Shafted

Gravity is the one sure thing about dropping rocks into abandoned mine shafts.
You creep up as close as you dare to the edge of the mysterious hole in the ground, smelling decades of rotting timbers wafting up from the thing. Always one big unknown is the stability of the ground around the mouth of the shaft. It might collapse under your feet, sending you plunging to a dark death.
But that won’t happen to you, right?
Then you drop the rock and experience gravity at work, 32 feet per second per second, the growing hiss of air resistance as the rock approaches terminal velocity. And then the echoing crash (or splash) as the rock hits bottom. You stand there, breath held, until silence returns to that dark world.
Mine-shaft spelunking.
Abandoned mines have been in the news in Arizona for the past year, since two girls rode an ATV into a 125-foot-deep shaft concealed by brush, near Chloride. A 13-year-old girl was killed in the fall, and her 10-year-old sister was injured, rescued after an unimaginable night in the mine. The state had identified the shaft as hazardous 10 years earlier, but did nothing about it. The girls’ mother has sued the state for $11 million.
Since then, Arizona Mine Inspector Joe Hart has been searching desperately for ways to close up abandoned mines before more people fall in them. At one point, he proposed filling them with old tires, but that idea was dropped due to environmental concerns.
However, Gov. Janet Napolitano on April 28 signed a bill into law that will let Hart accept donations of inert construction waste materials such as concrete rubble to fill abandoned mines.
Hart’s office has estimated that there are 100,000 abandoned mine openings – from deep shafts and tunnels to shallow prospect holes – in Arizona. In most cases, the people who dug those holes died long ago, leaving us with mine workings that age and decay, growing more dangerous as Arizona's population grows closer to them.
It’ll take a lot of construction rubble to fill them. And, under the the Law of Unintended Circumstances, there’s a distinct possibility that some of the trucks dumping construction rubble into mine shafts will fall in themselves, in the process.
Meanwhile, abandoned mines continue to claim lives. Earlier this year a 19-year-old man fell 300 feet to his death in a shaft near Globe.

I learned about mine-shaft spelunking on a ranch in Yavapai County, north of Wickenburg. The state lists 1,948 mines in Yavapai, more than any other Arizona county. I’m sure that most of them must have been on our ranch, scarring the desert hillsides with tailings piles and occasional head frames standing above mine shafts like gallows. There were great, mythic names for those played-out mines – the Mizpah, Slim Jim, Keystone, Bloo Nellie, Monte Cristo, and the Gold Bar, to name a few. The Gold Bar had a vertical shaft 800 feet deep, my father said. The Mizpah was 600 feet deep straight down, and the Monte Cristo’s incline shaft was 1,100 feet deep. My father somehow knew the depths of all of them.
One unusual mine on our ranch had a tailings pile jutting out on a hillside, but no mine shaft at all. Where there should have been a shaft at the top of the pile, there was just flat ground. Even my father couldn’t explain that.
Then, after some heavy rain, the shaft made a shocking reappearance – a gaping hole about 200 feet deep on the side of the tailings pile, rather than the top. It must have been covered over by rotting timbers, a death trap waiting to snare some kid doing the kind of thing kids love to do, like riding an ATV.

That’s the kind of memory that still haunts my sleep.
Mine-shaft dreams, I call them. Once or twice a month, they visit. No amount of inert construction material, I fear, will cover them up.
I’m there again, looking down into the blackness of the mine shaft, a rock in my hand. I drop the rock and watch as gravity takes over and it falls, 32 feet per second per second. But then it’s me falling, falling, falling ...
Still falling after all these years, with no hope of terminal velocity.