This is the last adventure dad and I got to go on together, so this is a special memory to me.

So, some backstory is necessary here. Dad and I have been hiking for as long as I can remember. We’ve found quite a few old mines that had been rendered inaccessible by bars or rubble, but we had never really found one you could explore. We’d toured caverns, and we found a few old mining operations which had some neat stuff to poke around and look at, but we always dreamed we’d find a real mine we could explore one day.

Well, finally around December of 2022, dad found the mine shown above on one of his back-road explorations. We found out he was sick in February, so come March we made our first trip out to check out the mine together (his first adventure into it solo had nearly resulted in disaster after his light sources all failed or were broken). We were not properly equipped, so we came back out in April for a good delve into its depths. The photos above are from March, below are from April, when we were better-equipped. It goes without saying this is extremely dangerous and we could have died in any number of unpleasant ways so I don’t advocate that anyone, anywhere repeat this unless they find themselves hoping to expedite their departure from this plane in a dark, scary place. Also, this might have been trespassing? There were no signs, but I can’t really imagine most of the responsible people out there want random folks crawling around in old mines, so you probably shouldn’t.

And lastly, here’s a short video we got of me down in the mine (I don’t really know why I decided to narrate like this but it felt like I should at the time).