Turns out, we hit the jackpot. We found the largest mine I'd ever explored. We entered through the upper level adit. The upper level was not very large, but a winze about 100 yards from the entrance led to a lower level. The winze was a diagonal shaft the went down at about a 45° angle. We tied a rope to a piece of a metal that was secured to the floor of the upper adit and slowly lowered ourselves down to the lower level.
The lower level of the mine turned out to be huge. We probably spent more than an hour-and-a-half exploring it. As we got deeper into the mine, we had to climb over several sections of collapsed rock. When Matt was climbing down the backside of one of the debris piles, the candle he was carrying went out. Our first thought was that he had accidentally blown it out as he was scrambling over the rocks. I climbed down to meet him with the lighter. We decided not to move any further until we got the candle re-lit. I pulled the lighter out of my pocket and tried to light it several times, but couldn't get a flame. I'd dropped the lighter in the dirt and thought that maybe that was preventing it from igniting. So I pulled a book of matches out of our mine exploring bag. I struck several matches, but each time got the same result: the sulfur on the head of the match burned, but never created a flame. Matt and I looked at each other, both knowing what we were experiencing: bad air. We scrambled back to the top of the rock pile we'd climbed down. There, the lighter and candle both lit very quickly. There hadn't been enough oxygen lower in tunnel to support a flame. We knew from our research that carbon dioxide is more dense than oxygen and often displaces oxygen in mines, creating bad air.
At that point, we decided to turn back, very grateful that we'd run into the old geologist that recommended we carry a candle. He may well have saved our lives. Neither of us felt short of breath in the area with bad air, but we later learned that fire needs at least 15% oxygen to burn (normal air contains 21% oxygen). I haven't been able to find out what oxygen content is required for humans to survive.
On our way out of the mine, we climbed up a stope we had passed. A stope is were the miners pulled the ore from that they were going to process. This one went up at a 45° angle. We had originally hoped that it was a raise that would lead to another level and were slightly disappointed when we discovered it was only a stope. Overall, though, we were very excited about the mine and all the exploring we had done in it. We were still curious about what might've been passed the section with bad air, but we won't be able to find out without supplemental oxygen.
On our last full day in Colorado, we went on another hunt for abandoned mines. We decided to take the Jeep up the trail where I had gotten stuck in the snow with my dad this spring. My dad had told me there were several mines in the area to explore. We stopped to take pictures were my dad and I had gotten stuck. This picture shows the tree that we cut and the rocks we piled to fill in the side of the trail.
The ashes from our fire are still there.
The snow had all melted on the lower portion of the trail, but it was still a solid 4 wheel drive road. As we got higher on the mountain we came across several mine sites. Unfortunately the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety had beaten us there. There were placards in all the mines we stopped at that indicated the mines had been made "safe" in 2007. The entrances to all of them had been blasted closed. We were very disappointed.
We did make it up to some snow, which Matt was excited about. Part of the trail was blocked by snow.
Vanity picture of the Jeep at the highest point we made it to.
We drove to the end of the Jeep road where there was a huge mine with several cool structures that were still intact. As we expected, though, the entrance to the mine had long since collapsed. There were some cool structures left.
Check out the rest of the pictures on flickr. There are some good ones.
That marked the end of our mine explorations for this trip. We left the next day to drive back to Kentucky.
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