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Gold/Mining/Energy : JAB International (JABI) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Charliss who wrote (2034)	12/7/1997 11:48:00 AM
From: Charger	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4571

Mine tour - second installment: Warning: This information is for those who wish to read it. Please always feel free to corroborate any information herein with the company itself. This is not intended to promote the company nor to suggest that you purchase or hold or sell the stock. It is simply a posting of what I saw and interpreted for myself. Where was I? Oh, yes, all suited up and about to go into the Lower Brush Creek mine. We waited a goodly long time for our trolley cars to come up out of the bowels of the earth. There are intercom phones in the workshop on top of the mine which connect to frequently spaced intercom phones down inside the mine. Every so often Stan would get on the intercom to find out the progress of our trolley car. It seems that a rock (or some such) had flipped up onto the track an derailed one of the cars. As anyone knows, who has played with model trains, getting a car back on its track is not an easy thing. Also, the 4 trolley cars (platforms) are connected to eachd other so they probably had to be unbolted and rebolted, etc. Anyway, the importance of this delay was that we were scheduled to go to the Ruby Mine wo watch the "pour" - the processed gold being melted down and poured into a gold bar. When the "oven" (forgive my incorrect terminologies) reaches a certain temperature, the ore must go into it at that time. The delay caused us to miss this pour and all of its attendant processes, but I will speak more about that later. The tracks that have been laid down for the ore carts and our platforms were taken from a defunct trolley car run in San Francisco. They are laid about 18" apart, just enough to walk with both feet between them, if you are balanced and can see where you are going. We were told that everything had to remain inside the 4 posts (two foot uprights on each corner of the flat platform). I doubled up my stiff body and inflexible 60 yr. old back into a lotus position and sat there for the next (seeemd like) 15 minutes while the trolley platforms fairly whizzed into the darkness endlessly. Heavy timbers on both sides shoring up the walls sped past us. Water constantly dripped (not too much) onto us. A huge flexible pipe was immediately at head level causing us to cock our heads slightly to avoid missing it. The tracks were often under water, the water on the floor of the mine being about 3-4 inches deep. It was impossible to talk above the roar of the fresh air pipe, the rattle of the trolley platform, and the rushing of the water as we sped through it. The impression that I had was that this was a safe place to be and that all workmanship had been executed well. Finally the trolley stopped and we were asked to get off. Getting off means very quickly getting to know how tall and how wide your body is. All the miners were short (no one over 5'11, maybe no one over 5'8, lithe and athletic). (Aside) Many of the area miners are Cornish (from Cornwall, England) as that area is famous for its tin mines. One can even find Cornish Pasties (the standard lunch for a Cornish miner or sheepherder). A pastie (pronounced with a short "a" like mast) is a piece of pastry shaped like an empanda, sort of palm sized, filled with potatoe, beef, onions, usually peppery, and sometimes has a baked apple (for dessert) tucked in the bottom. So we got off our trolley platforms and figured out how to get around the corner posts, miss the fresh air pipe, negotiate our feet, not blind people with our lights and stoop a little along with the curve of the vaulted roof of our tunnel. We got off at a junction of the rails. The other rails contained the ore carts which needed to get back onto our rails and they wanted to get the trolley back up top and out of the way. So we waded through the rails and water the rest of the way (not far). We came across about 5 miners looking as if they had been through a good day's work who said they had only just closed down the "cage" (a sealing mesh overhead gate) to Pillar 4 (we were late). Stan suggested that we go on to the next area which they were working simultaneously which is what they believe is the "parallel ore shoot". The parallel ore shoot is important to understand. If you were looking at a map of the Lower Brush Creek mine you might be looking at a cross section of (guessing) a half a mile. Through the middle of this section comes the Golden Gate Ore Shoot, from which the mine made its big strike way back when, and which has all been mined out ON THE TOP LEVEL ONLY! Before we proceeded on to the parallel ore shoot area, we were shown the down dip access which goes to the next level down which is just as developed as the upper level, complete with shoring, etc. (I think I have all this right) Below the second level is a third level. These areas are not yet dewatered but the pump mechanisms are all in place and they have tested the time to take the water out which was a matter of a few hours. Despite the amount of water we saw, this mine is considered to be one of the "dry" mines. The water was talked about as not being even a small problem. The "pillars" which are left (about 8 of them) are massive areas (say 120 feet by 80 feet by the depth of the whole mountain, all part of the original ore shoot. They just need to be shored up and removed. Now, before I go on and describe Pillar 4 some more, I will just say that all of this massive work is being duplicated "just down the road" (the next area that we walked to and climbed up) which is thought to be the parallel ore shoot. This means that had the original miners gone on a little farther (no need to, it was so rich where they were) they would have come across another ore shoot (a massive vein travelling parallel to the Golden Gate Ore Shoot) equal in richness to the vein that was removed in the gold rush days. I get the impression that this parallel ore shoot may not be as wide, but as yet they are still chipping away at it trying to understand just how big, wide, deep it is. I will post this now so that those interested can start reading, while I sit here typing the next installment.