Returning to a Great Lead-Silver-Zinc Mine

all right so we're back here at this mine those who've been watching my channel will probably remember this one and we're back here today to explore areas that we weren't able to get to last time and one of those areas is a stop that's right next to this head frame here's another look at the shaft just really cool seeing this uh construction here yeah here's the stop that i was mentioning and yeah we're hoping that this will take us to an area we weren't able to access last time so see you down there all right so we're climbing down the stop and uh it opens up down here and i think this is the uh the other side of the first level that we weren't able to get to because i remember spotting the top of that ladder so this is pretty neat looks like they cleared out a little pocket over there very pretty stuff whoa don't try to kill me man and uh yeah this is the other side of that natural cave so we made it yeah these stops are really interesting just you know small little rabbit holes almost yep this is where xavier was trying to cross and yeah that was uh that was way too hairy because falling down here would really suck especially because this is all very sharp limestone and it'd probably tear your skin up pretty good but uh it was pretty easy getting down here the way we did so let's go have a look at this level wow this looks like it's worth uh going down it's pretty cool it's getting kind of warm in here hey i'm guessing you're just faces out unfortunately yes but it goes surprising distance yeah this hall here looks like a limestone which was the the host rock of the uh the deposit here yeah that's the end we've got a nice little foot wall for a fault here [Music] and some dupont instructions for maybe blasting caps or fuse kind of interesting yeah so i'm curious to see what's on that ladder because that goes down to a pretty big stop that that we saw last time but we weren't able to get to you so all right so i found some cool things here first of all here's a square now it's a bit rested but next to it i found a fragment of jeans and there's a button here here it says patented patented may 1873 and it says ls and co san francisco so levi and strauss company in uh san francisco california it's a pretty neat find you can probably sell this for about 10 billion okay so we climbed down here just a little ways and there's a pretty neat retaining wall with uh raw timbers and at the bottom there's actually a small little ladder that they're using uh to support all that waste rock and this does continue down fair ways but it gets a bit steeper but we're sort of at a little level uh you can see the there's running off this way and there's a drift over here that contains uh some really pretty crystals apparently okay i'm gonna have to take this sample home check this out is that not gorgeous or what well that is awesome yeah this side look at that side so that's i believe that's hematite right with the bright orange staining or is that it might be a limonite or maybe jar sight i don't know dude wow i'm definitely not a geologist and the green stuff what were you saying that was it well it's calcite crystals but there they got another this looks like it might be quartz but also uh i believe fluorite was found here florida okay well the ones you found last time those were a bit greener i think yeah so that might just be quartz it's still really pretty though it's very crumbly though when i get home i'll have to see if i can stabilize it yeah that is a really beautiful section here there's still more up here if you want to all right get a close-up shot of some beautiful pockets along here i wonder if this is what they were following seems likely and this sort of just dead ends over here and it looks like they drove a short little raise up here but yeah that stuff is really beautiful all right let's go check out those stops that are over to my left here it's really cool um how this ladder is set up and you can see they just have a raw piece of lumber holding it up yeah so this is most likely the stop that was below that cave and yeah it definitely looks like it is yeah this is a fair sized snow i like those uh those stalls over there whoa okay so we just climbed down to the bottom of the slider we were just using a hand line but really we we should have been on ropes this was a pretty hairy but um we're at the bottom now you can see there's some pretty cool stops um whoops up there there's a retaining wall and uh there's a whole bunch of waste rock being held up by just a few uh broken beams so yeah that doesn't make me feel too good yeah there's the bottom of the ladder and behind me um there's a passageway that goes down and that connects to a level that we uh we're at before but um there's no way you could um make it down to there it's too collapsed and there's another stop running up this way yeah pretty neat okay so that's the bottom which is where i was just filming at and i made it across here and uh wasn't so bad and uh yeah here's another look at this retaining wall and i thought this stuff was all loose up here but it's actually stacked so i guess it's a bit better but still uh i don't really trust those beams but there's a little drift running over here and it leads right to a ladder that drops off into that big stop and this is the ladder that i saw from the the cave in the first video but i'm not going to climb down this because it's not attached to anything at the top and it's and it feels really wobbly so yeah it's going to be a no-go for me so here's this cave again there's the really neat formations and uh way down over there is the ladder that was attached to the top that i saw off that other incline winds alright so we're back here at the the main shaft and the goal is to go all the way down to the bottom but along the way we're going to stop at each level and uh check out some of the the raises and stops that we didn't really check thoroughly last time and then once at the bottom we're going to try to descend those two lenses that we saw and hopefully there's something cool down there so i'm working my way down the shaft and right by me there's a roller and it's interesting because they only have the uh the metal bit on one side and that's just because the cable was running on this side of the ladder but um last time we were here we're trying to figure out what this was a piece off of and xavier did a bit of research and he found out that this is actually a hub off of a wagon wheel and that is uh really cool i think and i'll put a picture of a wagon wheel hub up so you can make the comparison for yourself all right so we're back on this level on the last time we were here i called this the 400 foot level but now i think i may have been mistaken and that this is actually the 300 foot level making the one down here the 400 and if that's the case then one of those two wins as we saw down there must be uh 240 feet deep and uh yeah i'm just going to show you another look at this level again here's this really cool riveted shovel i didn't even notice that the wooden handle was still on there last time and over here we have a can for micro grease we have this roller that says youngstown on it and over here off to the right there are some stops that we didn't check out last time and i found a pretty cool passageway going over here so here's a close-up of this vein they're chasing pretty neat and this wraps around here and it connects back with the incline shaft yeah so there's a bunch of burlap bags in here and i'm guessing these are for taking rock samples and yeah there's this little window that pokes right out into the incline shaft so it's a pretty neat little passageway to explore i'm just going to give you another walkthrough of this drift with all the pyrite in it because it is really pretty the pyrite stinks too as a sulfur smell so this is a pretty cool shot the uh the bucket guide bends here and you can see they put this piece of metal on the side to help keep the rope rubbing against the wood and there's another wagon wheel hub there and that light you see down there is uh xavier at the bottom of the shaft and you know what this definitely does not feel like 240 feet down feels more like 100 feet so the one down here is probably the 400 which means one of those winches goes down 240 feet and uh not really sure what would be down there it might be a dead end winds it's possible there might be drifts off of it i don't know okay so i'm almost down to the bottom and there's a short little drift off to the side here i don't think it goes very far but there's a velvet tobacco can sitting right there which is pretty neat and you can see uh there's some wiring here i think this larger one is for the uh the bell signal because it seems to run all the way up and down the shaft and i don't think they're using this for electricity this one um this one you can see is wrapped so this is what they were sending down to that one room with those uh batteries we saw the last time okay i made it to the bottom of the shaft i don't think i filmed that note last time but it says mckay school of minds and i'm gonna give you another tour of this level and i'll try to go a bit slower than it did last time because we were rushing it so again there's 1918 and we have a whole bunch of uh drill steels here i think this one is so skinny because it's been sharpened so many times it's probably at the end of its life and we have some pieces of a giants powder box some more drill steels and hand steels handle for maybe a shovel and there's a raise going up here but i don't think this one punches through to the level above i think it just faces out up there about 50 feet maybe not sure what that is well it's clear they were following a vein here and it looks like it dips at about this angle there's sort of a hanging wall here but it's not extremely obvious i mean i guess it is pretty obvious yeah look at this pocket yeah a lot of you seem to enjoy the close-up shots of all the uh the veins in here really cool stuff and here's this really cool junction i love how the track switch still works and there's that broom again guess i'll go to the right i think the guys over here lots of gobbing backfill drift over there and here's this really nice receiver tank yeah still can't quite make up that uh that plate yeah so over here is one of the the winses that we're gonna try to descend and last time i didn't do a rock test so let's try doing that now all right here we go it doesn't sound very deep i think it might just end right down there only about 30 feet and i'm guessing they had some kind of actual air hoist here rather than a windlass because that board is soaked with grease so i'm thinking they may have had something set up on there and you can tell by the coke can that someone has been down here and down here in recent years yeah i think the other one that we're going to see in a moment is the uh the deeper one so right here by this tank is another hand steel i don't think i noticed this one last time yeah looks pretty new you can tell it's not worn very much on the end and let's go down this drift and there's a lot of cool things in here yeah so this right here is a column hey man this thing is awesome yeah so like i said in the last video they would have mounted pneumatic drills on it here and it has this base which i've never seen before and this is actually how they wedge the column in between the floor and the back so they would stick like a pipe in there and they crank these bolts down to a widget and i've seen these before in other mines but it didn't have this base and instead the uh the jack i guess was on the either the top or the bottom was actually on the column itself it wasn't an individual base so yeah this is definitely a pretty unique find and again here's this windlass here which was probably used for this winds here right by this horseshoe and again um we have some more hand steels yeah so this looks like a complete set actually because i think they came in sets of three a long one a medium size one and a small one and they all seem to be here so that's pretty neat t a pi i don't know yeah so this is the winds that i'm thinking might go down 200 um 40 feet or so looks pretty nasty we definitely need to get on ropes for this one and here's uh this junction the really cool um slick plate yeah so basically would just slide an ore car on here and they'd slide the wheels into the direction they wanted and then wheel it off and you know this i think that this is actually for a little shiv wheel for possibly the uh the winds that's right over here because it looks just like the one uh that's on the head frame for the main shaft yeah i bet there was a shiv wheel mounted on here so yeah that weighings might actually go down 240 feet if they if it was deep enough to construct a head frame i think i could see the bottom just in case it might curve i'm pretty sure it just ends on there the rocks didn't go very far well try to remain positive y'all this is the patented double rat a double ladder technique this is hard for me to do because you know the constant person how do you like me now oh and then this one ends back to single ladder technique didn't get some good shots good picture oh that looks really good the lighting looks fantastic always with the tank lines right now looking really good the thing that worries me is i'll get over the edge and it'll turn out you know it is the 200 something foot shaft and i'm not dangling well what's the report xavier uh it appears to be a 30-foot hit the report is all the way down kind of dusty yeah you're breathing in all that i think they were considering going further but it just never happened there's nothing down here it's actually even very devoid of artifacts as well hella cool up and down better let's get at her so here's this track switch and i'm going to give you a walk through of this portion of the level i just love how clean the drift looks with the rail and everything there's that uh explosives crate and we're back over here none of these give me the warm fuzzies what are we looking for anchor points yeah how much does he trust the beam you make grandpa's cool dude oh it kind of goes free hanging here this might actually go down the ways that's what i'm saying well this is gonna get interesting i feel like it's gonna turn all right so we made it about 25 feet down winds number two and there is a short level off of here that has a um pretty beat up dynamite box and a shovel head but apparently uh xavier tried picking them up and they just crumbled so it's pretty humid in here um but it is also extremely dusty as you can tell so there's aber says he sees another level so we're going to try to work our way down to that and there's a bit of rock falling right now okay so this is the 240-foot winds then yeah it keeps going i'm gonna toss another rock let's see the thing is it's a real shallow incline yeah i can tell it's only like what is that 20 degrees yeah we uh we're wearing masks right now because this dust is horrible okay so we're down the incline maybe 100 feet and it definitely keeps going down but i think we're going to call it quits here because the dust is just getting unbearable yeah no airflow down here at all and i don't think there's going to be any major workings down there anyways i think this was just a test wins to see if the deposit continued down further but i don't believe it did because we've been seeing short drifts like the one we're in right now but it only goes back about 15 feet but uh we did find one cool thing down here and it's this hercules powder box and it's actually in pretty decent shape well i take back what i said on that other little level we actually made it down to the bottom this is the foot of the winds but uh it doesn't seem like it's 240 feet because we have a 200 feet of rope so maybe more like 180 but in a lot of mines it seems like the levels aren't spaced out as a far as it is described in the mining reports but uh yeah we have an actual decent sized level here and we have a tuxedo tobacco can but as you can see it's very rusted everything down here is very degraded right there we got a hand steel and a blasting captain and over here we have a junction and it's pretty cool because we actually have a candle over here see that the wick is still in it bit of nails and over here we have some dynamite boxes but as you can see uh they aren't looking so good we also have some mica grease and another blast encap lid by the looks of it or tin by the looks of it and heading off this direction i'm taking it really slow because i did not bring my little stabilizer down with me so just trying to keep it steady so yeah as you can see there's a lot of rot down in here it uh must get pretty damp in here sometimes but it's not so humid right now that's how xavier whistling up to my uh other buddy who's waiting up at the top of the winds and this looks like it was actually the working face because you can see they have these uh sideways rails here along with a muck sheet and the last drift doesn't go very far but it has a muck sheet and a little can of something so yeah was it worth coming down here probably not but now we know what's down here so we don't have to stay up you know awake at night wondering what the heck's down here all right so i missed this prince albert can here's another thing i missed it's a uh eggshell it's pretty interesting i'm going to admit what we did here was incredibly stupid first of all we should have been using harnesses for a lot of these drops what is more concerning is the fact that we didn't have air quality monitors my o2 meter had just broken before this and xavier's had just expired so we dropped down this last winds without any air quality indicator besides our own senses i didn't state it in the video but we could tell the oxygen levels at the bottom were definitely lower than normal this was due to the decaying wood and metal as well as the lack of airflow we were lucky it wasn't at the point where our lives were in danger but it was probably at the level where our decision making abilities were impaired when we climbed out we both agreed that we've been taking too many unnecessary risks so if you happen to visit this mine don't go down that winds you can see what's down there from my video

Channel: Forgotten Mining History

Views: 15,117

Rating: 4.959322 out of 5

Keywords: mine, mines, mine exploring, mine exploration, abandoned, abandoned mine, abandoned mines, exploring, exploration, underground, adit, tunnel, shaft, incline, inclined shaft, incline shaft, winze, stope, stopes, lead, silver, zinc, copper, gold, silver mine, lead mine, desert, mining, geology, mineralogy, minerals, bad air, low oxygen, dangerous

Id: 5TVb-4gTmiU

Length: 35min 26sec (2126 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 25 2021