Abandoned Mines Collide With The Cold War

Given the enthusiasm with which various governmental agencies destroy abandoned mines today, it may seem odd that abandoned mines were once greatly in favor with the U.S. government. However, the Cold War made strange bedfellows of many… At the height of the Cold War, there was a high level of fear of nuclear war (Given the recent ravages of World War II, I believe a certain level of paranoia was understandable). As such, civil defense agencies were building fallout shelters all over the country in the 1950s and 1960s and were stockpiling them with food, water, medical supplies and more.

Dry abandoned mines were determined to be an ideal location for these as the infrastructure for underground operations was already in place, they already had large areas underground (stopes, drifts, etc.) where people could take refuge and supplies could be stockpiles and they were cheap to set up and control since the mines were abandoned. Furthermore, with all of the digging already done in the past, these sites were easier to hide as Soviet spy satellites wouldn’t pick up on fresh waste rock piles and other telltale evidence of large underground facilities being built. Really, it was quite clever to use the underground abandoned mines…

I did a little research online about the water containers we found and uncovered this about the size:

“The odd 17.5 gallon volume resulted from the plan of providing 1 quart of water per day per person for two weeks (14 days) for 5 people per drum. This is how the 5 person supply of water per drum was arrived at. The standard shelter water container was a steel drum (or very early issue fiberboard) that had 2 plastic liners inside and stood about 22 inches tall and was about 16 inches in diameter.”

The source on the above is civildefensemuseum.com.

You can look around on the internet for a lot more information on the Civil Defense programs and the way abandoned mines were incorporated into these programs.

Regular viewers will likely recall that this is not the first interesting piece of Cold War history that we have found hidden away underground!

What you see in this video is actually on private property. We were invited to visit, but you can visit this exact site as well (or a number of others). You see, the owner of the cluster of abandoned mines where this is located in Tombstone, Arizona has set up a small business offering tours of parts of the mines there. The website is goodenoughsilvermine.com or on Facebook at “Tombstone’s Goodenough Mine Tour.” They offer different tours that range from areas that you could take your grandmother around to areas that are fairly advanced (and that’s me saying that).

We spent a few days there exploring (and went to a number of parts of the mines that are not part of the official tour). So, I’ll have a lot more about the mines beneath Tombstone later this year, but I wanted to give you a little taste for now.

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All of these videos are uploaded in HD, so I’d encourage you to adjust your settings to the highest quality if it is not done automatically.

You can see the gear that I use for mine exploring here: https://bit.ly/2wqcBDD

As well as a small gear update here: https://bit.ly/2p6Jip6

You can see the full TVR Exploring playlist of abandoned mines here: https://goo.gl/TEKq9L

Thanks for watching!

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Growing up in California’s “Gold Rush Country” made it easy to take all of the history around us for granted. However, abandoned mine sites have a lot working against them – nature, vandals, scrappers and various government agencies… The old prospectors and miners that used to roam our lonely mountains and toil away deep underground are disappearing quickly as well.

These losses finally caught our attention and we felt compelled to make an effort to document as many of the ghost towns and abandoned mines that we could before that colorful niche of our history is gone forever. But, you know what? We enjoy doing it! This is exploring history firsthand – bushwhacking down steep canyons and over rough mountains, figuring out the techniques the miners used and the equipment they worked with, seeing the innovations they came up with, discovering lost mines that no one has been in for a century, wandering through ghost towns where the only sound is the wind... These journeys allow a feeling of connection to a time when the world was a very different place. And I’d love to think that in some small way we are paying tribute to those hardy miners that worked these mines before we were even born.

So, yes, in short, we are adit addicts… I hope you’ll join us on these adventures!

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Видео Abandoned Mines Collide With The Cold War канала TVR Exploring