Monday, May 9, 2022

Memories and Old Stories with a Purpose

(From my comment to a Youtube video about exploring old mines, some words of advice from a graybeard Grandpa.)

Years ago, as a Geology grad student, in our youthful foolishness - with some classmates - we briefly crawled into a number of old mines in West Texas and southern New Mexico. Usually with no safety equipment and we probably notified a minimal number of people where we were going on our impromptu explorations. Not good.

One time, five of us entered an old tin mine in the Franklin Mountains (north of El Paso) with ONE FLASHLIGHT! The mine had last been in use during WWII and it was in good shape (the adit floors were not littered with fallen rocks and there were no surprise intersections with vertical shafts). But if we had dropped our ONE FLASHLIGHT and broken the bulb, we might still be there. (I'm sort of kidding, a helicopter search would have found our vehicles in 2 or maybe 3 days or it might have taken us that long to crawl out.)

Another time in the Jarilla Mountains, a friend and I walked about 20 feet into an old mine, silently looked around, touched nothing, and said "NOPE". Perhaps a year later in the same mine, there was a local news report that two guys went in and started hammering on the ceiling to get some mineral specimens, causing the ceiling to collapse, killing them both. Yikes!

(I think that is where a number of my phobias come from.)

When there was only one person in the group that wanted to enter a sketchy old mine, I found a good way to deter them. Example: "Hey Bob, before you go in that old mine, toss me the keys to your truck. If you don't make it out, can I have your pickup truck?" (That usually worked. The thought of losing their prized pickup truck worried them more than a mine collapse. Go figure.)

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