[Rockhounds] Abandoned mine exploration

[J. R. Hodel]

I watched a couple more of his videos, it's pretty interesting to an old rock-hound. My late rock-hounding buddy Danny Kebles would have loved it, would have wanted to do it so bad!
But the second video I watched he was solo, in a mine by himself, going across 50-90 year old wooden floors around ore chutes, etc. So very dangerous, if you hurt yourself, you're probably dead before they find you. Because no one appears to know in advance where he's going underground. First thing they teach cavers is "never go underground alone!" 

The people I went caving with had a 3-person team rule, that way an injured person would have someone with them while the third person went for help. Maybe the tradition with abandoned mines is "you're on your own?" 

Otherwise he seems like a guy who enjoys going into abandoned mines more than he's a mineral collector. A collector would have a rock pick with (and probably other rock-hounding tools like chisels etc), and containers for any specimens they wanted to bring out, as opposed to his hip pocket.

The one time Danny and I went out west to spend 3 weeks rock-hounding in Colorado and Wyoming, we found our way to an abandoned mine, about half-way up a mountain side north of Bonanza CO, with a talus slope to climb up to get to the adit. There was an old cable hanging that they had used to man-trip up and down, and for ore.
But once we were up there and knew there was a mine, we had no lights, and no helmets. So we dug through the tailings around the mine face, I still have a couple of nice rocks from there. Finally I looked up from the rocks at the sky, which was suddenly dark gray billowing clouds, soon in late May it started snowing hard before we got off the mountain. "Uh, Danny, maybe we need to get down off this mountain now?"

My little Ford Ranger had a lot of tools and supplies under the topper, so we had pretty good traction, and made it to our friend's mountain cabin where we were staying between rock-hounding trips. Built a fire in the stove late in the evening. Stopped in Salida for dinner on the way home. I will always wonder what if we had lights and helmets, what would it have been like in the mine? What kind of rocks would we have found? What would the weather have been like when we got back out?
I miss Danny, he was struck with Pick's Disease, which is a hereditary dementia, and died relative young in a VA nursing home. I don't go out collecting much any more, partly because I'm 70 now... & partly because Danny isn't here to poke me awake. Also Covid, of course.
You all take care, best of luck with finding great rocks!