Long Tunnel Extended Gold Mine

Walhalla used to have a gold mine.  A few of them, actually.  We go on a tour of the Long Tunnel Extended Gold mine, which was the biggest, and most profitable.  Incidentally, it's the only mine that offers tours.  Entrances to all the other mines are closed off with heavily padlocked doors.

Just walking down the tunnel itself (actually, up the tunnel) is an amazing experience - seeing the light at the end of the tunnel (behind us) get smaller and smaller.  Eventually the tunnel forks, and we gaze up the left fork, the smaller fork - it just begs to be investigated.  We continue up the right fork into a huge double chamber - the size of a small house.

Here, our guide, Sheriff, explains to us how water continually seeps into the mine, and had to be pumped out. They had serious boilers in this chamber to provide the energy to pump this water out, and they had chimneys going directly from this chamber up 130m to the surface to get rid of all the smoke. Well they had all sorts of problems with debris dropping down said chimney, due to the heat of the smoke. So they lined it with bricks. Can you imagine? Working inside a chimney, 130m tall, merely 4 feet wide, lining it with bricks?

Sheriff shows us a map of all the tunnels, and where the gold was found. My jaw drops, because I realise that we are in the very top, very first tunnel. We're at the tunnel's end, where a shaft drops down 923m! That's almost a kilometre! Straight down, towards the centre of the earth. And this was dug out in the late 1800's, with relatively primitive tools! But the even more amazing thing is that there are tens of tunnels extending horizontally left and right off this shaft! Think about it. Kilometres and kilometres of tunnels, deep down under the earth. No light at the end of those tunnels. And that's where the gold was dug out from. All 13.7 tonnes of it.

I move away from the group, and find the shaft in a corner of the chamber. It's been sealed off, and made into a bit of a display. Behind the glass, on the right I can see a miner on a ladder. Blue uniform, a miner's lamp. Next to him, there is a trolley full of ore. The trolley is sitting in a cage - this is the real shaft, the big 1km hole in the ground. The trolley has wheels. I gaze down at the ground - I am standing on a pair of rails. Like train tracks. I gaze back down the tunnel - the train tracks run all the way to the end of that tunnel.

My mind comes alive. I can see trolleys being hauled up, being released from the cage and pushed down the tunnel, towards the light. They rattle as they roll. Men toil hard, feeding wood into the boilers, and getting trolleys out of the cage, their faces beading with sweat. I entertain visions from one of the Indiana Jones movies. A sneaky smile creeps onto my face.

Sabina, curious, comes over. She sees the miner behind the glass. "Mama, is he alive?", her eyes widen with childlish disbelief. I am so, so tempted to say "yes", but I resist. She is so innocent in her concern for the poor miner behind the glass.

"So, 20m below us is the water table", Sheriff's voice bellows over our thoughts. "And 300m below us are the stables." Sabina pricks up her ears. "Just before they closed the mine, they sent all the school kids in here, disassembled as much as they could and brought it up to the surface. Then they shot the ponies, got everyone out, and turned everything off. The entire mine flooded, and now we can only get 20m down the shaft." If you thought Sabina's eyes were big when she saw the miner, you should see them now. "But why did they shoot the pony?", she asks.

"We spoke to one of the women who, as a schoolgirl was sent into the mine to help disassemble equipment", Sheriff continues. "She said that there were trolleys loaded with ore. There is no evidence that those trolleys ever made it up to the surface. So we know there is gold down there." Everyone gets a little twinkle in their eye. Gold talks in mysterious ways. Sabina, tugs at my sleeve. "But Mama, why did they shoot they pony?".

Finally we turn back down the passage. There is light at the end of the tunnel. Sabina leads us out of the mine. The tour is over, but the question "why did they shoot the pony?" haunts us for the remainder of the day.