Death Valley struggles to make abandoned mines safe

They are hard to find and costly to fix. They also can be deadly.

A warning sign at the entrance to an old gold mining area Skidoo. Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times

By David Kelly
Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Death Valley National Park -- Here in ghostly Skidoo, the holes and tunnels are everywhere, nearly a thousand of them puncturing mountains and cratering the desert. Cold winds blow through darkened shafts. Bats flutter in and out at twilight.

Linda Manning, an expert on abandoned mines at Death Valley National Park, peered into a tunnel braced by beams near the old mining camp.

"It kind of gives me the creeps," she said as dank air rushed over her. "These timbers are probably over 100 years old. You never know when they've reached their tipping point."

No other park in the nation has as many abandoned mines as Death Valley. Officials put the number between 10,000 and 50,000, or about a third of all hazardous mines within the national park system.

Now Death Valley and other parks are under increasing pressure to reduce the risks of those mines, risks that include falling, drowning, explosion and asphyxiation. At least 33 people have died between 1999 and 2007 in abandoned-mine accidents on federal and private land, experts say. Many of the openings are all but invisible.

"We are gravely concerned that the Department of the Interior has put the public's health and safety at risk by not addressing hazards posed by abandoned mines on federal lands," said a report by the department's inspector general last July. "We identified serious environmental and safety hazards where members of the public have been killed, injured or exposed to dangerous environmental contaminants."

California parks have the highest number of abandoned mines, with Death Valley followed by Mojave National Preserve and Joshua Tree National Park.

In September, Death Valley closed the defunct Keane Wonder Mine after the report cited a family with a toddler playing near a collapsing opening. In 1984, a visitor fell 30 feet down a shaft in the mine and died.

The park, the largest in the nation, warns visitors about the dangers, but the message isn't always clear.

At the entrance to a mine shaft here large enough to stand in, signs bearing skull and crossbones warn of death from falling, suffocating and explosion, but a trail leads visitors to the opening. Mines, in fact, are often highlighted on park maps.

"I share the concern about mixed messages, of doing tours of mines and then telling people they cannot go into them," said Manning, a wildlife biologist who helps identify and mitigate mines in the park. "The signs say 'stay out,' but you can see the trails go right to it."

Some of the most dangerous mines have been fitted with bat gates that keep people out and let wildlife in. Others have metal netting stretched over openings.

The financially strapped National Park Service estimates the total cost of making mines safe at about $233 million, with an immediate need for $60 million. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has introduced legislation to establish a cleanup fund by requiring all hard-rock mining firms operating on public land to pay a 4% royalty on existing operations and 8% on new ones.

The inspector general recommended that parks request enough money to mitigate the worst sites and share resources to shore up their programs for abandoned mines.

Despite warnings, people continue to explore mines and occasionally post their exploits on YouTube. In one video, a middle-aged man heads into a Death Valley mine. At the point when he sees danger signs, a message on the video reads: "Danger. . . . That's my middle name! Let's check out this mine."

"It's not a matter of if we have another death, but when," said Mike Cipra, California Desert Program manager with the National Parks Conservation Assn. "This year, Death Valley got no money for mine reclamation. All national parks are competing for that money. There is an $8-billion maintenance backlog in the national parks."

The job is daunting, especially in Death Valley.

Miners once moved like termites over this harsh landscape, blasting and boring their way through sand and rock. Everything was taken -- uranium, silver, talc, borax.

When the Earth stopped yielding its treasures, the miners simply packed up and went away, leaving gaping holes behind.

Deciding how to balance this rich if treacherous history with public safety is complicated, said Linda Greene, who works for the park's cultural and natural resources department.

"Mining has been going on in Death Valley for more than 100 years," she said. "They are good educational spots, and we consider that when we decide whether to close them or not."

Greene and Manning were searching for old mines in the remnants of Skidoo, once home to 700 people and one of the most productive gold camps in California. The site is one of dozens scattered across an epic, near-biblical landscape.

It didn't take long to find mines. Some were mere holes in the ground, others yawning chasms in the desert crust. Trails led to a largely intact old mine, with signs warning visitors not to enter.

"The floors can easily collapse," said Greene, examining the relic. "Last spring a volunteer found a case of dynamite nearby, which is highly unstable."

The most menacing mines are just deep gouges in the Earth, often more than 50 feet deep and 30 feet across, propped open by timbers. Metal netting stretches over some, while others remain exposed. Climbers are known to rappel down the sides into the darkness below.

"I'd like to cover all of this with some cable netting, but I don't have the money," Manning said.

Greene saw the danger -- but also an opportunity for people to learn.

"To me, it's an interesting example of early mining technology," she said. "If you fill up the hole, you can't imagine how they worked. If we could make it safe for tourists and for education, that would be great."

Death Valley officials are working to minimize the worst hazards, but with money scarce, this is often done piecemeal.

"We would like to hire a crew and inventory all the mines and while doing that begin the closing process as well," Manning said. "Without people on staff to do this, we are relying on finding partners. Putting a bat gate up is a couple thousand dollars. If it could be done in-house, it would be half the price."

In the Mojave National Preserve, a lack of money has meant little movement in addressing some 600 sites.

The inspector general's report said mine shafts on some roads there are "large enough to swallow entire vehicles" but have no fences or warning signs. Sites have been identified and prioritized, but few have been made safe, the report said.

Joshua Tree National Park was praised by the inspector general for using volunteers to map mine sites and for finding cheap ways to install bat gates and other mine covers.

"We have about 300 openings, and about 120 are considered very hazardous," said Luke Sabala, who heads the park's abandoned-mine program.

"All of the mines close to roads and trails are our No. 1 priorities. We have taken care of almost all of those."

So far, Joshua Tree's mines have caused no deaths or injuries. But the job of securing them is a big one.

"These mines have been here a long time," Sabala said. "Mining is the legacy all of us land managers have been left to deal with."

Preserving a town time almost forgot

Old railroad town, bypassed by Route 66, gets a helping hand from devoted couple

Andrew Edwards, Staff Writer
San Bernardino Sun

GOFFS - "Hooch" Simpson has been dead for nearly a century, but this cantankerous desert character has not been forgotten.

In a photograph, Hooch's lifeless and shackled body hangs from a noose. A sign shown in the picture states that the dead man was hanged on Easter Sunday 1908 in Skidoo, a Death Valley mining town that no longer exists. The black-and-white image hangs on a wall inside a museum in Goffs, another desert town that itself could have been lost to history, but instead became a place where the past is remembered.

Goffs, once a railroad town west of Needles, is now the home of Dennis and Jo Ann Casebier and the Mojave Desert Heritage and Cultural Association. The Casebiers founded the association in 1993 and have restored the ghost town's red-roofed schoolhouse and transformed it into a museum that boasts a variety of Mojave Desert exhibits. Dennis Casebier said the association's collection includes 6,000 books, 50,000 photographs and the transcripts of 1,000 oral-history interviews.

"We've gotten ourselves embroiled in the history," he said.

Hooch, just one character in the Mojave Desert story, was executed after committing murder in Skidoo, Jo Ann Casebier said. Next to his picture is a display case containing a noose that, according to the museum, was the very instrument of Hooch's demise.

The National Park Service has more to the tale. According to its version, there is a desert legend saying that Hooch was hanged twice by townspeople. The first hanging killed him, but he was supposedly strung up a second time for photojournalists who weren't around the first time. You could call it an early version of the "perp walk."

Goffs has a story, too. The history of the town, as summarized by the association, is the tale of a railroad town that was founded in 1883 and owed the first decades of its growth to the Santa Fe Railroad.

National Old Trails Road also led to Goffs and became part of Route 66 in 1926. But five years later, Goffs began to fade. Route 66 was realigned about six miles south of the town and in 1937, the last classes were held in the schoolhouse that now houses the Mojave-themed museum.

During World War II, Army troops trained around Goffs, and inside the museum, a mannequin wears the green uniform of the 7th Infantry Division, a pack of Domino cigarettes tucked inside the band around his helmet.

"They trained here but they never went to the North African desert. They went to the Aleutian Islands and South Pacific," Jo Ann Casebier said.

Dennis Casebier, 71, grew up in Kansas and joined the Marines as a young man.
In a roundabout way, the military played a role in bringing him to the desert. He entered the service in 1953 before the end of the Korean War, but fighting a war on the other side of the Pacific wasn't in his future.

"The North Koreans knew I was coming so they signed the armistice," he said.

Instead of Korea, Dennis Casebier wound up stationed in Twentynine Palms, where he "got bit by the desert bug." After the Marines, he went back to college in Kansas, took a job in Norco and retired in 1990. He and his wife moved to Goffs that same year.

The Casebiers are visited in Goffs by volunteers who help maintain historical records. Jackie Ridge of San Diego is one of them. She said she comes to Goffs once a month to help catalog records. She began her work in the desert after the museum helped her find Brant, a place where her husband's great-grandfather worked as a railroad-station manager in the early 20th century.

Brant was east of Kelso, Ridge said. Kelso, inside what is now the Mojave National Preserve, was an old railroad stop whose depot still stands. Time has been harsher to Brant. Little remains except for what may have been a chicken coop and burro pen and a rock foundation for a house.

"The railroads have been regraded but it's amazing how close that house was to the railroad tracks," Ridge said. "It wasn't a quiet place to live."

Goffs is quiet, but Dennis Casebier is working to bring the noises of construction to the town. He wants to build a replica of Goffs' railroad depot to serve as a library. In 2005, he received a grant of about $500,000 for the project from the California Cultural and Historical Endowment. The groundbreaking for the depot project was in July, and Dennis Casebier said he's collected about $200,000 of the $250,000 he needs to fully fund construction.

One of Dennis Casebier's other priorities is interviewing as many Mojave Desert old-timers (or their descendants) as possible before their knowledge of desert living is lost.

"Oral history is a wonderful thing," he said. "We're trying to track down people who have first-time experience here."