 Good morning YouTube Mine Exploring fans. How many are you here? Morning. She's here. I can't really see her though, it's pretty dark. I'm here. It's a beautiful day. It's about 76 degrees. It's only 8 in the morning. 9. It's going on 9 I guess. So we're parking the Jeep. We're going to go on foot from here. Look at this huge wall ahead of us. It's a fairly narrow canyon. Oh, Julie's already leaving. I better catch her. Well, we're off on another adventure there, Julie. Pretty awesome view. Yeah, it is. Beautiful canyon. Looks like there must be some moisture down here. I see a lot of vegetation. Wow, what a steep rugged high canyon. It's beautiful. We're actually walking through vegetation. Look at these tall grasses. Kind of neat. Obviously a spring here. This is looking up canyon the way we've come from. And here we have a little greeting this morning from a beaver tail prickly pine. A beaver tail prickly pear that's flowering. We love beaver tails. What are Julie's favorites? Yeah, it is. It's beautiful. Hey, I see a piece of rail down in the wash. What's that doing there? Wow, here we are. Look at that shoot. And I believe we are looking at a stamp mill ahead of Julie. That's the second mill we found this week. Wow, crazy. That is quite an ore shoot that comes down to this mill. We're going to have to go it up to the top of there somehow. See where the mine is. But first, let's go look at the mill. So there's the old mill that looks like it used to be a two-stamp mill and now it's a one. One whole side of that battery is missing. That looks like the base for the hammer. The mortar, is that what you call it? The big wheel and the camshaft there and the cam itself. And the king post or the big hammer. That's what lifts the actual hammer and post when the cam pushes up on it. Pretty awesome stuff. Fairbanks, Morse, Nissan mill. So this is patent November 29th, 04. And the actual badge on this particular casting is 599. 569. 569. And the hammer is there. Here's another shot of the mill, the ore bin above it. And then that crazy wooden chute that goes up, I'm assuming to where the mine itself is. So here's a trail. Let's see if we can mountain go our way up there. You see anything in the ore bin from there? Here's the chute from the side. So we are at the mine. The portal is right there. It always got a piece of quartz that looks like it's vane material that's sitting outside the mine. There is the portal to the mine we're looking at today. This mine was first located in 1903 by an Indian named Johnny Hughes. He was out big horn sheep hunting and must have spotted something that looked good to him as far as the mineral vangles. He went and showed it to a guy named Ishmael who in 1904 came back and claimed it I guess. And then Ishmael must have sold the claim to two guys by the name of Frank Durham and Burton Gaylord. And these are the two guys who first worked this claim in 1905. Okay, let's go in the mine and see what we have. See what Johnny Hughes has found. Oh boy, a big breeze coming out here. Well, there are some remnants of track although some has been pulled out. There's a gobbling wall here. And then the tracks pick up again. Oh, and a big chute. Plugged up. Pretty nice chute. Yup, it's jammed up. Big breeze coming out of there. Oh, look at the nice lagging. Looks like it's done a little settling that play at the top that timber has compressed pretty good. Nice lagging wall here. Must be a pretty good stope up top. Oh, look at the windlass. Yeah, it's a long one in there. Oh, it's still all there too. That's got to be at least six feet long, probably longer. And another chute. This one's open. And yes, there's a big stope up here. Goes right on up. And then another big lagging wall here in this stope. It's like the veins at about a 45 degree angle. So that's the end of it that way. Lagging still in perfect condition. And that big chute. Julie's up at the windlass. Check me out. Does it still work? I'm working the windlass. Yes, you are. Nice and smooth. Well, that is nice and smooth. Yeah. This end just has a 90 degree bend on the end of it to keep it from sliding out. And you can see the cable marks on it. Or the rope marks, whatever they used. OK. All right, let's go down. This is looking down. Yeah, why don't we go down? We can go down and up. A little piece of ladder there. Make sure the ladder's sturdy before you jump on it. Feels sturdy? Yeah, seems OK. OK. OK. It's looking up at the area where the platform and the windlass are. There's some tracks coming down. Although they're not set up the way they would have been. I don't believe. Unless they were that narrow. There's the ladder we just came down. Just goes a short ways to the right. And it looks like there's a stove that goes up. Some on a few stalls in there. And then the other way, you can see the vein right here still. The other way is a short, low stove also. There's a jumble of timbers here. Some cams on a rail. And then a low stove with three stalls. And it goes right down. Let's see if we can go down. Look at her scoot into that thing. Like nothing. OK, let's go see what happens over here. Go down? It just goes down a short ways and ends. OK, I'll just take a look. And there's another set of rails that go down here. I don't even see any of the vein over here. Let's go back and see what the upper section looks. I know you could get up that chute or alongside that chute. OK, let's climb up this other ladder. Let's see if the old guy can get up here without hurting somebody. Let me be myself. Any of you up here and look, see what's going on? Yeah, I want you to check it out. All right. Pretty steep. Yeah, it looks steep. This is the ore chute cam. OK. Yup. That's looking back down the chute. I just scrambled up. I took to that side and it goes just a little ways above me here. Not too far. Then there also, now I see there's another portal over this way. Here's a low hanging wall here on low stope. Little stalls getting crushed. Looks like there was another one there that's died. So this area must be sagging a little bit, shifting a little. This must be the top of the other chute that we saw. The first chute when we came in. And then there's another portal. So I didn't have to crawl up that chute after all. I didn't know that was there. Always do stuff the hard way. At least the first time. Yeah, this is looking down another chute. OK, that's the top of the chute. That one was plugged. There's the portal, some gobbling out there. I'm sitting underneath a couple stalls right here. It doesn't go far up past this chute. So, that's it. Let's go see the top of the mill and that big long chute that's outside. There's the outcropping that Johnny must have seen there on the right. Above the main portal here. And then that top area that's mine, that's where I just came out. OK, let's walk over this way and go see the top of this chute that leads to the mill. That ought to be kind of interesting. Not much left of the old chute up high here. It's all falling apart. Let's see if I can't get down a little bit and see if there's some left of the steeper section. Oh, this is a look at the chute. I gotta say it's one of the longer chutes that I've seen down to the mill there. Wow, what a structure this is. It's so steep I don't know how you can even hold a board in place while you nailed it. I also don't know why they covered the top of it. In fact, this might not be a standard chute. Maybe there was a rail that ran along the top of it. I'm making my way down this chute. I still don't quite understand how it worked and why the top is so covered up. It's possible they had rail up on top of this. I don't know why they would have all these boards on top. And I'm just above the mill. There's a piece of drill steel in a cable anchoring this section on the steep part. And here was a cable tightener. A lot of times they would do that. They'd take a piece of steel or wood and crank that cable and tighten it up. And this part's all collapsed. So here's a close-up of the big drive wheel. Look at all the nails they put in there. And then this is the cam in the lifting block. This is something. I can't quite read it. And that's looking down at the hammer. There was another shaft here. I'm not sure that this other side was ever operating because I don't see any... Well, there were some bolts on the foundation for it. But the cam is gone and the rod is gone and everything. Then there's this other wheel over here. This lines up with the drive wheel behind me. But what would that have been powering? The shaft goes underneath this bin. And the end of the shaft is over there on the other end. And I don't know where this right end goes. It goes into the bin and I can't see it. The shoe is clogged. Look at the wooden bushing type thing they have here on this shaft. There's also a regular cast bearing here of some type. But these two things... I don't know what they would use that for. Wow, look what you leave just unearthed. A Coors cam. Is it all steel? Yeah, look it. All steel with a church key. That is cool. Look how good a shape it's still in. Yeah it is. Let's see the top. Look at the little teeny church key holes. Let's get them to something. Little teeny holes on the back of it's burnt out or it's rusted out. That must have been up, huh? It was just down here? Yeah, in the rubble. Underneath this steel. Here's a riveted shaft of some sort. It had pivot point there. And something that would catch a 2x4 or something on this side. Through the pitting. I haven't been sitting there for a hundred years. Right there is where it was. So just up canyon from the mill, there's a little structure here. Looks like it was a bit of an old miners' shack. Maybe just a little sleeping quarters. There's a portal behind me that's open. We're overlooking a wash here and there's absolutely zero waste rock pile. So we're not expecting a whole lot here. But let's go see what we do now. Here's the portal. It's actually a pretty good sized portal. It's hard to judge the size of a mine by the size of the waste rock pile. And right off the bat, I see a piece of vent mine, so that's a good sign. So you can see a bit of quartz in the rock right here. And then right above the center of the back here, there's a streak of about 4 or 6 inches. It looks like quartz. Okay, let's go see what we have. Here's the vein. Looks like they were following what they didn't take. Here's the hanging one on the left. The vein looks to be at about a 50, 60 degree angle. It's warm in here and there's some mica in there, it looks like. And some iron. Here's a chute with an open shaft, huh? Oh, it sure does, then. We must have followed some up that way, yeah, right here. This goes up there. It's powdery dry here. Ooh, it's getting warm. What's your temperature say? 64. Let's see. 64. 64 doesn't seem very warm, does it? Maybe it's getting humid. It feels like it's getting humid. Oh, it can feel the humidity, yeah. Here's something sticking out of the wall for a vent hanger. Pretty standard, rounded piece of wood going into a drill hole. Looks like there was track in here. I see tie bumps. Hmm, let's go left here and look at this. Somebody had a little fire there. I wonder if there are bats in here. Usually they did that to get the bats out, which is kind of mean to the bats. Here's their vent line. Not much there. Okay, back in the main line. It changes geologically here, doesn't it? Wow, is it wet? Wow, is this... Human. It changes drastically from where we started. I didn't think this would even be this big because there was no waste pile. Man, it's so humid you can hardly breathe. Here's some tracks covered with stuff. Smells like sulfur, doesn't it? What a jumbled mess. Wow, look at the colors on the line here. There's a bit of a collapse here. Some click it's slabbed off a little. Does it keep going? Yeah, it keeps going. The tracks are here, they're all rusty. It's already 69. It was just 64. So it went up about 5 degrees. Here's a little crosscut. There's some old boards in there. I don't see anything else though. And then a lot of colors. And I can feel the mud starting to collect underneath my feet. Yup, there's some water right there. It's going to be a little muddy. The calcite you think on this? We'll have to get our UV lamp in a minute and see if something fluoresces. Pretty wild stuff, isn't it? So different from the other mines around here that are dry and not humid. Very different from what we usually see. It's dark and there's going to be some flowstone I can see coming up here. Yeah, it's pretty wild. So it's just a small stove going up. But the flowstone is coming out of it like crazy. And then this thing. Is that soft? Because it looks like it would be slimy. And then oh, this is flowstone. Look at our UV light in a little while. I'm going to check this out on the way back. Can you go now? No, there's something funny something up there. A tommy knacker. A tommy knackers. Okay, continuing on past the flowstone. More flowstone. Look at it dripping, actually dripping. Oh, a big drip just came down right in front of me. At the end? It ends right there. Kind of neat, don't you think? 72 degrees. So it went up by what, 10? 64. 8. And it humid. 72. Like 100% humidity. It automatically sweats. Okay, we're working our way back out. That flowstone is something in there. I'm going to turn my light off and see if it fluoresces. I've found that you have to kind of move the light, because if you look up fluorescence, how it works, it's when the UV light excites the electrons and then when you remove the light, it's when it actually fluoresces. Something like that, anyway. That's kind of neat. Hold on. It kind of changes some different colors, doesn't it? Yeah. I don't know if that's calcite. I think flowstone can be any number of dissolved minerals. Okay, I didn't realize my camera lens had all fogged up. My thermometer reads 76. 76, so it went up. Yeah. It didn't got about 100% humidity. Because it feels like it's 90 in here. Here's the sulfur area. We're not going to use this track, are we? Look at the stuff going on the track. I know, look at all the colors. I know. This must have fallen down from up here. Yeah, very colorful mine. It's kind of neat, isn't it? Yeah. I really don't like to disturb the bats. You can feel the temperature changing drastically as does the mine rib and back geologically changed from that wet area. It's completely dry now. Dusty. We're almost back to the shoot and the portal. I wish they'd go by me. This is my little buddy. He comes again. What you doing there little guy? Anyway, that's looking back down the canyon. We're almost back to the jeep. This is one of the few places you're going to see grass in Death Valley. Tall or mental grass. So, from Julia and myself we thank you for watching the video. We hope you enjoy it and we'll see you on our next adventure. Thanks for watching. See you next time.