Death Valley Curly & The 1885 Mine

The mining district where this mine is located was famed for its rich silver production... I would love to tell you more about the history of this mine than that. However, with these early mines (subsequent research leads me to believe that the 1885 carved into the wooden door may well be accurate), there were often few – if any - written records. That is particularly the case with a smaller mine such as this one where I was unable to even determine a name, let alone production records or the identities of the original miners that worked there. I don’t know if “Death Valley Curly” ever mined here or not, but I’d love to know more of his story as well.

I am curious to know how the miners decided on the location of this mine. The surface of this site was made up of broken rocks from an ancient lava flow and there didn’t appear to be any minerals that would have caught the eyes of the miners. I suppose they might have had a hunch that the lava flow had covered up a good deposit of silver ore, but why here? Perhaps one of the geologists in the audience will correct me, but a lava flow of this type seems like really unpromising ground to run a mine into. The smaller size of the mine might be confirmation of that speculation on my part.

Despite starting out with relatively drab colors, the adit really exploded with color around the end of the haulage adit where that significant winze was. I’m partially colorblind, but that really popped even for me. So, I can only imagine how it looks for those of you enjoying the ability to fully see color. I believe that that would have been an interesting place to try out a blacklight.

I am not sure what inspired the miners to run that ridiculously deep winze straight down toward the end of the haulage adit. Perhaps they were giving up on continuing to drive ahead horizontally as they had been? Or perhaps they found some promising indicators as they were working down? The other work branching off from the haulage adit seemed exploratory in nature or perhaps the miners had come across a small pocket or two along the way, but nothing significant. Regardless of the reason for its creation, I remain very curious about how deep that winze runs and if there are any additional levels down there.

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You can see the gear that I use for mine exploring here: https://bit.ly/2wqcBDD

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Thanks for watching!

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Growing up in California’s “Gold Rush Country” made it easy to take all of the history around us for granted. However, abandoned mine sites have a lot working against them – nature, vandals, scrappers and various government agencies… The old prospectors and miners that used to roam our lonely mountains and toil away deep underground are disappearing quickly as well.

These losses finally caught our attention and we felt compelled to make an effort to document as many of the ghost towns and abandoned mines that we could before that colorful niche of our history is gone forever. But, you know what? We enjoy doing it! This is exploring history firsthand – bushwhacking down steep canyons and over rough mountains, figuring out the techniques the miners used and the equipment they worked with, seeing the innovations they came up with, discovering lost mines that no one has been in for a century, wandering through ghost towns where the only sound is the wind... These journeys allow a feeling of connection to a time when the world was a very different place. And I’d love to think that in some small way we are paying tribute to those hardy miners that worked these mines before we were even born.

So, yes, in short, we are adit addicts… I hope you’ll join us on these adventures!

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