I had always thought that Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a fantasy film, but after exploring this abandoned mine with Frank and Paul, it appears that the film was actually a documentary. You see, it is impossible that anyone other than a team of dwarfs could have worked this mine. The top of the adit is so low that one is compelled to make their way through the mine almost completely bent over at the waist. There is just no way an ordinary human could endure working in this mine as our backs were killing us after just a few minutes. As my list of crews of dwarf miners doesn’t extend beyond those in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, I really see no other explanation than that we discovered the mine where the dwarfs featured in the film worked.
An EXTREMELY unique feature of this mine is a layout of dual cloverleaf interchanges or loop the loops... In other words, after one enters the mine, drifts branch out to the right and the left that complete a full circle or loop inside of the mountain and then connect back up to the main haulage adit! I have never seen anything like it before.
According to the scant records I could find on this mine, the dwarfs apparently mined silver here. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released in 1937 and so the mine obviously dates to before that time.
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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 niche of our history is gone forever. But, guess what? We have fun 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 hundred years, 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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