Exploring A Lead Mine Looking For Barite & Other Minerals

This is my first in what I hope to be a long series of mine exploration videos. Since it was my first time it's not the greatest. I've got a lot to learn about filming underground, but it turned out ok.

The Mine

This is a lead mine whose location will remain secret so as not to encourage other people to explore it. Mines are extremely dangerous and I was with a group of well prepared geologists who had been in the mine before.

Originally it was mined in the early 1930's for several years hoping to find gold and copper. Unfortunately it didn't produce enough of either to keep production going. For collectors though It produces excellent barite, galena, calcite, hemimorphite, cinnabar, mimetite and smithsonite specimens. There are some copper minerals scattered about, but they are far and few.

The walls and the floors glittered with barite crystals every time the light hit them. You can see it in the video. Another characteristic of the mine was dust. Everything was covered in dust. Unfortunately most of us left our dust masks in our trucks. Not a good idea, but we were only in there for about 15minutes. Anyway, here is the video.

I came out with quite a bit of material I am still going through. Here are a few pics from the video of 2 specimens that are quite nice.

And one with micro cinnabar crystals.

I already have another mine trip scheduled in April with some geologists to a really amazing mine that I will blog about soon. It's a copper mine that produces around 100 different minerals, many of them very rare. Really looking forward to that.

Until then, thanks for reading!