Mine exploring in Nevada.

[Joanne]

We come across a lot of little shafts and the only way to find out what's at the bottom is to go there. Nothing at the bottom of this one.



Joanne

[fmrUSMC_0844]

Looks like fun! Whats the craziest thing you have found at the bottom of a mine shaft?

[jeff-gordon]

looks like a nuclear blast hole

[Jim in Idaho]

Not me sister! I'll go into a horizontal shaft, but never one that heads down. I hope you're lowering a bird of some sort in there before you go down. Vertical shafts have been known to hold poisonous gases. Go on down, pass out, and how is anybody at the surface going to help? I caution all my prospecting friends about this. An older guy in Utah a couple of years ago, had that very thing happen. He was alone, which compounded the problem. They found his body at the bottom of the shaft.
Jim

[Joanne]

Looks like fun! Whats the craziest thing you have found at the bottom of a mine shaft?

We seem to find all kinds of stuff at the bottom of mines. If the site is close to a town it tends to be junk that folks throw down, Old couches or refrigerators. More remote sites we often find old mining gear that wasn't valuable enough for the miners to haul out. I recently found a round Griswold griddle that I was super excited about. I'm a cast iron cook so having a bit of history to use and enjoy was a special find for me. I'm going to post a story about it in the General Discussion area.

Joanne

[Joanne]

Not me sister! I'll go into a horizontal shaft, but never one that heads down. I hope you're lowering a bird of some sort in there before you go down. Vertical shafts have been known to hold poisonous gases. Go on down, pass out, and how is anybody at the surface going to help? I caution all my prospecting friends about this. An older guy in Utah a couple of years ago, had that very thing happen. He was alone, which compounded the problem. They found his body at the bottom of the shaft.
Jim

Jim, that's good advice. A lot of the guys run a 4 gas detector but I don't personally have one.

Joanne

[Red_desert]

See any quartz vein showing down there?

[Joanne]

See any quartz vein showing down there?

Hey Red Desert,

We didn't find any quartz down that particular shaft. That said, there are quartz outcroppings scattered around the mountain range. All around our mine are chunks of quarts that have washed down the ridge above our mine. There is a large quartz vein right on top of the ridge. There are a few prospect diggings right close to it, but nothing that would have been a production mine.

A few miles north of our mine is an old working that was specifically chasing a large vertical quartz vein. About 30 feet down from the collar are drifts to both sides where the miners worked some side veins. The shaft continued down another 70+ feet to a small drift that ended 25 feet back. It's a hanging rappel and climb back out so it's not one that I'll go back to. We've not found a name or any other information about the mine in our mine database, but it was a substantial working.

We've found yet another quartz vein a few miles west that had some prospecting work done to it. The quartz is almost pure white without any iron discoloration that we saw when we climbed around. We grabbed a few really pretty samples.

Joanne

[Red_desert]

I've seen white as sugar, quartz before, around SE side of Los Cerrillos NM. Hardly even an inch thick flat pieces you'd find back then just digging a little off the highway shoulder; some were gold flecked.

[against the wind]

I saw and enjoyed your post on the cast iron griddle.
What you do sounds like it could be real fun.
Stay safe.

[tamrock]

I know of two cases where mine rescue was called to recover bodies of amateur explorers. One was in New Mexico and that guy was crushed by a slab off the back of the drift and the other was in Colorado where the guys leg was pinned by a failing timber and rock fall. He finally died from bleeding out. They could tell his last efforts were trying to dig his way out with his hard hat. It was too dangerous to try to remove the old timber with all that rock on top of it and and they ask the family if it was okay if they used a chainsaw to free his leg from the fall and at least get some of his body out.

[Holyground]

Are you looking for bodies?