Bayhorse’s Silver Lifeline: Exploring the Skylark & Ramshorn Mines

I'm at about 9,000 feet in Idaho heading to a couple mines. This one's the Ram's Horn that's down below. It's a quarter mile as you can see how steep that is. The structure way down there that's a tram tower and you can see or the tram base where they had the ore bins and you can see the towers they still have some of the cabling on them. I'm at 9,000 feet in Idaho heading to a couple mines. This is the Skylark. It's got the bunk houses. The new wood is their park service forestry services shoring up the structure so they don't collapse. They're pretty worn out. Down below is the Ram's Horn and we'll be visiting them visiting that on this video. This is a quarter mile and the road up to this point we drove up to 8,900 feet and had to park and then hike the rest of the way up. Not that far of a hike. The road was not fun. Basically the road will look similar to this but a little bit wider. To get to the Ram's Horn we just park inside a closed gate and walk up. But let's take a look at the Skylark first. Now originally this area was discovered in the 1860s for a gold deposit but then a large lead silver deposit was located and originally was I think it was the Ram's Horn if I'm wrong I'll tell you and then the Skylark and then they used this tram to connect the two and then to connect to the bottom part where the ore was then processed at a place called Bay Horse. See you still got the stove down there in the bunkhouse. There's one of the tram towers and you can see the pulley and the cable are still on it. And there's the work crew they're trying to shore it up so that it can hopefully survive the winter and they said they're gonna be back up next year to try to stabilize it and fortify it a little bit more so you get to enjoy it if you do decide to hike up here. Came down from up there to show you this portion. This is where the tram system is. There's one of the pulleys that they would have had on the tower so they had it up here for a backup. From what I read what they did was is they filled that's the work crew making that noise they would fill one tram bucket with ore from this mine go down to the next mine the Ram's Horn and then um fill the bucket up the rest of the way. Isn't this cool guys yeah I'm hoping that they can save this. There's the tram wheel you can still smell the grease and a couple pulleys down there. Yeah this is really cool oh there's the operator's pedal that's cool. All right let's go ahead and look around some more. Just making my way around the bottom of the building since this was built in the 1800s. Look at all these square head nails that they used that is really cool yeah here's a small one isn't that neat. So this is the bottom of the tram house or the powerhouse. What's neat is it's two separate buildings that were just connected with like a little alleyway in the middle. You got like a wooden trough there. It's like so hard to find any flat ground to stand on. It's just so neat and look at the size of those timbers. This is a treat to see this is underneath the bunkhouse portion. Some of the wood's giving way there cool. I'm still underneath the bunkhouse. You can see what we have to climb up and this is all just loose dirt shale. It's not making it fun but it's worth it to see this. I need both my hands to finish the climb. Very careful. Check that out that is cool. There's the stove that I showed you from outside. Oh excuse me. Nice shelves. Oh a little wash basin area that's neat. So we got another door over here. Looks like a little stairwell. What do we got over here? Okay so this allows you to climb out and head up to another level. You can see the stairs right there. Hiking back down to the truck those logs there are the original road. That is insane. Just think these people discovered this silver mine climbing up that. Wow. A little winded. I saw this roof. I just climbed up this. There's no direct trail. Too bad it's collapsed. What do we need to see? I've got something else up there but I'm heading back down because I want to hit the ram's horn next. So before we did the hike up we parked right here and we were playing with stuff and the we had like 0.12 micro sievers of radiation outside and I went inside the mine. Yeah it's fluctuating but at one point we had it before the hike at 0.17 micro sievers. I wish this wasn't closed. That looks like it was closed up in 2010. Well we just came down from up there the top part skylark. This takes us to the ram horn. It's supposed to be a 0.7 mile hike which is not bad. Let me get going. It is a little bit steep if you do come but it's a pretty easy grade and that's our final destination. It's pretty. It's well worth it. Still making my way too but starting to see can debris. There it is ram's horn. So you can see the tram cable and you can see the bottom there where the bottom the lower and that banging is the workmen doing the some restoration work. Yeah see skylark. Yeah the first thing I pointed out I made a mistake the first thing I pointed out it's a central tower. It's where that tower is there's a tunnel up there and that's where they would also load up the ore. All the tunnels in this area are sealed. They either collapsed them or barred them up. Oh that's cool. Yeah better turn off the GPS. I recorded the entire track so I can give you guys profiles. All right I'm just gonna just drop my bag here. Let's go check this out quickly. Oh it's a pump so this must have been a pump house for them to get water. I need both hands determine if I want to risk trying to climb into that. I probably will. Now let's get the I'm like looking at all this cool shale type stone and you know it's not going to be with a few fossils in here. Oh cool stone fireplace. All right you guys don't feel this. I do. The wind's blowing and it's shaking the entire structure. This is where they had the potbelly stove or their oven or whatever they were using. Oh man the slats it's pretty cool. All right I need both my hands. I'm going to go ahead and look around a little bit more outside. Actually first thing before I completely shut off is that right there is the access to get to the second floor. Let's see what's left of the stairs. So we won't be exploring the upstairs. That's okay. Now this one is newer than the Skylark. You can tell by the brown nails but they're still pretty machine rough. So this is early 1900s. So you know what this means. Green paint is probably arsenic. That's pretty cool. So when I was inside looking around I went to one of the front rooms and I saw there was a room below. Might not be able to get up to the top level for the upper stairs. We can check out down here. There's remnants of an old stair and walkway. It's insulators. An old light socket. Big insulator. Oh cool this one still has some wire on it. Okay that is really cool how that hunk of wood is holding up the entire chimney. That's neat. Let's see. Oh look solid ground. Maybe. Who knows. Okay nice stacking on the rock. Really cool. Well I gotta get myself out of here. I need both hands. So looking at it. So they had an ore cart. So this is supposed to have been where they lower or yeah loaded up the ore into the tram buckets. The mines are at this or the tunnels are at this level. I'm still debating. Okay now there's really no safe way to enter it. Yeah there's no safe way to enter this. So I won't be going in there. Which is sad because it looks like it has a couple transfer pulleys in there. Oh well. So I'm gonna go ahead and hike back out and I'm going to drive down to the lower ore hopper tram tower. Before I leave I'm gonna have to do some more research. I think a later mining company came in and opened this all up. You got some timbering in there. It looks like the end of a mine. Oh just heard that. In reality as much as we know there could actually just be a tunnel here. This might have actually been a tunnel entrance. Hey you can't really tell because they come in and they can blast them and then bulldoze them and you never know if there was ever a tunnel entrance. Cool let me grab my bag. So this is the terminus. Just park right up there. So this is where all the ore came down the tram along each one of the stops and it was dumped here. Here's the road where they would have loaded it in wagon and then later on into truck. You see the road right there. These are counterweight buckets used to keep tension on the main frame. They would fill them full of rock and they were attached by chain or cable and it would pull the unit this way so that the weight of the tram tower above was not pulling it and both sides had it. So one was pulling or both sides were pulling on each other. Look at that. Isn't that awesome? There we go. There's examples of it. And with that I'm bringing at the end of today's video. This gets you excited to do some exploring on your own. Do it. Have fun. Be safe. I'll catch you guys on the next one.