Fewer holes to fall into.

Work underway to close old mine shaft entrances at Gold Butte monument

Asmall team of state contractors is about halfway through a nearly six-week effort to close off 42 abandoned mine openings scattered throughout Gold Butte National Monument, about 90 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Most of the underground tunnels date back to the early 20th century. Several feature vertical shafts, primed to swallow unsuspecting visitors.

In the hills above the long-gone mining camp of Gold Butte, 20 miles from the nearest paved road, contract workers Brian Breiter and James Ryan spent Monday capping one such hole with about 2,500 pounds of crisscrossed steel.

“It’s strong enough you could park a vehicle on it if you wanted to,” Breiter said after securing the new grate with 18-inch pins drilled into solid rock.

MINES

The work began on Sept. 22 and slated to last through the end of the month. The sites are strewn across roughly 25 miles of desert, including remote locations with no usable roads nearby.

Crew commutes by air

“We are using a helicopter on this, which we don’t usually do,” said Richard Perry, administrator for the Nevada Division of Minerals.

“Many of the sites were not accessible by any other means,” added Garrett Wake, Southern Nevada chief for the division. “There is some hiking or small (off-highway vehicle) access, but getting supplies and multiple personnel there would be extremely difficult without air support.”

In addition to hauling welding equipment and steel to the old mines, the contract helicopter hired out of Elko also serves as a taxi service of sorts, shuttling the threeman work crew to and from nearby Mesquite, where they’ve rented a house for the duration of the job.

Some of the old shafts are being plugged with a special polyurethane foam that expands and then hardens to close the openings. Others are being blocked with the grates — assembled and welded on site — with openings large enough for bats and desert tortoises but too small for people to slip through.

Shortly after finishing one so-called “wildlife compatible closure” earlier in the project, workers at Gold Butte watched in astonishment as a tortoise casually walked out of the mine shaft through its newly built door.

Before the work began, a biologist checked the shafts to see what animals might be using them.

Wake said a handful of openings that showed no signs of habitation are being fitted with wildlife grates anyway, so people can see inside and get a feel for what life was like during the heyday of the Gold Butte Mining District.

Cliven Bundy weighs in

Wake said state officials decided to fence off two mine portals at the northern end of the monument rather than seal them with a grate or a plug after rancher Cliven Bundy told them he owned the rights to water flowing out of the shafts.

For decades, Bundy has been running his cattle on public land in the area without a federal grazing permit, triggering a 2014 stand-off with federal authorities that made headlines nationwide.

The work in Gold Butte is being done in consultation with the Nevada Department of Wildlife, the State Historic Preservation Office and the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the national monument.

The state’s Abandoned Mine Lands program and Clark County’s Desert Conservation Program are sharing the cost of the almost $400,000 project. The county’s share of the money was left over from a project earlier this year that permanently closed 41 mine openings in the hills above Fort Apache and Warm Springs roads in the southwest Las Vegas Valley.

More than 17,000 sites across Nevada have been secured since the Abandoned Mine Lands program was launched 32 years ago, but tens of thousands of old shafts and other hazards remain. State officials have to be selective about where they spend their money.

“The big push is to use funds to take care of places where people recreate,” Wakesaid.

A new national monument in Nevada’s most populous county seemed like as good a place as any.

Contact Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350. Follow @ Refriedbrean on Twitter.