Entry tags:

suburban exploring

It's a what?
The coal company that owns the remains of the old mine nearest to me put up big yellow Keep Out signs all along the railroad tracks closest to the colliery. The people who ride their bikes and ATVs there still don't seem to care. This wouldn't be so big a deal, too--except for how I saw these exact same big bright yellow signs on the side of the turnpike a few days ago. Instead of effectively telling me to keep out, the company's just told me where to look for more neat things.

Is this new neat spot within walking distance? No. Does it have big visible-from-space shale piles like the one nearest me? No. Sadness. But examining google's maps & satellite pics of my immediate area showed a strange sort of change to the nearby creek, maybe a mile or so down the tracks from me. The creek around here meanders. When it suddenly goes in a straight line, something's up. And the area surrounded by this oddity didn't have big gray visible shale piles . . . but it did have some weird treeless spots and a complete lack of houses, roads, etc.

It might be a mine; it might not be a mine. There was only one (fun) way to find out. You know me: I grabbed the dog, the camera, and my cell phone, and started walking.



On the way, I found myself a little worried by all the bones on the side of the tracks. There were a lot. There aren't any closer to home--but then again, that area's frequented by the ATV & bike people, and I'd headed way past their beaten path. There's a lot of cracked ribs, scattered vertebrae, jaw pieces and crushed pelvises . . . It's kinda sad.

Oni managed to find a piece of one with hair still attached, and of course tried to bring it along with us. Yeaaahno. No no no. Eew no.

After a little while we got to the right general area and I was starting to wonder where we should make our grand entrance, and oh look hey there's a tipple.



It's almost as good as a big yellow sign, really. So we climbed up the side, found a nice little path at the top, started exploring, and found . . . nothing.





It's nice, yeah, in that crunch-around "What the blue fuck were the fianna smoking, run through the woods without snapping a single twig?" way. But the wreck I expected just wasn't there.

Unless you count the giant water-filled sinkhole that'd taken out a chunk of the path. I'm told the shaft entries tend to do this as their filler material settles. This hole's close to thirty feet across & about ten feet down to the water's surface, and on the left side you can see the straight edge that marks it as something not-quite-natural.



Oni and I walked across and around the entire area. Basically it's a huge mostly-smooth lump with a really steep drop to get to where it's surrounded by marsh and bordered by the creek.

The drop:



The marsh:



A snowdrop, running wild (and linked to my devart):



I was starting to wonder, though: There wasn't anything to really make this place stand out as an old mine. No walls, no crumbling stuff; only a little bit of exposed coal, a foot-wide segment of protruding concrete, and a single piece of brick to mark that there'd been something there . . .

Then Oni found an animal hole and started trying to evict its tenant. And I started paying attention--because the stuff he was turning up, and the stuff the animal'd turned up, was the shale and gravel that's so out in the open at the other site.



I'd been looking for shale piles and somehow discounted the possibility that this entire thing is a single gigantic shale pile, covered in a hundred thirty years of dirt.

More specific research tells me this little guy ran for around thirty years in the 1800s, topping out at about twenty thousand tons of coal a year but ceasing function as a mine right after the Civil War. It also tells me that the "little" mine down the road from me, started about a decade before this one's closure, likely mined the rest of its coal.

Seems my "little" mine isn't nearly as little or one-directional as I'd thought. D: That's a hell of a lot of undercut and definitely goes under fun things like homes, playing fields, the creek, and possibly the railroad.

The company that put up the yellow signs supposedly has a center nearby. I shall be in their base, pokin' them have to go visit sometime for more information.