Epic Travel → North America → The West Coast → Secret Sites → Death Pit and Ore Cart Mine

Δ Secret Site Δ

Location: West Coast, United States

Time Required: 4-6 hours (allowing for exploration time)

Distance: 6 mile roundtrip hike

Elevation Gain/Loss: 2500 feet

Reason It’s Secret: The more highly publicized the site, the more quickly authorities will move to close off the mine shafts. Also, much of the appeal is from the excellent array of artifacts, which will quickly be appropriated by visitors looking for sweet mine memorabilia for their personal collections (and ruining it for everyone else)

How can I go there?: This place is open to the public, so it’s not like you couldn’t find it on your own, we’re just hoping to limit traffic through the mine by not advertising it much, meaning the people who stumble across this page are ones who really like this sort of place and would be respectful. We’ll give the location and travel information to 25 people a year, so if you want to go, drop us an email and we’ll get back to you.

This excellent mine site is reached via a very scenic hike and has several different areas to explore. There’s a mining camp area with the remains of a bunk cabin and cookhouse (and a classic outhouse), numerous mine shafts cut into the rock of the hillside with ore cart tracks and one sweet square pit that drops down an estimated 50 feet (which was evidently accessed by an extremely sketchy looking ladder), there’s an aerial tramway from the mine shafts to a processing area down canyon with ore carts still hanging, and a plethora of artifacts at the processing site. You could easily spend hours exploring here; I’m amazed that it hasn’t been boarded up and “made safe” (and otherwise ruined), and I’m just happy we found it before that happens because it probably won’t last much longer.

Epic Travel → North America → The West Coast → Northern California → Secret Sites → Death Pit and Ore Cart Mine