Lots of local history out here, aside from the various mining camps and townsite around these hills.

When my dad was a teenager, the shafts were wide open, so kids would go exploring down there in the miles and miles of tunnels.

Later some governemnt agency tried blowing them shut for safety, and did sort of a half-assed job, leaving a handfull of shafts open, even more dangerous than before, as a mess of semi-collapsed timbers and rubbly partial openings. So those were the digs me and my friends explored when I was a teenager. These pictures are just a couple false start tunnels that don't go anywhere, but approximate what the sandstone tunnels were like.

Then the Army Corps of Engineers came in and sealed them for real. I actually remember this particual air shaft. We carved skeletons in the sandstone walls a few hunderd feet below, and I suppose they are still down there.

Only the air shafts have those grates on them. The big walk-in shafts had so much fill crammed in to them I can't recognize them. This may be one under here, or may be a pile of original tailings.

Peeking through the bars.

Cooling off in a little sort of tourist cave along the hike.