Alaska Gold Mining: Exploring Gold Run Mine

Описание: Well, you knew that I had to get at least one abandoned mine in on this trip, right? This is your classic placer gold mine. The historic mining equipment indicates that there was obviously a lot of surface work that took place here along the river… Given the presence of the hoist, they may also have dug shallow shafts down into the permafrost during the winter. However, there would be no trace – or almost no trace – of these. When spring came – and the air temperature rose above freezing - those underground workings that were carved into the permafrost during the winter would have softened up and caved in.

Typically, what miners working underground placer gold mines in Alaska will do is to vent in freezing air to the underground workings during the winter in order to keep the ground frozen (and, therefore, stable) and will haul as much placer material up to the surface as they can during this time. Then, during the warmer summer months when the temperature rises above freezing, they will wash all of the gravel they hauled out and stockpiled over the winter through a sluice in order to extract the gold.

This is, of course, in contrast to the underground placer mines in California’s “Mother Lode” country where the miners had to punch in through solid rock to reach the ancient river channels buried beneath countless millions of years of volcanic and other geologic activity. Although the overwhelming majority of placer mine videos on my channel are of this type, that is due to my proximity to them when based in California. They are actually quite rare and, in fact, I am not aware of any other underground placer mines in the world that tap into ancient river channels as they did (and sometimes still do) in California. This has led to more than one heated exchange with arrogant know-it-alls that insist that I don’t know what I’m talking about because the underground placer mine I am showing in the video starts out by running in through hard rock. Eventually, I am able to persuade them to simply Google the topic and then they can discover that just because something is a certain way where they’re from doesn’t mean it is like that everywhere else in the world. Of course, rather than conceding that they were mistaken at that point, they simply disappear. People are funny…

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All of these videos are uploaded in HD, so adjust those settings to ramp up the quality! It really makes a difference.

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

And a small gear update here: https://bit.ly/2p6Jip6

You can see the full TVR Exploring playlist of abandoned mines here: https://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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