining, abandoned mine, history, exploring abandoned mines, artifacts, rare, amazing, underground, find, exploring, explorers, mine exploring, miners, gold, copper, silver, minerals, geology, shaft, mineshaft, found, treasure, desert, california, nevada, oregon, washington, fhood, minesofthewest, TVR exploring, haunted, dark, ghost, caught, adit, portal, stope, ore, vein, ore cart, tracks, rails, TVR, western mining history, ghost town, king, hidden, graffiti, historic, sunshine mine

Id: zKC_TEIXMTs

Length: 24min 3sec (1443 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 21 2019