Mountain Rampage (5 page)

The mining expert led Chuck deep into the tunnel, walking on the floorboards between the ore cart tracks three-quarters
of the way to the bare back wall of the mine before turning and declaring it safe.

The engineer tapped the thick floorboard planks with the sole of his boot. “I like that they installed rails to cart out the tailings. And the quality of the floor, too. Shows they thought they were in it for the long haul.” He directed the beam of his headlamp at the wall of the tunnel. “It's too bad, all this effort—pick-work, flooring, rails—and they just quit.” He turned to Chuck. “I've seen it before, though. Probably ran out of money. Happened all the time.”

“At least they didn't go too deep before they moved on,” Chuck said.

The engineer faced the tiny rectangle of daylight that marked the doorway at the mouth of the mine one hundred fifty feet away. “They must've dug thousands of these things back then. Hell, tens of thousands.” He grunted. “Just another empty hole.”

F
IVE

Chuck trailed Clarence and Team Nugget down the mine tunnel. The six students fell silent, subdued by the darkness and the tunnel's chill. They positioned the solar-powered LED floodlights to illuminate the day's work area and set about dismantling the final, fifteen-foot stretch of ore cart tracks and underlying floorboards. Each time they removed one of the planks, the young men crouched shoulder-to-shoulder around the newly uncovered rectangle of debris, looking for anything of interest.

At the start of their work in the tunnel three weeks ago, the students of both teams had groused about the extent to which Chuck required them to sift through the layer of gravel that comprised the base of the tunnel.

“We're searching for a needle in a haystack,” Jeremy complained.

“Which is exactly what you signed up for,” Chuck responded. “Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. August, 1951. Hundred and ten in the shade. Louis and Mary Leakey scraping away at the side of a hill blazing day after blazing day. And what is it they found?”

“Frosty the Snowman,” joked lumpy, disheveled Carson.

“Broken bits of stone tools,” Chuck corrected. “Tiny pieces of bone. Tooth fragments. It was years before they came across the skull that made them famous.”

“Oh, my God!” Carson exclaimed with an exaggerated shiver of fear. “A skeleton!”

“Everybody loves the mystique of archaeology's biggest discoveries,” Chuck continued as Carson traded a fist bump with Jeremy. “Olduvai in Tanzania. The Valley of the Kings, Egypt. Machu Picchu, Peru. But the truths archaeologists work to uncover aren't tied up all neat and tidy in ribbons and bows. They're covered by jungle growth, buried in dirt and rubble, or—” he pointed at the base of the tunnel “—hidden beneath
floorboards in an abandoned mine. Gravity is an archaeologist's best friend. Stuff falls down, other stuff covers it up, and it all lies there, waiting to be dug up and studied.”

Jeremy gave a dismissive sniff. “Nothing's ever fallen in here.”

“The laws of gravity aren't suspended underground,” Chuck said. “Which is why each time we remove another board from the floor is so important.” He added a note of wonder to his voice. “Who knows what might lie below?”

By now, Chuck knew the same thing the students knew: they wouldn't find much, if anything, amid the broken rock and rubble, just as they and Team Paydirt had found little of note upon disassembling the rest of the tunnel's floor over the last three weeks.

That, in fact, was the point, as Professor Sartore had explained to Chuck when he'd suggested the students excavate the tunnel. While the excavation of the cabin site was sure to provide a trove of finds, the tunnel would provide the opportunity for the students to realistically judge whether they wanted to go into the field of archaeology after experiencing the tedious, day-in-and-day-out work and dearth of discoveries that, in truth, comprised the bulk of archaeological inquiry.

Aside from a few rusted, Civil War-era peg nails dropped beneath the boards during the tunnel's construction, the students had uncovered only three items of interest: a broken pickaxe tip, a soggy box of matches, and a brass lipstick container. Of the three items, only the pickaxe tip dated from the tunnel's initial construction in the 1860s. The matches and lipstick container were from the 1950s, about the time park officials affixed the iron door to the mouth of the mine, putting an end to the increased exploration of the tunnel that had come with the completion and opening of Trail Ridge Road.

Fortunately, the teams' finds beneath the collapsed cabin numbered in the dozens—intact bottles, rusted tin cans, broken
china and crockery and glass, and a few leather boot soles, dried and curled with age—precisely the type of items the National Park Service sought, by encouraging archaeological digs in its parks, for eventual display in park visitor centers and museums.

Chuck shuttled back and forth between Team Nugget and Team Paydirt throughout the morning, assuring himself Rosie was on the mend and banishing any thoughts of how Janelle would receive him when he returned to the cabin at the end of the day. Not long before lunch, he stood with Clarence between the tripod-mounted floodlights illuminating the final stretch of the mine tunnel. They looked on as the team pried loose their sixth floorboard of the morning, this one little more than a body's length from the end of the tunnel.

For the past few days, in a welcome attempt at overcoming the monotony of dismantling the floor of the tunnel unrevelatory plank by unrevelatory plank, Team Nugget member Samuel had taken to injecting some showmanship into the lifting of each loosened floorboard.

As his teammates prepared to remove the next plank, Samuel, green-eyed and sporting a prodigious, leprechaun-like red beard, stood beyond the other team members on the last of the intact flooring, his back to the chipped stone wall at the end of the tunnel. He spoke into his fist, assuming the role of a play-by-play announcer, his voice artificially deep.

“All is hushed,” he intoned into his imaginary microphone.

Samuel's teammates crouched, unmoving, over the loosened plank.

“The members of Team Nugget, acting as one, work their fingers under the floorboard,” Samuel continued.

Chuck couldn't help but smile as the five team members did as Samuel described, eliciting a quiet squeak from the loosened board as it moved in its place.

Samuel pounded the intact floor at the end of the tunnel
with his boots. “What might be hidden beneath one of the last boards to be lifted from the floor of the famed Cordero Mine?” he asked. His breath, lit by the floodlights, clouded in the moist air of the tunnel. “Could it be an ancient scroll? A map to hidden treasure? A key to a long-forgotten tomb?”

He paused. The team remained still, allowing the tension to build. Chuck bit his lower lip, caught up in Samuel's patter. It didn't matter that five times already this morning the team members had found nothing beneath the planks they'd lifted; Samuel's invented suspense was exhilarating nonetheless.

Samuel dropped his voice to a whisper. “And now, the Nuggeteers remove the ancient hunk of wood and peer beneath it.”

The students lifted the heavy, moisture-laden plank, holding the board level so the shadow cast by the floodlights and their headlamps hid the narrow rectangle of gravel beneath it until the last possible second.

Samuel's voice grew louder as the students edged the plank away. “We begin to see what's underneath the floorboard,” he exclaimed. He drummed his boots, and, while still speaking into his fist, he waved his free hand like a gospel preacher. “Yes, yes, it's…it's…we can almost see it now. It's a…I can't believe my eyes. Something shimmering. Hold up. What's that?”

The students set the plank aside.

“Diamonds,” Samuel crowed jubilantly. “Rubies. Sapphires.” He jumped into the air and landed with a resounding
thump
on the floorboards at the end of the tunnel. “A treasure like none other.”

Samuel leapt again in feigned ecstasy. He landed on the floorboards with another loud
thump
while the five kneeling members of Team Nugget aimed their headlamps at the bare patch of ground formerly hidden beneath the plank.

Chuck leaned forward until he caught sight over the students' shoulders of what the team members were seeing—no
rubies, no sapphires, just the rocky rubble spread by miners a century and a half ago beneath the paired timbers that ran the length of the tunnel, serving as a foundation for the floorboards.

On the far side of the kneeling students, Samuel turned his face to the tunnel ceiling and cried out, “The Seven Cities of Gold, the Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the Holy Grail—all pale in comparison to what has been discovered here today!”

He jumped into the air, pressing his hands to the roof of the mine. “Incredible!” he shouted as he landed, his weight depressing the floorboards with a dull crunch before they gave way with a splintering crash and Samuel plunged, screaming, from view.

S
IX

Chuck stumbled backward, slapping an arm across Clarence's chest.

The three students grouped on the near side of the newly removed floorboard tumbled backward along with Chuck and Clarence. Carson and Jeremy, on the far side of the plank, threw themselves forward, scrabbling for anything to hold onto as the floor fell away behind them. Before they, like Samuel, disappeared, each managed to grab the snapped end of one of the two rotted timbers that had served as the floorboards' foundation.

The three remaining students crawled on their hands and knees past Chuck and Clarence. Chuck scrambled forward, reaching a hand to Carson, hanging chest-deep in the black hole that had opened beneath the collapsed floor. Chuck pulled Carson out of the hole and into Clarence's waiting arms.

Jeremy fought for purchase, his fingers slipping on the wet, broken timber at the edge of the hole, which extended the width of the tunnel and all the way to the tunnel's back wall.

Chuck jammed a boot against the timber, anchoring himself at the edge of the six-foot-by-six-foot opening. Jeremy latched onto Chuck's ankle with both hands. Only Jeremy's head and neck showed above the edge of the hole. The rest of his body dangled into darkness. He gulped in terror, his Adam's apple jerking up and down.

With the addition of Jeremy's weight, Chuck's foot slid along the moist timber, inches from the gaping hole. He threw himself away from the opening, his arms outstretched, reaching for something, anything, before his foot broke free and Jeremy dragged him into the pit.

A pair of hands grasped him from behind. “Got you,” Clarence said in his ear, toppling with Chuck to the ground between
the timbers, his arm wrapped tight around Chuck's chest. Clarence extended his free hand past Chuck to Jeremy, who grabbed it and scrambled up and out of the hole.

As soon as Jeremy crawled past him, Chuck shook himself free of Clarence, rolled to his stomach, and extended his head over the edge of the pit, shining his headlamp into the darkness. To his immense relief, Samuel was not impaled on shattered floorboards at the bottom of the opened hole. The bearded young man clung to the side of the hole, eight feet below the floor of the mine tunnel, his feet kicking in space, his hands grasping the remnant of a handmade wooden ladder affixed to the wall of what appeared to be a downward extension of the mine.

A pair of rusted, iron stanchions secured the splintered, three-rung length of the ladder to the rock face of the vertical shaft. One of the stanchions broke free and the length of ladder dropped several inches on one side, nearly sending Samuel plummeting to the bottom of the pit.

“I can't hold on much longer,” Samuel said, his voice strained, staring up at Chuck with fear-filled eyes. He toed the damp rock wall before him, searching for a foothold but finding none.

Chuck scanned the squared-off walls of the vertical shaft. He needed rope, webbing, carabiners, but he had no climbing gear at hand nor the time necessary to effect such an involved rescue.

He spoke over his shoulder in a staccato burst. “Grab my ankles. Now.
Everybody
.”

He shoved himself forward, counting on Clarence and the members of Team Nugget to respond to his terse command. His body canted downward as his torso extended past the edge of the hole. Hands wrapped themselves around his lower legs from behind.

“All the way,” he said, worming his body past the lip of the opening. “Far as you can lower me.”

Harsh exhalations of exertion sounded from behind Chuck as Clarence and the students lowered him headfirst into the vertical shaft. His hardhat slipped from his head and tumbled past Samuel, the beam of its headlamp wheeling off the walls as it fell. It struck one side of the shaft and ricocheted to the other before coming to rest, its lamp still shining, amid the wreckage of the collapsed floorboards and ladder some sixty feet below.

Chuck hung upside down, his face to the rock wall. The tops of his feet rested like angle irons on the lip of the vertical shaft, locking him in place.

He reached downward, past his head, but his outstretched fingers found only blank rock wall and moist air.

“Chuck,” Samuel gasped, his voice flagging.