A recent March morning was an occasion to indulge my curiosity and take a guided mine tour.
While I am a fan of the ‘Abandoned and Forgotten Places’ YouTube channel, which seeks to document a long-ago West, my wife and I have done very little of our own explorations. I can count on two hands the number of shafts that we have entered. The adits have always been horizontal and low-risk, and all have been relatively truncated. Our timid forays have been more akin to a short walk down a darkened and unfamiliar hallway than a trip into a danger zone.
At 70-plus years, I could have taken an easy, tourist-accessible type of mine tour and not felt any guilt about wimping out. My digging involves finding interesting material to write about as much as it involves pretty rocks.
The Queen Mine Tour in Bisbee looks interesting. You have to wear a slicker to fend off the dampness as you ride a mine train underground. The website advises that no open-toe shoes or high heels are allowed.
In Tombstone, there is the Toughnut Dinner Theater Tour, which features an “1800’s style dinner….100 feet underground.” A bit more rugged, their promotional blurb reads: “Steep stairs, slopes, ladders, and uneven surfaces.” Dinner consists of “meat chili, cornbread, cobbler, coffee or water,” so not for vegans or those prone to heartburn.
Coveting a more genuine experience we instead chose to take the Chief Silver Mine Tour offered by Desert Adventures Vail Arizona. Our guide was the mine’s current owner, Bob Miller. We would descend 450 feet without open toes or high heels. Plenty of drinking water, but no hot meal awaited us at the bottom.
Outfitted with a miner helmet with adjustable headlamp, and knee pads, we backed our way down a steep incline shaft holding onto a thick rope in our gloved hands. The rails on which half-ton ore carts were once tugged to the surface were still more or less in place and could be used, along with their crossties, to steady ourselves.
The 450 feet are not a done-in-one, straight shot. Instead, the rhythm seemed to be 50 feet then a landing or a side shaft, then 75 feet and a rest stop, then 50 feet and a room with a huge dugout ceiling.
Intriguing pockets and drifts all the way down. I’d see a beautiful rock and want to stop and rescue it from certain anonymity but just kept on going because there were still several hundred more feet to descend before we would be coming up and out.
These mines had proved to be a strong magnet that attracted men from around the world.
Brute strength and a capacity for hard work, along with a knowledge of, and competence in, the field of explosive powders, were all that a boy/man needed to get by.
My imagination drifts whenever I am on Duquesne Avenue in Patagonia, and I see the listing hulk of the Lopez Pool Hall across from the present-day library. The mountains here were loaded with mines and miners, and I can see those hard-rock guys showing up on a Saturday night to assuage a week of six shifts that saw back-breaking work and ear-numbing explosions followed by the shoveling off of muck sheets, to be loaded into the half-ton ore carts that were then hauled to the surface by pulley and winch.
Standing upright and shooting pool after scurrying through tunnels, bent over, with 40-pound buckets of ore, unable to stand, must have felt like a relief.
Some weeks it was only sweat that needed to be washed away or fine dust in the back of a throat that needed to be cut with a cold beer.
Some weeks it was the trauma of witnessing—or experiencing—physical injury that had to be dealt with.
It was a good life, provided you didn’t weaken.
All the while there was the dazzle of the veins. The folds, the sparkle, the flamboyance of shameless mineral colors, thickening and thinning, for richer and poorer, pursued with the guts and sinew that you hoped to keep inside your body.
Visiting now, as a retiree, seems almost a sacrilege.
I was breathing air, heavy with particulate matter, and laboring to lower myself, not to feed my face or my family, but purely for the thrill of seeing veins, lines, changes, and faults.
After an hour or so, our guide, Bob, led us to a low-ceiling chamber. He told us to climb a ladder and then crawl along a shelf to a rich blue vein where we could wield our hammer and chisels and do some collecting. I came away with a 4-inch-long piece of something that was later crowd-sourced as gem-quality Chalcedony or Chrysoprase or maybe Gem Silica, by the people who saw its photo on Arizona Rockhounds.
We quickly exhausted our capacity for mining and exited the vault.
We hit bottom, took some photos, and began our long retreat out.
When we broke the surface, all was green and blue and milky white, just another warm and leisure-filled afternoon in the Empire Mountains of southeast Arizona.
Driving back home I tried to square the contrast between the hard-working cowhands of the grasslands, rounding and branding cattle, stringing tough fences, and providing for his horse with the life of the miners in the surrounding mountains.
Who worked harder? Who got what they deserved?
Desert Adventures Vail Arizona: desertadventuresvailaz.com
Keith Krizan can be contacted at therealkbkkbk@gmail.com