\u201cOn Rope!\u201d I announce \u2013 partly out of habit, partly because somewhere in my training, a voice told me never to go quiet over a hole this old. I step backward off the collar.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The cool air comes up to meet me, thick with the smell of old wood and the sour musk of pack rat nests. I drop slowly, headlamp catching glints of skip-guide hardware on my right and a few crooked rungs of the manway on my left. The top 20 feet of the ladder are missing. So is most of what should be between 40 and 80 ft. \u2013 what\u2019s left is the production side, the side the old-timers used to haul ore and supplies on a skip and hoist. That hardware is still in place. The skip guides aren\u2019t as plumb as they once were, but they\u2019re greased. Greased. Seventy years on, and the grease hasn\u2019t given up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s the first lesson, and it doesn\u2019t take a degree in engineering or geology to understand it.<\/p>\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/northamericanmining.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/20-Years-of-Abandoned-Mine-Exploration.png\")
Then and now. 2004: a young Stuart sits outside a Western mine portal, reached courtesy of a 1977 Chevy Nova and a teenager’s deliberate misreading of his mother’s standing warning \u2013 “stay away from abandoned mines, they are dangerous.” 2026: an older (and arguably wiser) Stuart climbing out of the 1956-era tungsten shaft this article opens with. The Chevy Nova, sadly, did not make it to the second photo.\u00a0<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
The old-timers had grit we can barely imagine<\/strong> I\u2019ve seen this hundreds of times over 20 years. Every one of them is humbling. Every one of them is a reminder that whatever I\u2019m complaining about today \u2013 the rough road in, the heat, the long day, the gear that didn\u2019t quite work \u2013 these men did it harder, with less, and they did it on foot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I never come out of a place like this without feeling a little tougher and a little ashamed of how easy I really have it. We live in an extraordinary age of technology and opportunity, and most of us, myself included, don\u2019t half appreciate it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I touch down at a ledge around the 60-ft. mark to clear a board that\u2019s wedged across the production side. Another at 80 ft. The shaft looks more and more familiar the lower I go, and just before my boots hit the floor at a hundred feet, I look down and to the left and smile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There it is. A scrap of pale-yellow string from a Chainman II hip-chain \u2013 the kind every old-school mine surveyor used to drag through a working to measure footage. It\u2019s mine. I left it here 15 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve been here before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A drift, crosscut, winze, or shaft is a giant drill hole<\/strong> It is a slow, expensive, and dangerous way to take a sample of the earth. It is also, if you walk it carefully, the most information-dense sample you will ever get. Every face is a logged hole. Every back is a strike map. Every drift is the old prospector showing you, in three dimensions and at full scale, exactly what he thought was down there and exactly where the ore went. You\u2019d pay a fortune to drill what these mines already tell you for free \u2013 if you\u2019re willing to come look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am standing in a drift now connected by a short crosscut to the shaft station. Headlamp on the wall. Rock nobody has touched in 70 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Keep it simple<\/strong> This is not an argument against modern mine planning, safety, or geotech. Those things save lives and save money, and I\u2019m a fan of all three. But in exploration \u2013 especially in early-stage exploration \u2013 I have watched smart, well-funded teams talk themselves out of perfectly good ground by overthinking it. The old prospector\u2019s question, \u201cIs there ore here, and where does it go?\u201d is still the only one that matters. The fancier the model, the easier it is to lose sight of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I crouch and sweep my hand along the rib. The rock is bleached and altered on the contact, shot through with garnet and pale silicate. I pull a fresh chip with my hammer and bag it.<\/p>\n\n\n Context is everything<\/strong> I was wrong, and it had almost nothing to do with the rock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I came back this week because a different client is interested in tungsten \u2013 specifically scheelite, the calcium tungstate (CaWO\u2084) that is the major high-density ore of the element. I brought a shortwave UV lamp. I switch it on now, in the drift I walked 15 years ago, and the entire wall lights up. The 100-ft. level isn\u2019t just mineralized; it\u2019s driven through a skarn end to end, and scheelite glows fluorescent blue everywhere the beam falls. Without shortwave UV, scheelite is essentially invisible. Without the lamp, you\u2019d never know. I didn\u2019t, in 2011.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the deeper miss was context. This wasn\u2019t a gold mine at all. It was a tungsten mine \u2013 and the historical records, the assay logs, the district reports would have told me so. I just didn\u2019t have them. Nobody was interested in tungsten in 2011, and I wasn\u2019t asking the right questions of the rock because I wasn\u2019t asking the right questions of the archive. Geology is the easy part. The hard part is knowing what the prospector was chasing, what the market was rewarding, what the cutoff grade looked like in 1956, and which of those numbers has moved enough to make the same rock interesting today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you take one thing from any of this: look at the rock, then look at the paperwork, then look at the rock again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is no substitute for boots on the ground<\/strong> Outcrops don\u2019t tell the truth on a satellite image the way they tell it under your hand. Faults don\u2019t strike on a screen the way they strike when you stand on or inside them. And no GIS layer can tell you what an old miner thought he was chasing \u2013 only the working itself can, and only if you go look at it. If old mines are present \u2013 and out here they almost always are \u2013 they hold a wealth of information you can only fully collect by being inside them: seeing what they chased, how they chased it, and what conditions stopped them. Those same conditions may very well shape your project, too. Hands on the rock. Always.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I clip into my ascenders and start back up. The chip samples are heavy in my pack. The setting sun has turned the surrounding hills pink. As I clear the collar and step back onto solid ground, I drop the pack, pull up the rope, and look down into the dark I just came out of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The mine has changed very little in 15 years. I have changed a lot. The industry has changed even more. And somewhere in the next 20 years, this same rock will give up another secret \u2014 to whoever bothers to come down on a rope and ask.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Disclaimer \u2013 \u201cStay Out, Stay Alive.\u201d I used to chafe at that old adage. After 20 years, I\u2019ve come to accept it as the truth. Unless you have the proper equipment, training, and experience, the right place to learn about abandoned mines is from a magazine like this one. Leave the rope work to the professionals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the descent \u2013 with that familar underground scent of wood and passed time \u2013 in 2004, and in the same position again this year, more than two decades later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stuart Burgess The shaft collar is older than I am. Built in \u201856, abandoned not long after, and now half-swallowed by sagebrush and rabbitbrush. I sit on the lip and run the 10-mm static rope through my descender, click the carabiner shut, and check it twice in the direction of the load. My harness is snug. My ascenders are clipped where I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":12753,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Diamond core drilling didn\u2019t become common in the United States until the early 20th century, and even then, only the larger operations in mature districts could afford it. For everyone else \u2013 and that means the vast majority of mines in this country \u2013 the only way to figure out what was under the ground was to dig and look. Exploratory shafts. Drifts that meander for a literal mile chasing an elusive theory and an intercept always just out of reach. Crosscuts. Winzes. Stopes that followed the ore wherever it went. At 10 ft. a day, on a good day.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4516],"tags":[4648,4647,4646,992],"coauthors":[4519],"class_list":["post-12751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-open-ground","tag-calcium-tungstate","tag-diamond-core-drilling","tag-geology","tag-gold-mine"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/northamericanmining.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Helmets.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/northamericanmining.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/northamericanmining.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/northamericanmining.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northamericanmining.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northamericanmining.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12751"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/northamericanmining.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12751\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12754,"href":"https:\/\/northamericanmining.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12751\/revisions\/12754"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northamericanmining.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/northamericanmining.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northamericanmining.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northamericanmining.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12751"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northamericanmining.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=12751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
I\u2019ve stood at the bottom of three-tram systems strung up canyons so narrow and steep I couldn\u2019t see how anyone got the cable to the top, much less an ore bucket back down. I\u2019ve crawled through stopes a mile from daylight on workings hand-driven by men advancing 10 vertical feet a day \u2013 sometimes much less. I visited one of those mines last week: 1,500 vertical feet above the canyon floor, in one of the most remote and inhospitable ranges left in the continental United States. They never made any money there. Metals prices dropped, the dream collapsed, and they left in the kind of heartbreak that\u2019s still in the air when you walk in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Diamond core drilling didn\u2019t become common in the United States until the early 20th century, and even then, only the larger operations in mature districts could afford it. For everyone else \u2013 and that means the vast majority of mines in this country \u2013 the only way to figure out what was under the ground was to dig and look. Exploratory shafts. Drifts that meander for a literal mile chasing an elusive theory and an intercept always just out of reach. Crosscuts. Winzes. Stopes that followed the ore wherever it went. At 10 ft. a day, on a good day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I love a good engineering story \u2013 Virginia City, the Comstock\u2019s square sets, Cornish pumps, the deep workings of Butte. But those are the exception, not the rule. Most of the holes in the ground in the western U.S. weren\u2019t dug by engineering firms. They were dug by individuals and small teams with no formal training in geology or mining, just dogged determination and the dream of a better life. They didn\u2019t have the luxury of stope planning or geotechnical reports. They found ore. They followed it. When it stopped, they tried something else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/northamericanmining.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Helmets.png\")
The first time I dropped this shaft, in 2011, I was looking for gold and silver. I didn\u2019t find much. In fact, it was greatly disappointing. The district had been prospected historically for several different metals, and like most explorers at the time, I assumed the precious-metals story was the only one worth telling. I walked these same drifts, sampled these same skarns, took the same photos \u2013 and concluded the mine was tapped out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The last 20 years have been an extraordinary period for our industry. We have better satellite data, better geophysics, better drone surveys, better drillhole databases, better visualization software, and better AI tools than I imagined we\u2019d see in a career. All of it is genuinely useful. All of it has made exploration faster, cheaper, and in many cases more successful. None of it replaces what your boots, your eyes, and your hands do when you walk a property.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/strong>Stuart Burgess is the Co-founder and Chairman of Burgex Mining Consultants. A specialist in mineral exploration and landman work, Stuart has spent his career bridging the gap between geological discovery and the complex regulatory landscape of the American West.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"