Spirit of the Ridenour Mine

by Earl R. Verbeek

Nearly everyone who has spent significant time in mines has at least one story of some unexplainable experience while underground. This is one of them.

During the 1980s, when I was with the U.S. Geological Survey, I made several visits to the Ridenour copper-uranium-vanadium mine in the Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon. The Ridenour is a small mine, barely 80 ft deep, with its lowest level reached through an inclined shaft. I should mention at this point that the orebody is in a solution-collapse breccia pipe, a cylindrical mass of broken rock surrounded by fractured sandstone. Having spent several days detailing the structure of the fractured wallrock, I decided one day to descend the shaft and enter the brecciated core of the pipe.

This was not difficult – a steep climb down the shaft, a few steps along a drift, a short belly-crawl over a collapsed area, then a left turn to reach another drift that was driven into the very core of the pipe. Once in the core I sat down to inspect the breccia, took out my notebook, prepared to write the first of my observations – and my cap lamp went out. Well, it happens – no bulb lasts forever. For that reason most electric cap lamps have either two bulbs in the housing, or two filaments in one bulb, so I simply switched to the next filament and continued my work. Upon reaching the surface, however, I found that the first filament had not burned out as I assumed. No, it was working again.

The next day I descended the shaft once more, entered the breccia core, took out my notebook – and my cap lamp went out. Again I switched to the second filament, and while recording my observations I began to think how very strange it was to have a cap lamp act that way. I spent a few minutes trying to figure this out. Humidity causing a temporary short? No, it was dry as dust down there. Nothing fit; I had no explanation to offer. And later, after exiting the core, both of the bulb filaments were operational again.

Yes, it happened a third time, too. By now I was convinced that some mischievous mine spirit was playing with me, and I felt rather honored to be the target of its pranks. During my 10 days or so at the Ridenour mine I spent time in every part of the underground workings, some before my work in the core and some after, but it was only in the core that my cap lamp always went out. I’ve never been able to explain this, but if I did come up with a rational scientific explanation (I am, after all, a scientist) it would take all the fun out of it. No, I prefer to think that a spirit inhabits that mine, a spirit with a sense of humor, and I am grateful that it knew I have one too.