Another Camping/Exploring trip to nevada went down over the labor day weekend. This was a closed Underground explorers trip although a open invite trip is due in November.
candelaria was a huge mine back in 1870ish. Recently the last of the ore was removed through a open pit mine dug right on top of the old mine. To mine exploring this is good and bad. The bad is obvious since most of the drifts and workings were dug up and destroyed. The good is that drifts were exposed that you can get into with some effort allowing access to areas possibly unreachable for the last 140 years. After a previous visit and extensive scouting, we finnaly got in. There was evidence of people being there in the 20's and 50's but nothing since then. We were only able to decend three levels due to the damage to the mine.
Next up was a large mine we had scouted on a previous trip. The underground working were fairly extensive and modern Roughly 500 feet to the waterline. Several areas were in poor condition and marked as such.
The next stop was a modern mine with a extremely large adit. The workings ended up being nearly all collapsed but all research and satellite imagery showed this as a monster we could not skip. It ended up being a great place to camp none the less.
Our next mine turned into something much bigger then we had hoped. First hand accounts were hard to interpret since the mine had not been thoroughly explored and was also at least partially flooded. I figured we would be done in a hour, but 10 hours later we had walked 12-15 miles underground. Unfortunately I can count on one hand the amount of things we saw. The mine was just mainly walking spiraling drifts to nowhere. The real main attraction was a large stope in the center of the mine that was larger then anything any of us had seen before.
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