I almost came up empty on my initial search for Saunders - also known as the Haile-Buckley Mine - after spending an entire afternoon scouring the west side of the mountain where I thought the mine was located, but not finding anything. After calling it a day I was working my way down the mountain, but rather than taking the main trail I paralleled it about a hundred yards into the woods on the off-chance I'd find anything interesting. That's when I began coming across scraps of mica and other discarded rocks, and soon after I stumbled upon the mine.
Dusk was setting in about this time, so I poked my head into a couple of crevices but didn't do any underground exploring. One tunnel was blocked by a 20-foot pool of water that all I could do was stare across at wistfully, while the other one was open but would require a bit of rock climbing to enter. Happy just to have located it, I left for home and put a return trip to Saunders on my to-do list.
It was the first of December when I made a second exploration with my buddy John. We'd purposely waited until winter so that the pool blocking tunnel #2 would be frozen over, but we should have given it another month - ice covered most of the pool, but the edges were still open. I didn't drive 4 hours that day for nothing, though. Out of my pockets came the electronics, around my waist went the rope, and cautiously I began out onto the ice. I'd made it probably five steps when the cracking started, and suddenly the bottom dropped away like I'd been standing on a dunking booth. If not for a handhold I found against the rock I'm pretty sure I'd have gone under. It was several freezing moments before I could convince my body to start breathing again, then I yelped for John to pull me out.
Water that sits for many years without moving or circulating is some pretty foul stuff, and although he's too polite to say so, I'm sure John was happy we'd driven in separate cars that day. Cold, wet, smelly, and unable to explore tunnel #2, there seemed only one logical thing left for us to do. On to tunnel #1 we went.
While flooding has made tunnel #2 inaccessible outside of winter, tunnel #1 is accessible year-round. It's approximately eighty feet long and goes straight through a small hill, however its western side was never completed and squirming is required to fully traverse it. In this picture I am entering the tunnel from the east, or the good side.
Between its narrowness and low ceiling, tunnel #1 is more suited for someone my wife's size rather than myself. Add in the abundance of loose rocks, and the feel is that you're crawling through a natural cave instead of something man-made. After a quick exploration we called it a day, and I drove the entire way home with heat blasting on my bare feet.
Three months and several cold spells later, we made a third trip to Saunders to explore the final tunnel. This time there was no issue with the ice being solid enough, I probably could have parked my car on it.
At approximately 50 feet in length, tunnel #2 measures a bit shorter than the first one, but what it lacks in length it makes up for in height. I estimated its ceilings to be nearly 20-feet tall. Two wooden beams are wedged between the walls, and our first thought was they were support beams. But these were nowhere near the thickness of support beams we've found in other mines, which makes us suspect they served some other purpose, such as to hold scaffolding for a platform.
Having first located this mine in the summer, then revisiting it when freeze-over was not up to supporting my 180-pound frame, it wasn’t until this third and final trip that I was finally able to complete my exploration of everything Saunders has to offer.
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