It started with “Secret Places in Death Valley: The Boxcar Cabin” (sparked by the conversation we had about the Death Valley Germans in last week’s link roundup) and things just went nuts from there.
“That’s definitely a raft.” ALL I CARE ABOUT ARE MINES AND CAVES, GOODBYE FOREVER.
“You never know what you’ll find down in these tunnels” *UNCOMFORTABLE PAUSE*
“You wanna see a dead body?”
Yeah, didn’t they see Justified? All the abandoned coal mines in Kentucky are stuffed with dead bodies.
Do Timberlakes spawn in caves, tunnels, and abandoned mines?
SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: “–And here, in these dark, secluded chambers throughout the American Southeast, the Resplendent Timberlake returns year after year, to spawn. The male inflates his elaborate plumage and performs his characteristic mating dance: rocking his body until the break of day, passing to the left, then sailing to the right. If successful, he will have the female naked by the end of his song. A Timberlake in mating frenzy is often driven to exhaustion by this performance, yet the instinct is so powerful that he can’t stop the feeling.
“Sadly, due to extensive pesticide use throughout the Timberlake’s range, recently large numbers of males have suffered from abnormal development, and attempt to attract females with a rendition of Loverboy’s ‘Working For the Weekend,’ with the result that the species is now considered critically endangered.”
oh Mallory what have you done
I’d hope to find the one miner who was on a bathroom break so never heard the mine was shutting down, so he’s still in there, diligently working decades later.
Abandoned mines are the best. My parents used to take me and my sister out mine hunting in the desert when we were little. Like just drive around until you see something that looks like a mine pull over and start exploring. Looking back on it not sure how safe that was with a 4 year old and a 9 year old, but it sure was fun. We would throw rocks down the shafts and count how long we could hear them hitting stuff.
I’m about to move very close to a massive old salt mine that has been turned into a sort of underground playground and I really gotta start brushing up on my cave and mine knowledge
Oooooooooo yay
This really isn’t terribly on-topic, but something about the obscure-stuff-in-California-ness of this got me thinking about Huell Howser and how amazing he was, and now I miss him / California Gold a lot.
what is this, anon? I could just google it I guess but y’know
I lived down the street from the Winchester Cathedral from all of my single-digit childhood and my parents were too grinchy ever to take me. I’m comparatively grinchy about goasts, but supes interested in weird spaces.
For obvious reasons, the final video in these series is never posted to the Youtube channels.
They tend to feature the sound of many tons of loose soil collapsing, followed by seconds or minutes of tortured breathing and then an hour or so of silent, perfect darkness.
O_o
In northeastern Minnesota there are pit mines (iron ore) that were abandoned when they hit the water table. Which then filled up into ‘pit lakes’ which, at least when I was a kid a few decades ago, were super fun to snorkel in because the water was unusually clear for a MN lake and trees grew in the time between ‘mine’ and ‘lake’.
Swimming at the surface and looking down on the underwater forest is about as close to flying as a person can get without one of those squirrel suit contraptions.
I am so envious– I wanted to go swimming in one of them when I lived there, and was Not Allowed (and was a bizarrely obedient little kid).
That first picture looks quite, er, inviting.
I think I begin to see the attraction.