Amador County Gold Mines 58 images Created 10 Feb 2011
After the easy gold was picked up during California's Gold Rush in the 1850s, miners had to start getting their gold from the source in the rocks: underground. They started with adits and coyote holes and in the 1880s and 1890s, as the technology arrived with pumps and TNT, hard rock mining.
Most of the mines were located along the western slope of California's Sierra Nevada in the foothills known as The Mother Lode and The Gold Country. This gold belt stretches from Coarse Gold, Madera County in the south to Downieville and Sierra City in Sierra County in the north, about 200 mines south to north.
The gold veins are predominately in quartz rock and along the Melonies Fault zone, especially in the Heart of the Mother Lode in Amador County.
Throughout the Mother Lode, Amador County is about in the middle and its mines were among the deepest with both the Kennedy and Argonaut Mines both dropping more than a mile below the surface.
Today, Sutter Gold, developed the late 1980s and early 1990s in historic mining properties near Amador City is the only producing gold mine in California's Mother Lode and is now mining.
Most of the mines were located along the western slope of California's Sierra Nevada in the foothills known as The Mother Lode and The Gold Country. This gold belt stretches from Coarse Gold, Madera County in the south to Downieville and Sierra City in Sierra County in the north, about 200 mines south to north.
The gold veins are predominately in quartz rock and along the Melonies Fault zone, especially in the Heart of the Mother Lode in Amador County.
Throughout the Mother Lode, Amador County is about in the middle and its mines were among the deepest with both the Kennedy and Argonaut Mines both dropping more than a mile below the surface.
Today, Sutter Gold, developed the late 1980s and early 1990s in historic mining properties near Amador City is the only producing gold mine in California's Mother Lode and is now mining.
