Well, maybe not ALL that shines is gold. But if something in a mine sparkles, it's only fools gold - not the real stuff. I think that's about the biggest thing I learned in this real-life mine tour.
Sutter Gold Mine was a working gold mine, and is trying to become so again. It is estimated (through painstaking research) that there is still a LOT of gold in there. The Mine has been only for tourism for the past four years, and now the company is working on plans to keep the tours and do real mining again.
Unlike what movies portray - most gold mining isn't finding nuggets just lying around, or seeing gold streaks in caves. Most gold is now pulled out of white quartzite - and it's usually not visible to the naked eye. There is this huge process that extracts the gold - and the process only gets like 25% of it. So Sutter Gold Mine is keeping all the leftovers for the day when someone discovers a better way to separate the gold, in hopes that more can be extracted.
This huge vein of quartzite could be worth quite a bit, but it's located in a spot in the mine which is not possible to pull it out without collapsing the mine. Hmmm... guess that wouldn't be worth it.
This shows how a mine shaft would have looked like back in the day. Well - kinda. There wouldn't be those bright lights overhead. Yes, there would be timbers to hopefully hold the walls of the cave up. But there would be one candle for 5 miners, so basically it would have been almost pitch black. And each miner would have had his precious bird with him - if the bird became dizzy or passed out, it was time to run out of that cave - fatal gases were accumulating.
We learned about the different methods of drilling and the types of explosives used over time. The tour was very informative - yay! And our guide is a real miner - he's been working in mines for seven years. His fave part is explosives of course, typical guy. LOL
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