>>862850Where is this, out near Death Valley somewhere? I love exploring old mines.
Also, most of those mines were opened after a big strike occurred nearby. When news broke of some random prospector finding a big vein, everyone in the vicinity would rush out and try to stake a claim closest to the original strike with the richest ground. A lot of prospectors would get together and organize stock companies to promote their mines and obtain development funds in new mining districts, and those holes in the mountain are mostly likely from that kind of activity. You can tell from the small tailings piles in front of the adits that most of those were pretty shallow and probably didn't contain anything of value.
Also, most of the prospectors from the nineteenth through the early twentieth century were just glorified desert wanderers or part-time wage miners like Shorty Harris who had no formal training in geology and were just dicking around hoping to find something of value. Which is why most of the types of mines in your pic mostly date from the turn of the twentieth century and earlier. The mine in my pic was discovered and developed by a large corporation in the 1920s and as a result is a much more extensive site.
