The Rookies Find Valuable Opal In A Dangerous Abandoned Mine _ Outback Opal Hunters.

Rookie miners Dan Becker and Justin Lang are on a quest for riches. The area they're heading for is notoriously dangerous. A no-man's land of thousands of abandoned mine shafts named 17 Mile. People have died here, people have disappeared, the mines fields are deadly. This area is littered with deep shafts up to 30-40 metres deep in some areas, you know. If you fall into one of those, you're dead. The plan is to go down one of these abandoned mines. Chasing scraps of opal the original miners may have missed. We'll go down and look for some trace in the wall and try and drill it out. Hopefully we find a pocket or two. But it's a risky strategy. At the bottom of this 30-metre hole could be both fortune and disaster. The mine they're about to enter is a tangled network of tunnels over a kilometre long. It'll be easy to get lost down here and easy to get hurt. It is risky, it is dangerous, you can have rock collapses, you can have all sorts of other unknown things down there that can end your life. A winch will carry them down. If it fails, this ladder will be their only way back to the surface. Going underground is quite a scary experience, especially when you haven't done it before, you know. Dan and Justin begin their 30-metre descent. From this point on, they're entering the unknown. Down here is a rabbit warren of heavily mined tunnels and caverns, with many areas unstable. But the boys hope they can find opal that's been missed. Sometimes the old miners left opal in the support pillars or in the walls. You've got to be very, very careful. A lot of people have been killed taking these support pillars out and the whole wall or the whole roof collapsed on them. The boys need to make the most of their time here. They decide to split up. If you worked over there, I went into that corridor there. We've got enough extension lead to make it happen so we can both use the drills. All right, we'd better get cracking. Let's do it. All right, I'll go in there. All right, see you soon. I'll see you a bit after. Good luck. Yep, you too. Areas that look interesting might have some chips of opal in the heaps around it. That is often a good indicator of what's been in the wall. Meanwhile, Justin's concerned just how dangerous this mine really is. You can go around and listen whether the roof is hollow sounding. Over here, very dangerous. Some miners have been killed in areas like this where they might go in to have a look. And if you don't look what's up, you might have a couple of ton of rocks come down on top of you. You know, some people might just tap it and the whole thing falls down. You know, it's very dangerous. You know, even if I tap, that is how easy it is. And there's more right through here. I might even get out of this area because it's way too dangerous to even work anywhere along here. So, too dangerous, eh? What I've got here is a UV light or black light. White little bits that show up in the dirt. This is all potch, potch being the base material, and potch becomes opal once there's colour in it or fire. But no colour. Justin's looking for opal in the tunnel's walls. You've got to be careful. You can see here, the big pillar that's holding up millions of tonnes above us, this one's starting to crack because it's thin. There's a lot of weight that's pushing down on this. So, you've got to be very careful. I would not in a million years touch this pillar. If it had a million dollars worth of opal in it, I'd probably leave it. No, nothing in this one. Snow bloody opal, today. This trip hasn't been successful, so it feels like the trip's closing in on us. We haven't found the opal that we're expecting and it's starting to wear on us, I think. Determined to carry on, Justin keeps drilling. But the more he drills, the more he weakens the wall holding up the roof. Oh, oh, oh. Look at it. Look at it all reflect up the back there. Like that. Yeah, really good. Right, more action. There we go. Ooh, hang on. All right, this is my favourite thing to do. You know, when you don't know there's opal here, you know, you hear this little crunching sound when you break a chunk of sandstone off. You know there's opal. Mola, come here. Mola. Oh, my God. Look at that, look at that, look at that, look at that. Straight through. Nice. Is this good or what? Bloody beautiful. But to get it all, Dan attacks the wall from the other side. Weakening the wall. Look at that. Even more. That makes you get goosebumps instead of pieces. But the supporting walls of the tunnel are now seriously undermined. I'm getting out of here. Yeah, let's clear out. That's too dangerous. Out here, there's no hospital. There's no ambulance too far away. So you've got to have your wits about you. Otherwise, you're finished. Took the risk of going down these shafts and being underground all day and our plan worked out.