Paddock Mines - Exploring Shaft #2

If anything can stir my imagination more than a hole in the earth, high up on a desolate mountain and disappearing into darkness and the unknown, I don't know of it. Whether it's a forgotten cave, a hundred year old mineshaft, or even a mile long abandoned tunnel if you ever find yourself in southern Pennsylvania, to walk underground in one of these places it to step out of one world and into another. And in the case of the Paddock Mineshafts, you're stepping into a world of men who dug through rock for twelve hours a day with nothing more than a pickax and grit, men who were oblivious to such modern luxuries as OSHA safety and mid-morning coffee breaks, and men who would have laughed me right off the mountain with my daily multi-vitamins and two puffs of a inhaler every morning.

Our follow-up expedition to the Paddock Mineshafts has been my most anticipated adventure in the short history of this blog. After learning there was a second and equally long tunnel in those treasured woods, we planned a group excursion with the WeRmudfun gang to go back and explore everything in one shot - both the tunnel our group found during our initial search, and this existing one they knew of that we'd been looking for but never came across.

The morning actually started on a down note, as we left the house with only two of the four people who were committed to going from our group, me and Barry. Feeling bad for the two that couldn't make it, but not bad enough to consider rescheduling, we drove the two and a half hours to our designated meeting spot, roughly a mile's distance further along an old dirt road from the first time we made this trip.

Because we were now running off GPS there would be no bushwhacking through thickets and thorns like our previous search, and it couldn't have been more than half an hour of enjoyable hiking and chatting until we reached the mine. This was the first hike on this trail for our group, and the first hike in over two years for our new friends, who were navigating the way. My only flub-up was when I struggled to make small talk and asked them if the random section of trail they we were leading us through looked familiar. You know, from their last trip here over two years ago.

We arrived at the mine and one of the first things we noticed was that unlike the previous shaft, which had quicksand disguised as a puddle and would swallow you whole at the entrance, this one's method of attack was a slow and more tortuous one. Soon after entering the mine, a foot-deep river of cold water stood throughout much of the tunnel, and there was no way to avoid walking through it. A problem for some people perhaps, but no match against the Walmart waders I'd picked up just that morning.

But similar to the previous shaft, this one's entrance is guarded by some nasty spiders that seem to be breeding an army of their own.

Once about halfway into the mine the water eases up and the shaft becomes pretty smooth sailing. It runs mostly in a straight line, but has just enough waviness to close you off from any last glimpse of daylight and give you a real sense of twisting through the mountain.

Unlike shaft #1, this one doesn't abruptly end at a wall that makes it obvious you're not going any further, and instead splits into two directions that are almost immediately caved in on both sides. Purposely or not we don't know. And although I gave it my best shot to crawl over one of the piles of rubble, there just wasn't any continuing. On a related note, I'm one of those guys who will stop to say cheese for the camera under any circumstances.

Now it was on to the second part of this adventure, the Paddock Pit, and what turned out to be my biggest surprise of the day.

When I was considering that we would be climbing down into a vertical mineshaft, I mistakenly assumed it would be a shaft with a steep decline, and that we'd just need some rope to guide the way and help steady us down. Nope. A pit means a pit, and in this case it means a hole wide enough my wife could have driven our car into it. You can imagine how silly I felt standing at the edge of this thing holding not much more than a clothesline, but I threw it down anyway because if nothing else it would give us a measurement of how deep this hole went. We heard the plastic spool smack the bottom just before we ran out of slack at the top. That was a fifty-foot stretch of rope we'd just heaved in there, and this pit had swallowed almost every last foot of it.

It was time to head home for us as we knew we wouldn't be getting into the pit on this day, but at least I knew exactly what we were challenged with now - finding a way to climb straight down into a fifty-foot hole in the earth. Off to the drawing board I would be going.

And you know what that meant ... another trip to the Paddock Mines would soon be in the works.


Links:
Searching For The Paddock Mineshaft - Part 1
WeRmudfun - Abandoned Paddock Mines Shaft 1 and 2