The some 3,000 mines in San Bernardino County attract adventurers. YouTube videos and Facebook pages are devoted to rappelling in and exploring their shafts. Website authors wax nostalgic about the hunt for gold and silver deposits in the 1800s.
But these same mines, mostly now abandoned, pose a high risk for thrill seekers. Two such men were pulled uninjured from an abandoned, 250-foot vertical mineshaft near Twentynine Palms on Saturday, April 19, by San Bernardino County Fire Department crews that are trained to rescue victims of earthquakes, cave-ins and other disasters.
The men had rappelled to the bottom but couldn’t ascend when their equipment failed, said Eric Sherwin, a Fire Department spokesman.
Sherwin has himself trained in a mine shaft that extended a mile and a half vertically and horizontally, and on Thursday, he romanticized the experience.
“To think of the history that existed in this county, and the rough cut shoring that keeps them in place and how these structures were created over a hundred years ago with tools that are much less developed than they are today, it was commercial mining with hand tools and dynamite,” Sherwin said.
