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A few weeks ago, during a hike around the abandoned ghost town that I live in, I saw a [music] small crack in the ground. It didn't look like much, just another little opening in a mountain full of old mines. But after a little
Explorer discovers miles of forgotten 1800s silver mines beneath a ghost town, uncovering historic artifacts and new mine areas.
Key Takeaways
- Small, overlooked openings can lead to significant historical discoveries.
- The Sarraordo mines hold vast, well-preserved areas with artifacts spanning multiple mining eras.
- Exploration of abandoned mines requires careful preparation and safety measures due to unstable ground.
- Mining history is crucial to understanding the development and existence of ghost towns.
- Persistence and curiosity can uncover hidden parts of history even after years of exploration.
Summary
- The video follows an explorer who finds a small crack in the ground near an abandoned ghost town.
- This crack leads to miles of forgotten mine shafts dating back to the 1800s, connected to the original Sarraordo Silver Strike.
- The explorer has spent six years exploring the mountain and mines but had never accessed this newly discovered area.
- Multiple trips with ropes and climbing gear reveal well-preserved artifacts such as silver veins, mining equipment, carbide lamps, and old newspapers.
- The discovery includes the Union Chimney, a major historic silver and lead ore deposit previously inaccessible due to collapse.
- The mines contain evidence from different mining eras, including the zinc era and carbide lamp usage.
- The explorer emphasizes the historical significance of the mines in understanding the ghost town’s origins and history.
- The video documents the challenges and dangers of exploring unstable mine shafts and landslides.
- The discovery is described as a major personal milestone, comparable to a combined birthday and Christmas gift.
- The exploration sheds light on lost history and preserves artifacts for future generations.
Chapters
- 00:00Discovery of the crack in the ground
- 01:39Breaking the pattern and exploring new trails
- 03:06Initial exploration of the stope area
- 05:52Planning safer rope access
- 07:55Exploring the well-preserved mine shaft
- 10:59Uncovering miles of new mine tunnels
- 12:41Historic artifacts and mining equipment found
- 15:32Significance of the Union Chimney discovery
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
digging, that [music] crack opened into something that I've spent 6 years trying to find. This is like my birthday and Christmas wrapped up in one. miles of mine shafts dating back to the 1800s connected to the original Sraordto
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Silver Strike that nobody has seen in a century. I believe that they're blasting caps.
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That first opening led to six different trips, hundreds of feet of rope, multiple repels, and some of the most dangerous ground that I've ever explored.
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But inside, I found silver still in the walls. There's just silver everywhere. artifacts left from the 1800s and pieces of Sarraoto's history that never made it into the books. It became the most exciting minor exploration of my life.
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And it all started with a crack in the ground. [music] Over the past six years, I've spent a lot of time exploring this mountain.
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This mountain, Sarraordo, used to be the largest silver mine in California [music] that produced hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ore and had thousands of residents. But even after 6 years of living up here, I haven't seen
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it all. And I realized a few months ago, that's because I fell into that pattern [music] that we all do. I was taking the same trails, the same road. I wasn't exploring new places anymore. And so for the past few months in the evening, I've
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forced myself to take routes that I normally wouldn't. Straight up mountains, off trail, around corners, and I found some pretty cool stuff. I found some old bullets, old mining equipment, even little prospects that would go back into the mountain. And
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every time I saw one of [music] these starts to a mine, I would hope, what if what if this one goes further? What if inside there's all sorts of artifacts?
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And most of the time they only would go 10 or 20 feet back. But recently I found one that had a lot more in it.
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All right, we're up here. I was doing a hike the other day. I came across this that appears to be two collapsed portals. So I'm going to try to dig them out. See if these go anywhere.
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Probably not, but you never know. So I'm going to dig this out. There's another one just behind this I was going to dig out. We're gonna see what we could find.
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Hopefully something. We're close to where the main union chimney would have been. So, this could lead into some really old workings up here. Well, exciting news. I went in there. I squiggled in there and it actually went over in this kind of
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stoope area. Then it looked like it went down a ways. And I'm really hoping this is some of the oldest workings at Sraordo that this would be the Union chimney. So, I came back. I got rope with me this time. We're going to rope
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in there and hopefully we find something. There's some really cool blue rock in there as well. I'm going to take some samples of that. But I love it. You know, I just came up here for a little evening stroll.
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And now maybe we're going to find a new area of the mine. The Union Chimney is a massive nearly vertical deposit of silver and lead and one of the two great ore bodies that made Sarra Gordo California's largest
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silver mine. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ore came out of it before the chimney collapsed, sealing it off for decades. And I've reached the Jefferson chimney, the other main deposit here, but never the Union, despite hundreds of trips underground.
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And so my hope is that this small opening finally gets me inside [music] this historic area.
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Well, that first attempt it was just too sketchy. It's just all piled rock that one slide. There's a huge massive landslide and there's no solid thing to tie off to. So the rope itself could be pulling it in and then one of those big
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things starts getting momentum. As you go down further, you're done. So I'm going to have to do is come back with some climbing bolts. There was some decent rock down there attached to the climbing bolt. Put in a bite so that way
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the tension is on the climbing bolt and the solid rock and it's not on all that loose crap. But it did look like it went down quite a ways. And I do feel more and more confident that this could
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actually get us into the Union chimney, which would be huge. Every time I go underground, I'm trying to recover a little bit of Sarra Gordto's story. So much of this town's history was never written down or it was
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lost to time. And because the minds are the reason that Sarraoto exists at all, understanding them is key to understanding this whole place. And my hope is that whatever I find down there helps fill in those gaps. Not just for
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me, but for whoever comes after as well. [snorts] I'm down here and I was putting in my second bolt to go down further and right peeking out was this little piece of fabric.
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And this is definitely jeans. Oh, there was a cinch in the back. This is as old as it gets. Oh my gosh.
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Well, it's got to be a good sign. All right, I made it down further.
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Let's see where the other side goes. There's a rope hanging down. So, there must be something above this, too.
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But I wonder how far over this goes. It's so well preserved out here. What is this? Is this a shaft?
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[sighs] No freaking way. Where's that glove? This is crazy. This is such a big area.
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I thought we were just digging into a tiny thing. And you see there's electrical cord. So, this must have been during the zinc era, but I've never been down here.
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I don't know anybody's been out here in a really long time. This is so big [sighs and gasps] and it goes up to so many levels.
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[sighs and gasps] This is awesome. This is what I do this for. So freaking cool.
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What the hell? There's a full other area. I just unlocked like miles of mine.
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[sighs] An old carbide lamp. [sighs] A full carbide lamp. This is incredible. I thought I was just digging into a tiny little bit.
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We must be getting close to the main mine somehow. Whoa. Look at that. [sighs] The little wheelbarrow.
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This is like finding a whole new planet. A lot of dynamite. So well preserved batches.
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This is incredible. This might be my favorite discovery maybe ever. This is an area of the mine that I didn't even know existed. You know, above this, I was just scraping in with a shovel and I was just filming
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with my iPhone cuz I didn't think that there was going to be anything down here. And now it seems like there's miles of mine. You know, this hole behind me goes down who knows how far.
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And behind that there's more. And there's all those shoots down on the way over here. I'm in a completely new area of the mine. I think I must be near maybe the 86 given how far we went down.
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But this is awesome. After six years, I feel like I just found out that my house has a whole another house underneath it or something like that. So that goes down who knows how far. Over there goes back who knows how far. Who? That goes
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up. That goes over. That goes over. That goes over. It goes up and over that way too. All from that little shoot we were coming down. All from that what seemed like just a crawl space and now there's
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a whole another shaft down. Gosh, this is cool. This is like my birthday and Christmas wrapped up in one. Oh, there's a bottle. Oh.
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Oh my goodness. There's a bottle that was just hidden right there. Holy cow, man. This level.
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I don't even know where. I don't even know what to say. I got to get back up though. I told them I'd be Oh, there's some carbide graffiti. I told them I'd be just a little bit cuz I thought this
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was going to be another throwaway. That makes me very, very excited. So, I'm back in this giant [music] stoope. So, you can see all of this was mined out by hand.
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And I believe this is the Union chimney. You see goes down a long ways too over there.
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That's where I went down before. And I've never been able to get into the Union Chimney.
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This is historic. I like something in this. All right, so I'm back down here and I got my rope. I'm back to this little kind of tool shop area where I found that carbide lamp before. And it's just
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such a cool feeling when you're in an area and then you finally realize it's an area of the mine that you've read about for years and reports but were never in before. And that giant room that I walked into on the way down here
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this time, that's the Union Chimney. So imagine a giant crack in the earth that filled in with precious minerals that they mined out. That's why it's got 60ft ceilings and it's hundreds of feet wide.
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[music] That was one of the main or deposits here at Sarra Gordo. And in all of my time here, I have never been able to get into the Union M or the Union chimney. And if I have to guess, this
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level that I'm on now, because of all the oreshootes, this would have had to have a connection to the main [music] shaft. And so with all these, they were mining the Union chimney, which is above us now, and then
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sending it down these or shafts or these or shoots down to carts that were down here, and take it to the main shaft. So, if I had to guess, I think we're at the 86 level, but somehow at a part of the 86 that
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I've never been able to get into for some reason, because there's context clues such as, let me turn on my light a little brighter again. Such as here, we have a power cord going across and they didn't get power up here until the zinc
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era. So the second era and the fact that I found carbide before means that they were in here during the second era of Sarra during the zinc era and over here you can see on the wall there's a date
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of 20 but this was worked beforehand too and incredible all of the stuff that they got down here.
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All right. So, I got to the other side of that pit and there's more of this electrical cord and I was just walking over here and I think I think I know where this is going because you have to think where would
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they bring be bringing in power from? They'd be bringing in power from the main shaft. And I remember walking off the main shaft straight back.
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It's collapsed, but there is this power line overhead. And I haven't seen it anywhere else. And so I think straight through this collapse is where the Union Mine main entrance is.
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We got a big boiler here. You figure if this was accessible back in the day, they were taking this out of here. So, this must have been sealed for a long time.
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Back here, there appears to be a newspaper and some cloth. Maybe we'll get a date. [sighs] 1925.
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Whoa. Whoa. What is that? It's a giant wheel or something. Wa. Look at that crimping. That's terrifying.
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Giant air vents or something. [sighs] Oh it goes down. Whoa, that's scary. It goes down more again.
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Where does that go? Oh boy. Box of dynamite. Still with the top on and lots of dynam.
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So when I cross that pit of death and hidden here is a hat. I've never seen a hat in a mine before.
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Holy Look at that. Someone's hat. So scrambling in and out of these mines is hard. You know, climbing up the rope, moving the rocks, and it can be pretty exhausting. But luckily with me everywhere up here at Sarrato is
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Element. This is an electrolyte mix that's only sodium, potassium, and magnesium. There's none of the sugar or other crap that's in some of the sports drinks. And all you have to do is take one of these little packs, open it up,
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put in a water bottle, shake it, and you're good to go. And I have been taking Element with me everywhere up here for the fast past five years, whether I'm on a hike or a mine exploration or just working hard out on
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one of the buildings. And it has been a game changer. I don't get the dehydration headaches. I don't get the cramps. I don't get the fatigue. And if you're out there and you're looking for an electrolyte mix, I would definitely
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give Element a shot. They're giving away a free sample pack of their best flavors with any purchase. All you have to do is go to drinklement.com/brent.
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So drinklnt.com/brent and they'll hook that up. This stuff's amazing. I've been using it for years.
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Give it a shot. [snorts] So behind me, this is the power cord that went to the collapse. And at the 86 is the only level where I know that there's a power cord going into a collapse, which would be the other side
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of that. And that would put us right now into the Santa Maria tunnel. And that was one of the original workings here back in the 1870s. And if that's the case, then there could be some very old things here. But when I was looking at
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the report, the Santa Maria tunnel showed this going dead straight. So my theory is that this power line goes directly to the Bellshaw shaft and then it's just collapsed right there. And it's been collapsed for a while. But
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that shows this going dead straight. But we know that there's a little branch over there and there's all these branches along the way. And so either they didn't map this part because they couldn't get into here or we're not in
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the Santa Maria but other if I don't if we're not there I have no idea where we are because that power line had to go again to the main shaft. So, let's kind of slowly go through this, see what
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other things we can find, and then eventually see if I can go down lower to the stoopes where I think could be a really old area.
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There's this baking powder tin and inside of it, if we were to open it up, [snorts] either little blasting caps or almost look like 22 shells, but I believe that they're blasting caps.
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So, that's pretty cool. Just in an old baking powder tin royal baking powder. Whoa.
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Look at that. It's like a port hole. So, I just flipped over this big circle thing. And look, it's like a manhole cover that would go over our sewer with track over it. It's like they used to plug up the
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hole. So, I bet a lot of this is a false floor that goes down to these stoopes I'm seeing below it, which is scary to think I'm walking on a false floor. But here's an indication of it. Look right
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there that fell in. So, there's some waterworkings down there that if I get a rope, I can try to go down into. I've seen some square nails around here. This is 1800's workings.
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So, this is the area that it goes left and over there is where I found the hat.
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And it generally looks kind of like a dump area. And over there, there's some scary stoopes. Now, my theory is that they went straight cuz this goes straight probably during the zinc era.
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And these workings to my left and right were workings from the first era during the silver era. And the reason I say that is the the wood to the left and right as I crawl through here is different. This
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wood is hand huned. You can see it was chop chop chop chop chop chop chop to do it. And if you look at the nails themselves, they are square nails. All of the nails in this are square nails.
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And those are 1800's. Look at that carbide. All right. All right. So, I'm going to try to sneak on down through this little shoot into some older workings.
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Hopefully find some cool stuff. I don't know how deep it goes. This used to be a false floor, it appears.
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I mean, that is crazy. Look at the stoope of this terrible logging they're using.
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They mined out all the space you see. So over here it goes and goes around the corner there to more levels in this crazy wannabe square set type situation that we got here. But over here it also goes down a lot.
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And then again, if you look down there. So, I'm going to need [sighs and gasps] more rope.
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As I say, every freaking time I'm down here. All right, I'm back down with more rope and more bolts. And this has got to be some of the oldest workings in the Union chimney. Look at this old timbering they put up in here. This is
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before they knew about square set, which is a later innovation. So, this is just them throwing in logs wherever they could. And this makes me believe that this is some of the oldest workings at Sarra Gordo given the location and the
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type of timbering. Now they both look like they go down further to possibly another level.
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However, the danger here is where are you going to tie off without bringing all these rocks down with you when your rope hits the side? There's another area over here that I want to go into first.
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And so, but over here is the same thing. How do you prevent all this rock from falling down on you while you try to go deeper over there? So, I'm going try to do is find some decent rock and
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bolt around all of this to keep the rope out of this stuff. Then, when I'm over there where it's clear, it'll bolt there and go straight down.
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All right. So, the rope kind of decided I was going down. So, now I'm in this big stoope area.
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And luckily, I think that that other stoope that I was looking at from above is right over here. So, I'm not going to have to repel down twice. So, now we go to the corners, see if there's any more
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stuff in there. But all this timbering is so old. Oh, look. That's so cool.
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Candles. Spiric acid candles. [snorts] That's so cool. That just shows we're in the 1800s area where they're still using candles before carbine 1897.
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So this is from 1897. What we can do is I can write down some of these headlines like no bomb for something a jury of judge and I can find these to confirm that this is 1897.
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So this is the earliest workings down here at Sarto 30 years ago. There's a nice piece of galina.
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That's heavy. [sighs] That's the whole or bucket. This is what started it all. It feels really special to have gotten down here. Look at all that timbering.
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Oh man. Look at all that galina. Holy cow. This is the most gal I've ever seen.
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It's just silver everywhere. Now I know why they were down here. Look at that vein.
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They're chasing it down. I need to get some of that for myself. All right, time to go back up and see what's up there.
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That work bucket. So, I'm back up on that where I started going down before. And if you look up further, there's all sorts of machinery up above on another level. There's this metal stuff. There's big metal spool with some pipe coming down.
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And it makes me wonder how much more there's up there. But think about it.
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All this adventure, this all these miles of mine shafts, the carbide lamps, the hat, the this, the now this, all came from that tiny little crack in the surface. It was like a portal that brought me to a whole another world.
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Something that kids dream about. stashing. This is like the day it was printed. Look, there we go.
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1926. So, we have from 1897 to 1926. Almost 30 years they were working in this area. Look how nice this newspaper is.
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[music] So after all those explorations, this is the hall. Every single item that you see on this table came out of that tiny crack in the earth that I didn't think [music] went everywhere. And what I like so much about all this stuff and
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that exploration is that it was a crosscut through the history of Sarah Gordo. [music] You know, there's two main eras up here. There was the silver era and the zinc era. And both of them are clearly represented in these items
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that we see. You know, the cleanest place to start is in the newspapers. I found a newspaper from 1897 and I found this newspaper from 1926.
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So almost 30 years of mining in relatively the same area, but with much different things. You know, a good place to start is the lighting. First we have the candle lighting and then later we would have the carbide lighting. And so
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the first era of Sarah Gordo was the silver era from about 1860s into the 1890s. And during that era the miners were looking for this which is galina which is a silver and lead ore. And this piece I pulled out of right there. And
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during the silver era, the miners would have been down there working by candle light. And to have candle in front of their face, they would have had a felt hat like this that I found with a candle in the front with a little piece of
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twine or maybe a holder to hold it in front of them. And they would have been down there chiseling away, getting out whatever they could. And also from that period, something that was very interesting is after I shook out these
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ORS sacks that I found up that little rat hole, they have the initials Toland on them. And Tboland is for old Tom Boland, who was a guy that spent a lot of time around Sarah Gordo and leased the main Union mine here from 1888 to
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1890. And that era that Tom was leasing it and using these orsacs was a very interesting era because that was almost in between the two big eras at Sraordo.
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By that point the main silver kings that made their fortunes up here at Sraordo were gone. Mortimer Belsha Nadu Bodri all of them had moved on. But Boland was convinced there was still another strike here. He was refusing to admit that the
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silver days were done. So he had leased the mine and he had employed it with between five and 10 miners and he was having them pull out whatever they could pull out. And so that shows even with the use of these or sacks, you know,
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Bell Shaw and the silver kings, they would have had or carts and tracks and moving it all out. Boland was working on shoestring budget, so he was using smaller things like this. And eventually that even ended and the mind sat dormant
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for a while until around 1910 when a guy named LD Gordon came up here and he realized well everybody's paying attention to this nobody was paying attention to a mineral called Smithsonite which is a zinc ore and so
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by that point the lighting down in the mine they weren't having to strap candles to their headlamp anymore.
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Around 1900, a patent was filed for what's known as a carbide lamp. And this is what I found down there. And this is a carbide lamp. And in a carbide lamp, you take off the bottom. You put in
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carbide down here, which is a a mineral, a rock, a powder. And on top, you put water. And this water drips into this carbide. It creates a gas. That's gas is lit. And that light is what you would
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use instead of the candles. And so the fact that there were carbide lamps down there show that it had to have been worked during the zinc era. And as the miners were going around, they needed a way to hold this carbide that they were
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putting into their little tins. And they would often do that by putting them into a Prince Albert tobacco tin. I found oh a dozen or so of these while I was down there. And this red Prince Albertton tin
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came out in 1913, which aligns well with the zinc era as well. And when the miners are down there, they needed somewhere to haul around this carbide.
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So often they would put the carbide inside of the tin. And so this tin that I found down there actually still had carbide in it. And so this minor a 100 years ago was using this as his fuel for
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his headlamp and continuing on, which is just so amazing. And the next clue that we show that was during the zinc era would have been this box right here.
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This is a Hercules dynamite box. And Hercules was incorporated in 1912 because the first dynamite producer in the United States which was giant was broken up because of antirust laws. So originally dynamite was established in 1867 by Alfred Nobel. Then they came
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over here. There was the giant company that became the DuPont. DuPont becames too big and DuPont had to be split up into the Hercules power company and the Atlas powder company. And so we would have known that this would have put us
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firmly in the zinc era here at Sarah Gordo. I have this box I pulled out as well as that box I left down there that was full of dynamite. And when I say cross-section, I mean that literally too
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because I believe what would happen is oftent times after the first big era and they pulled out a lot of the galina and Bolan went back in and took all the scraps that he could find, the zinc miners were looking for a totally
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different mineral. And so they would go through some of the old workings, not trying to get the same mineral, but trying to access new deposits of this new mineral that they were looking for.
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And so when I was able to sneak through that false floor down into that stoope, I believe that that was the second era.
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So the guys that were using the carbide and the Hercules, that was them going on top of a very old era, which is where I found the 1897 newspaper. And so all that to say, this is very, very exciting
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to me. You know, the fact that 6 years into living at Sarra Gordo, I can still find a discovery like this is just amazing. And I think in some ways it's going to ruin me because I know that
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every night now for the next however long, I'm going to be looking at every single crack and indentation in this entire hillside looking for another portal. But as I said, this is just a beautiful cross-section of the history
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here, both literally and metaphorically. And the more of these rabbit holes that I dive into, the more excited I get about this place, the more I understand this place, and the more I feel in context up here. And so, I very much
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appreciate you guys checking out this exploration. I will leave you with the idea that there is always more out there to explore, as I saw today, even after six years. And so, thank you guys for checking out this video, and I'll see
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you guys next time.
Topics:Sarraordosilver mineghost townmine explorationhistoric minesUnion Chimneyabandoned minesmining artifactscarbide lampCalifornia mining history
