This mining area has been on my list for almost five years now.  I wasn’t expecting large mining operations but I was at least excited for the relics and hopefully some open mines.  Well, we found many relics and also some open mines and it turned out to be a great adventure.

You will need a 4 wheel drive, high clearance vehicle to make it to the mines.  But I suggest you get to the map coordinate “Hard Part Begins,” park your vehicle and then hike the rest of the way up.  You will find that your vehicle can make it up another 1/4 mile but there are no places to turn around so you will have to back up all the way like we did.

The trails are overgrown and you can tell that this place rarely gets any visitors besides a random hunter or some adventurers.  Still, the incredibly green hills and mountains with all the colorful wildflowers made this adventure a lot of fun!

For how small the mines are, it is a mystery why they would go to all the trouble to build roads like this.  They dug out parts of the hills to make gradually sloping roads but the mines only go in about 50 ft or less.  So I have to wonder, maybe they had some big investors or were just overly ambitious about their mining prospects?  Who knows!  We were just glad there was even a halfway decent road to walk on!

The first mine was probably the coolest.  It had some weird furnace or oven and a large metal hopper on top.  We aren’t sure what was going on here but it was pretty neat to see.  The mine entrance was still open and the actual mine tunnel was in pretty good shape.  It went in like 50 ft or so and even had some rail tracks in it still!  The tailings pile was small and there were other mining relics nearby such as barrels and large pieces of flat metal.

The second mine is located a little ways to the south and east of the first and only went in a few feet.  The miners even built a road to this small prospect.  There were no relics near this one.

The third mine was higher up in elevation and we ended up bushwhacking to it.  We walked by a “haunted forest” with tons of tall dead trees with fog and then traversed up the mountain until we found some tailings.

This mine had an open shaft about 40 ft deep right at the entrance to the tunnel.  My friend dropped a rock to the bottom and all of a sudden we saw a snake start moving.  The poor guy must have fallen down and is now trapped.

This mine went in for about 120+ feet and had a few spurs off the main tunnel.  There wasn’t any relics at this one either.

After we explored the mine we went over the ridge a little bit and found a beautiful meadow full of red, blue, and yellow wildflowers.  The sunlight was perfect for a great photo!

We then hiked back to the truck from here.