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Photograph Courtesy of Bonne Terre Mine
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Photograph courtesy of Bonne Terre Mine
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Photograph courtesy of Bonne Terre Mine
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Photograph courtesy of Bonne Terre Mine
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Photograph courtesy of Bonne Terre Mine
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Photograph by Byron Kerman
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Photograph by Byron Kerman
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Photograph by Byron Kerman
Slowly dripping water leaves behind mineral deposits that look like melted marshmallows.
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Photograph by Byron Kerman
Slowly dripping water leaves behind mineral deposits that look like melted marshmallows.
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Photograph by Byron Kerman
Cobalt deposits are pink in darkness, but would turn "cobalt blue" in sunlight.
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Photograph by Byron Kerman
An underground garden, with whimsical decorations, lives under artificial light, with watering by volunteers.
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Photograph by Byron Kerman
About an hour south of here, St. Louisans can experience something so odd, so otherworldly, so dreamlike, that it's hard to fathom how readily accessible it is, how easy it is to slip from sunlight and normality down into subterranean darkness and wonder.
The Bonne Terre Mine tour is a guided walking and boat tour through what once was one of the world's largest lead mines.
These are not like the nearby Meramec Caverns, where the ancient ceilings and walls bristle busily with stalactites and stalagmites. There are a few baby-sized formations just beginning to peep forth from the rock at Bonne Terre, but the overwhelming decoration is none—just carved halls of stone, and a peaceful, sepulchral hollowness between them.
Well, that and the pillars. This five-level mine didn't cave in thanks to the room-and-pillar mining technique. Great pillars of unmolsted stone, some hundreds of feet high, dot the mine. Each one is a monolith of ungodly mass and size. But really, you can only apprehend part of their size, because most of them are at least partly submerged.
Those who know the Bonne Terre Mine probably know its fame as the site for some of the most bizarre scuba-diving one can enjoy on the planet. After the area was “mined-out” in the '60s, the pumps that kept groundwater from rising up were turned off. The water began to rise, and Doug and Catherine Goergens bought the old mine and, improbably, turned it into the largest freshwater scuba-diving attraction in the world.
Divers who descend into the dark water see abandoned mining equipment like carts and tracks, shovels and axes, and jackhammers. A former elevator shaft rises from the murk, its metal slats criss-crossing like an oil derrick. What used to be underground offices, break rooms, lockers, etc. remain as in a ghost town. A peculiar effect causes particles of oxidized metal called “smoke” to hang in the still water like wispy ghosts, in fact. It's trippy.
The groundwater is clear as a bell, and when Jacques Cousteau dove Bonne Terre in '83, he went gaga, filiming for three days rather than the one he'd budgeted, said Goergens.
You can read a cool article on what it's like to dive the eerie caverns of Bonne Terre here.
Those who chose to stay above the water still come away with an otherworldly, magical feeling that lingers in memory after coming back above ground. In particular, the pontoon-boat ride that winds around the pillars and through the great halls of stone in the dimness is sensational.
It's hard to express in words, but if Kubla Khan built his pleasure dome in St. Francois County, it might look something like this. The endless series of caves and pillars, and the vast underground lake can start to seem like monumental metaphors for the “measureless” caves and pools of the subconscious. On my boat ride through the mines, a small child was overheard asking a parent, “is this real?”
Perhaps. It was just as unreal, though. It looks and feels like nothing else so much as a dimly-wandered dream.
Here's a fascinating video about the mines from the History Channel's Life After People, or check out the slideshow below. During the summer, boat and walking tours are offered every day between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Boat/walking tours are $27 all ages; walking tours are $20 adults, $12 kids. For more info, go here.
