Video: Incredibly Rare Wooden Ore Cart Found Inside A Mine!

Well, we certainly don’t come across something like this every day when we’re out exploring… Just like the abandoned steam engine we featured in another video, this is one of those incredible once in a lifetime finds. There are precious few of these wooden ore carts left in existence and even fewer that can still be found at an abandoned mine rather than rotting away in someone’s backyard. Fortunately, this mine is not marked on any topographic maps and it is in a very remote area of the desert. I believe this is what has protected it from the vermin that ransack these sites to sell the historical artifacts on eBay. Were it not for these circumstances, the wooden ore cart would have undoubtedly disappeared a long time ago.

We have found bits and pieces of the metal frames of wooden ore carts in and around some of the old (1800s) mines in California’s “Mother Lode” region. So, obviously, they were used there. However, the wood has long since rotted away and whatever was left of the abandoned carts has disintegrated with time and exposure to the elements. If you consider it, wooden ore carts actually made a lot of sense for the miners in the past that were venturing out over steep mountains and down deep canyons, often over little more than primitive trails. Rather than needing to use a team of mules to haul a backbreakingly heavy metal ore cart up a sheer cliff to a mine, the miners could have hauled out the relatively lightweight (except for the wheels) components and then assembled the carts from the plentiful trees growing around the mine. And, as was mentioned in the video, if something breaks, the miners could just cut another tree down and repair the cart. From the look of it, the wooden ore cart at this mine in the video may have likewise been constructed from the trees found around the mine.

As for the mine itself, which was almost an afterthought for me after finding the wooden ore cart, it wasn’t a huge mine, but I thought it was an interesting little mine all the same, no? The flickering effect created by the LEDs on the video drove me nuts when I was editing it, but focusing on the features of the mine, I liked the way the mine twisted around until it reached that small raise and the winze. Given how clean this first section of the mine was, I can only conclude that that section is the one that was worked most recently and the area behind the skip car (where the rails for the ore carts disappeared) was driven during the early days of the mine and then abandoned. I don’t blame the miners for abandoning that section of the mine given how soft the material there was.

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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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