Miners – bless their hearts – have been known to weigh themselves down with rock while at work. For some reason or another, the owners of the mines frowned upon this practice. One way to prevent such activities was to make the men strip down and change clothes before entering and exiting the mine. While the practice continues today – even in coal mines – modern facilities often include showers and lockers.

Not so much then:

Some of the more remote places where good ore was found are difficult for the casual traveller to get to (or even know about) so souvenir collecting has been less intensive. This is the changing room of a silver mine barely in California just over the state line from Nevada. It’s actually not far from well-known mines but requires some degree of effort to hike to (and find – lost behind brush and up a narrow canyon). I stumbled across it by accident long ago (and haven’t been back since). There are no obvious roads to it and at the time I was there, the path – such as it was – looked like an animal trail; not a trail one would normally follow. I suppose at one time it was a burro path for hauling sacks of ore out to better opportunities for reasonable transportation. A very dry climate helped preserve some of the construction over the 100 years or so.

The entrance to the diggings is just through the door. Square head nails (aka “cut nails”) helped date the workings; they were the primary nail used until about the 1890s when round wire nails became common. A bit of research suggests this mine was probably active for a few years in the late 1870s to early 1880s with fewer than a dozen men working it. The ore was good enough to construct this room and interior bracing but not enough to allow more extensive development and roads. I explored the interior a bit but the timbering was questionable and I decided I wasn’t all that interested in exploring the ore face.