Into the old mine.

The birds (except eagles maybe), the bees and flowers are of no interest to me. Old, abandoned mines are. Usually they have been abandoned for decades. Not all are accessible anymore, some are filled with water, some have caved in. But some you can still enter. At your own risk of course. You have to watch out for lose rock and shafts, some filled with water. If you fall into a shaft it is most certainly game over. Especially if it is filled with water. Sometimes I bring with me an aluminum ladder for crossing, sometimes I just turn and go back.
You have to bring with you flash lights. Not just one but two or three if one fails. You don’t want to be stuck in the darkness in an old, unfamiliar mine pit!

Some mines start as an open pit operation. As time goes by and the miners follow the ore vein down into the deep, it turns into an underground operation.

At the old copper mine i Falun, Sweden, the entire mine caved in due to poor planning and greed. This happened way back in the 18th century. Since then the mine is turned into an open pit, but underground mining also kept on until 1992, below the open pit.

As you mine your way down into the bedrock, precautions have to be taken so that the rock above you don’t cave in. Wooden props were common earlier, today we use steel and concrete.

In the Creutz shaft at the Falun copper mine we find the tallest timber (wooden) construction in the entire world: 208 metres high. It was built in the 19th century, the wooden wall is dividing the shaft. On one side is the intricate pump system, draining the mine of water. The other side, which we see here, was for hoisting ore out of the mine and lowering miners and commodities like tools, fire wood etc, down into the mine.