The Glory Hole - A brief Glimpse of What Lies Beneath Cobalt

What on earth is a glory hole?

IMG_1813, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

At the edge of Cobalt there is a deep open pit that is said to drop down 250 feet. The bottom is filled with cold, black water. A cable cuts across the top right of the picture. At one time there was a spider web of these strands that supported a tin roof to protect the miners below.

The tunnels cut inwards along the silver seams. At night the “High grader” was said to make his own private excavations using stolen dynamite. Doug Shearer, a knowledgeable local historian said, why bother digging to steal the stuff?It was lined up in wagons beside the station, solid slabs of pure, raw silver. “What a waste of time! There was nobody to stop them from hijacking a wagon load”.

In Cobalt all the locals have an “abandoned mine story”. Down along the shores of Long Lake I met a guy who was walking his dog early in the morning. He reminisced about a candle-lit journey that he had made as a teenager from a tunnel far out in the forest. They walked along in the dark, their light flickering with an unpredictable breeze that blew from within. Eventually they were reduced to crawling, the hot wax raising blisters on their skin. Through a tight squeeze they emerged into sunlight window way up the inside of the “Glory Hole” I am not sure how much the water has risen since his youth but it would seem to me that one of these exposed entrances might be the one.