It was my birthday last week! I meant to update awhile ago, but things happened. For one, I was hospitalized for a few days. I’m okay now. I have Crohn’s Disease and my current medications aren’t doing the trick. So yeah, I’ve been dealing with that all summer but was pretending it wasn’t as bad as it was. Obviously, that didn’t work for me. But I’m back on track (I hope) and I was able to be discharged a few days before my birthday!
I went to St. Francois County, Missouri to spend a few days at a cute little cabin. I was still recovering from my hospital stay, so I wasn’t able to do much like hiking, but I did read a lot, and I did get to take a tour in Bonne Terre! There’s an old lead mine there that started in 1862 and was operational for 99 years. It flooded after it was mined out and now it’s a popular SCUBA spot. I am not SCUBA certified, though I hope to be some day along with my brother Jim. Maybe this will be one of our destinations some day.
This was the interior of my cute little cabin. It’s a company called Getaway, and I really enjoyed my stay there. They even had a little Happy Birthday banner for me. I wish I would have taken more pictures and done a proper review but, again, I was still recovering. But I did have birthday smores and did a lot of reading.
I arrived on Monday (my birthday) for the tour and I was worried I’d be the only one there. One on one tours can be really awkward (speaking as a tour guide!) if one or the other person isn’t engaged. Thankfully some other people did show up and it made for a cozy little tour. Again, I didn’t get as many photos aboveground as I wish I did. In fact I got none! They had a lot of original buildings, and in fact the entrance we used to go down into the mine was the original mule entrance. A lot of my pictures weren’t very good, considering it was dark in the mine… But oh well! I hope you like them anyway.
So this lead mine was cave-like, but only -like because it was all man made! However, there are places where cave formations were starting due to the groundwater! So in a few centuries, there will probably be some impressive stalactites and stalagmites.
When they abandoned the mine they left a lot of things behind, including this minecart!
That’s some good railway, might take it up to the surface for my minecraft house. . . okay this joke is gonna get old if I don’t nip it in the bud now!
A flooded elevator shaft! Tell me that doesn’t look a bit like a minecraft hole, haha! In all seriousness, there’s more left behind equipment too! I think it flooded because when it was mined out, they stopped pumping out rainwater. That makes sense, why would they continue doing that sort of maintenance if they didn’t need the mine anymore? Anyway, it makes for some cool photos.
These are calcium deposits. They’re starting some early cavern formations, it looks like! Also an abandoned shovel.
So unfortunately I can’t remember if the black stuff is magnesium or manganese. It was last week lol. But it looks really cool.
The colored lights were kinda cool, but I wish I knew what the water looked like without them.
That’s a faultline on the ceiling. It’s a little hard to tell, but those lines in the photo were actually water droplets falling. I don’t know what type of fault that is, I’d have to do some research.
The miners intentionally left these large pillars to support the ceiling. Some of them were made too thin, which is why they wrapped wire around them for more support.
That pink color on the rocks is not due to colored light bulbs. It’s naturally pink. That is actually cobalt! And yes, cobalt is supposed to be blue. That’s oxidized cobalt. So like oxidized iron turns red (rust), I guess oxidized cobalt turns pink!
I wanted to take that little boat out for a spin.
We were on a pontoon boat instead! And yes we wore life jackets! The last place I’d want to fall in would be an underground lake, and I’m a strong swimmer! The water is under 60 degrees F anyway.
Ready to rock.
The lines near the bottom of the photo is from falling water.
They had a whole garden underground! It was pretty cool! It’s also really damp down there so watering needs are minimal for some of these plants.
There was a full fence around this bad boy. I would not want to tumble down there!
So all in all, it was a fun little tour! The gift shop wasn’t much, but I did get a postcard to send to my nephew. I’d definitely bring one of my nieces or nephews if I came back this way. It was fun seeing everything. I also went to a goat farm the next day but I didn’t get photos.
I’ll end this with a photo of a Luna Moth I saw on the evening of my birthday when I was building a campfire for smores. I’ve never seen one in the wild before, so it was really cool!
The Solo Geographer 