 looking out across the big nothing. There's some snow right behind Julie. Good morning. Morning. Morning mind-lovers. Tom and Julie here of course. We're out on another mission today. We're almost in Death Valley, not quite. Julie has an extra red pack on her body that is a rope and I have a rope on my back too. Look at the flowers are coming out. A little tiny ones. Hundreds and thousands of them over here too. Well these flowers are so thick that to hike out here you almost have to step on them. It's like carpet. So where we're headed you can see right ahead of me here. There are two fairly large waste piles and that's what we're going after today. Look who's starting to come out. I believe these are called Indian paintbrush. I'm not sure what the technical term is for them. There's a nice specimen amongst the purple flowers. Purple ones are everywhere. Okay we're almost to this first waste pile. Here comes Julie in through the portal. This is an incline shaft of sorts. Goes down that way. This is a very gentle incline. It gets steeper a little further in here. I've been in here before and I got to the point where it was too steep to safely go without a rope. So we are back. I'm kind of hoping that this would tie into that other waste pile that was outside. There's a shaft there, a vertical shaft. I'm kind of hoping this ties into it. It's going the right direction but it's several hundred feet away so I'm not sure how long this one goes. But we'll find out. Careful. There is some gravelly stuff over this hard band like this which does make it slippery when you get on the rock. When the rock starts rolling underneath your feet. I'm not sure what this is all about. It's straight up. There should be an anchor somewhere down here as it gets steeper in the wall or there was anyway. Okay there goes our lead explorer. It's not that steep so we're not having our harnesses on at this point. Just using a rope or something to hang on to because it's loose and kind of steep. You have enough rope? I feel air moving through here. Do you feel any? Yeah I do. Oh you do? That's a good sign. Are you getting close to the bottom? Alright. Careful. Rock. Well she got down there and said this is plugged. Okay so this is what I'm seeing when I came down that incline. Kind of ends here. Does look like it went that way a little ways. I'm gonna peek my head in there and see if I can find see-through there. Good Tom's making his way down. Okay I can feel that there's air moving through here. So this goes somewhere and you can't really see right there but I'm curious as to what's beyond here and there are a few big rocks here and it's very low but I can see that it opens up past that. So I think we should spend a little time and try to move some of these rocks maybe crawl through there. What do you think guys? Should we do it? Let's do it. I thought I heard their FC of CES too so let's try it. Maybe I'll find some gold while I'm in here. Yeah it's all accumulated down here. There's a pile of it. Yeah this is all groundfall and stuff that's rolled down the shaft over the years and washed in. Looks like some of this is silted in. Okay let's check that later. What'd you find there? I don't know. Kind of a sparkly one isn't it? Neat. I want to make the progress. One big one here. You can get that big guy out of there. I think we're doing good. There we go. Now you can see it a little better. Well we have that opened up enough to possibly squeeze through the skinnier one of us. No it's not me. There goes Julie the snake. Not by roll running these rocks in there behind her. We could seal her in there. That's not even nice is it? I wouldn't do that. Wouldn't do that to my lovely wife. Careful in there now. Okay this is what it looks like after crawling through. It's pretty narrow. No timbering. It looks like it's pretty solid rock here. A couple of stalls. Of course the big rats looks like it goes for a little while. I don't see an obvious mineral vein but it gets low here. Looks like it ends just up there but I'll keep going here and check it out. Okay so there's the face right there. Not gonna go any further but it's just a little ways up there. It's pretty low. And that's it. It's an interesting mineral vein while I'm sitting here. Almost looks like some fluoride over here. Purple. Maybe a little talc. Did you know that some talc veins have gold in them? I never knew that until this week I was reading a book about it. Here comes Julie. Not much going on there huh? No. Well that's too bad. Okay we're heading back out of here. We'll go look at that other shaft. Okay this is our route up. Julie is about halfway up our rope. That was only a 60 foot rope. It's a cheap one. So too bad that one didn't pan out. I was really hoping that would tie into this bigger mine that's it's a vertical shaft associated with that other wave spot that we could see from outside. But that's the way things go. Sometimes with mine exploring you spend a lot of time and effort and energy on something you hope will pan out and it doesn't. It's making its way up. It's a lot steeper than it looks. But not too bad. Alright you get her. Okay there's a little bit of a crosscut here. Careful of those loose rocks. And full of rat crap of course. Just covered with rat crap in here. And another little can. I don't think this goes very far. What do you see? The mother of all brass masts. Is that? Oh boy. You like it there. Yeah you like that. So that doesn't go very far. Yeah. Alright well a bunch of timbers in here too. I don't know what what took place here if these were used for assisting the hauling out of stuff from this chapter. There's a bunch of square like 10 by 10s over there. At least 8 bytes. Careful going down there now. One of those hand holes gives you're gonna go down the shaft. Okay let's have a look at this vein. It's very red right here. And there's a very sharp transition between the solid gray rock and then this vein material. I'm not sure if this is rhyolite. It might be. I mean it looks like there's some talc in there to me too. And then back this way was that short crosscut that turns into a rat's nest. A couple of cans here. Alright let's go back up and see what happens. Okay we're heading on up. Got a rope packed up. The shaft gets a little less steep up here too so it's easy to walk. Okay we're up at this other shaft. Here are some mounting bolts for a hoist I'm guessing. Here's the shaft. I've been here before. I can't remember if it had ladders. Well we looked on that shaft. We're not gonna go. There are no ladders. Even though we have our ropes today we're both a little dinged up for a long rappel and climb back out. So we can't do that. So let's move on somewhere else and see what else we can find. Somewhere out there. There's gotta be a mine waiting for us. Well look at the pandemics over there. Can you see them? They're just covered with snow still. There's a nice cactus. I'm not sure what type it is. It's growing like a hedgehog grows but they're not quite that big of a diameter. And then I noticed over here a nice Indian paintbrush. Pretty.