Getting To Know Kay Cooper (Mine)...

I was actually on my way to another abandoned mine when I took a wrong turn in the desert (I know; it happens even to me…) and ended up at this one. I’m not one to pass up an attractive exploring opportunity and so I added this one to the list for the day as well.
As you saw in this video, I started at the top of the workings and explored my way down as it seemed most logical to follow the route the ore seemed to have taken. I don’t know about you, but I had the impression that the miners here spent a lot more time laying down track and constructing chutes and trestles than they spent actually mining the tungsten here. Despite all of the mining infrastructure, it doesn’t seem like very much good ore was taken out. The workings on the hillside as well as the shaft with the headframe seemed to be the newer part of the mine. I have seen the video of another mine explorer that visited this site and he went down the shaft. Perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, the shaft ended up being relatively uninspiring as there was just one small drift level at the bottom and it didn’t really go anywhere. It may have tied into that “pit of doom” next to it at one time, but rock debris prevented this from being investigated. There were a number of dead birds at the bottom as well (if memory serves correctly, they were crows).
To me, it seemed that the deep “pit of doom” is the oldest part of this mine. It wasn’t clear to me if there was a headframe over the pit at one time or not. There were some boards on the right that were obviously once part of some larger structure, but I’m unsure how they fit into the puzzle. It would have been awkward for the miners to work around the deep pit and so it seems likely that the large pocket cleared out to the left of the pit may have been the first area mined in that section. Obviously finding something worthwhile, the miners would have then followed the ore body down for a significant distance, creating the pit (that is an operation I would love to have seen in its active prime). I’d be curious to know what is at the bottom of the “pit of doom”. Given its age, the possibility of there being mining artifacts down there is tantalizing, and there are also likely drift levels branching off. Some days we just don’t have ropes and climbing equipment with us though.
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All of these videos are uploaded in HD, so adjust those settings to ramp up the quality! It really does make a difference.
You can see the gear that I use for mine exploring here: bit.ly/2wqcBDD
You can click here for my full playlist of abandoned mines: goo.gl/TEKq9L
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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