Accidents highlighting the dangers, draw of old mines
EUREKA, Utah — Underneath the mountains and deserts of the U.S. West lie hundreds of thousands of abandoned mines, an underground world that can hold serious danger and unexpected wonder.
They are a legacy of the region’s prospecting past, when almost anyone could dig a mine and then walk away, with little cleanup required, when it stopped producing.
In Utah alone, the state is trying to seal more than 10,000 open mines with cinderblocks and metal grates after people have died in rock falls and all-terrainvehicle crashes and from poisonous air over the past three decades. Just this month in Arizona, a prospector broke his left leg and ankle after plunging to the bottom of an old mine shaft. He spent nearly three days there with no food or water fending off rattlesnakes before a friend heard his cries for help.
Still, not everyone wants to see the mines closed. For years, a dedicated subculture of explorers has been slipping underground to see tunnels lined with sparkling quartz, century-old rail cars and caverns that open in the earth like buried ballrooms.
“Nobody has walked the path you’re walking for 100 years,” said Jeremy MacLee, who uses old mining documents and hightech safety equipment to find and explore forgotten holes, mostly in Utah.
He also lends his expertise to searches for missing people. That’s how he got to know Bill Powell, who looked for his 18-year-old son, Riley, for months before the teenager and his girlfriend were found dead in a mine shaft outside the small town of Eureka.
The teens’ families formed a close bond with MacLee and other volunteer searchers. Despite his painful memories, Bill Powell decided to see what draws his friend to those dark recesses deep in the desert.
“It’s a whole different life. The underground life,” said Powell, who has a gravelly voice, close-cropped gray beard and a quick smile.
On a recent day, he and MacLee joined a group of friends in front of a mountainside opening near Eureka, wearing helmets, oxygen meters and strong lights, and a carrying stash of extra batteries. Cool air blasted from the opening, cutting through the desert heat.
The group walked between metal tracks that once carried ore carts, making their way through a tunnel shored up in places with squared-off timbers. After nearly a mile, the railcar tracks suddenly dropped into an abyss as the tunnel opened wide into a huge cavern. A hundred years ago, it would be a bustling scene lit with candles and carbide lights, as miners climbed a scaffolding the size of a sevenstory building to drill out lead and silver.
Now, it is silent and pitch-black, illuminated only by the searching headlamp beams.
Bill Powell thought of his son, and the trips they took through the desert when he was a kid. Sometimes they’d come across an old mine shaft and toss a rock down, trying to imagine how far it fell. He doesn’t do that anymore, not since his son’s body was found in one of those pits.
Though the teenager never got to explore a mine like the one his father was in, Bill Powell thought he’d like seeing it. “He’d probably wish he was with me, hanging out.”
But the dangers of abandoned mines weigh on Utah officials’ minds. There have been 11 deaths since 1982 and more than 40 injuries, including people who entered mines to explore and others who fell in by accident, according to state data.