A conveyor carries salt from the working portion of the mine to a bucket where 4,000 pound-loads are lifted to the surface. Lee Spence, president of the storage company, examines a chunk of salt.
By Lisa Gutierrez
We descended into the belly of the Earth.
“It’s going to take us just a couple of minutes to go underground. Does anybody have a problem going down in the dark?” our cheerful guide asked.
“Yes!” I screamed in my head. But I said nothing because none of my fellow tourists did — six senior citizens, including a woman pushing a walker.
“No? OK,” the guide said. “We do that because it gives you the first experience of going into the mine. Miners go down ... in the dark, so we try to do the same as well, kind of get you prepared for being in the mine.
“It will be completely dark,” she continued, “what we call pure mine darkness, and you won’t be able to see a thing. Your ears might feel some pressure, kind of like when you’re flying, so if you swallow, that will pop your ears.”
As we descended, cool mine air blasted up my leg through an air hole in the floor, reminding me the whole way down of the depths I had to go for this story.
Down, down, metal clanking; down, down, gears groaning, the elevator squeezed its way through the shaft.
Did I mention we were all wearing hard hats? And emergency breathing apparatus around our necks?
Did I mention I’m a wee bit claustrophobic?
I silently cursed the editor who sent me here.
“The bumpings and scrapings and all that, that is normal,” the guide said, voice raised above the clatter. “There are sensors on the sides of the hoist and, um, just a little bit of salt dust. I like to say that you’d probably hear the same sounds in an elevator, but you’re in an insulated compartment in an elevator.”
She kept up a cheerful patter during the 90-second ride. This tidbit caught my ear: There are only three ways in and out of the mine. We were standing in one of them.
A loud beep-beep-beep saved me from mental hyperventilation. “That sound means we’re 50ft from the bottom already,” the guide said.
And just like that, we were there. Our guide pulled the heavy metal doors of the hoist open, and we stepped out into a lighted lobby.
“Good morning! My name is Patty,” said the perky, white-haired woman waiting for us. “Welcome to the Kansas Underground Salt Museum. You are now 650ft below the surface of the Earth.”
Six hundred and fifty feet.
More than 400,000 visitors have made this trip since May 2007, when the museum opened in mined-out caverns of the 920-acre Hutchinson Salt Co.
Perky Patty informed us that the ground we stood on was covered 275mn years ago by the Permian Sea. The sea left behind a giant swathe of salt — 30tn tonnes — stretching from an area northeast of Kansas City through Kansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico.
“We have been asked if we are going to run out of salt here. They predict that 2,500 years from now, this salt strata will be exhausted,” Patty said.
“Just to be safe,” she said with a laugh, “I’m stocking up at home.”
Salt has been mined continuously in this spot since 1923, when the Carey Salt Co (today it is Hutchinson Salt) set up operations in one of the biggest deposits of rock salt in the world. Salt is still mined here on the same level as the museum for use in animal feed, tanning hides and de-icing roads.
The museum floors are made with salt, too, Patty said, which is why drinks are not allowed in the mine. Don’t want to melt those floors.
The lobby opened onto a cavernous space lit from overhead — a so-called “great room.”
“This is how they mined back in the ’20s and ’30s, in large, dead-end rooms that were 300ft long and 50ft wide,” she said.
A 6,000-pound hunk of whitish-grey crystallised salt sat in the middle of the space.
The story is told that a former mine manager figured that one day someone would need that giant rock for posterity, so he had his men save it. Otherwise, it could have wound up on the streets of Chicago, the No. 1 customer for the road salt mined here.
The museum tells the story of salt mining in Hutchinson. Videos and exhibits show how the salt is extracted, crushed and moved to the hoist that carries it to the surface. The process was backbreaking, pick-and-shovel type of labour until the mine lost workers to World War II and began to mechanise the process.
Before the conveyor belts used today, the salt was hauled through the mine on train cars. Almost 5,000ft of that track was dug up, cut up, bent and built into a railroad that carries visitors into dark corners of the mine.
Before we boarded the open-air train cars, the conductor of the Salt Mine Express told us the rules: Keep body limbs inside the car at all times, and do not raise your hands above your hard hat.
“There are places out there where you can actually touch the ceiling, you can actually touch the walls,” Mr Engineer said. “But we don’t want you to do that because the salt can be sharp, it can cut. And salt in a wound does not feel very good.”
He clanged the train’s bell as we rolled off into the dark. Spotlights activated by motion sensors lit up displays along the way. Our first stop was in front of a bulkhead, a wall built by miners to direct air flow.
“There’s actually over 150 miles of tunnels down here, so it was important for the miners to keep the air where they were working instead of letting it go out into parts of the mine where they were finished,” a recorded narration said.
The train moved on to a place where huge, dangerously jagged chunks of earth and rock littered the mine floor.
“As you look to the left,” the narrator prompted, “you’ll see a rare sight, what the miners call a roof fall. The pieces on the floor used to be the roof. But over a number of years, the salt started sagging away from the compacted mud layer above it and eventually fell.
“Even though only a few roofs ever develop a roof sag, everywhere in the mine that people will walk, drive or ride, we monitor the roof, and sags are removed when necessary.
“In the far corner, you can still see a roof sag. Can you imagine how it sounded when this roof fell?”
In the train’s headlights I could see that we were heading into a narrow tunnel with a very, very, very, very, very, very low ceiling.
The train stopped on the other side at an exhibit of, well, trash. “Everything that comes down in the mine stays in the mine,” the narrator said. “If you look at the lit area, you’ll see that this is even true of mining trash.”
Hershey bar wrappers, Coke bottles, Campbell’s soup cans, a 1953 calendar. The trash was artfully arranged next to a crude miner’s toilet, little more than a wooden box with a toilet seat on top. Scraps of toilet paper (clean, it was clean) littered the ground around it.
Scout troops regularly camp overnight in the museum, almost every Saturday during winter, and take guided walks out into the scary darkness of the mine.
I’m neither young nor brave. But for research purposes only I took the museum’s ominously titled “Dark Ride.” Perky Patty, again, was our guide. As she drove the tram away from the gift shop a co-worker yelled out: “Bring them all back this time!”
Up ahead, in a room mined of its salt during the ’40s and ’50s, she slowed the tram and announced: “I am going to stop and turn the lights off just for a moment, just to give you another experience with mine darkness. On the count of three I’m going to turn the lights off.
“One. Two. Three.”
She flipped off the headlights.
The darkness swallowed us alive.
“Do you ever get lost down here?” one man asked as Patty turned on the headlights and drove on.
“I never have,” she said. “I’ve heard that most people have turned wrong at least once. So far, I haven’t.”
“Glad to hear that,” the man said.
“I thought you would be,” Patty said. She pulled the tram next to a pile of rock salt and invited us to take a piece home. Just don’t climb on the pile, she warned. “Find yourself a souvenir that’s millions of years old!”
From the get-go, you know that this adventure through the bowels of the Earth is no trip to Disney World. You can’t even go underground without first watching a safety film explaining the three-pound “self-rescuer” you have to wear at all times, like the miners.
Right about then is when I started wondering who wanted to put a tourist attraction next to purgatory.
Turns out his name is Jay Smith, and he lives in South Dakota. But in December 1995 he moved to Hutchinson to be executive director of the Reno County Historical Society.
One of the first places he visited was a historical placard marking the spot where salt was first discovered in this city. The marker was overgrown with weeds “and kind of forgotten,” Smith recalled.
He’d noticed lots of places around town named Salt City this and Salt City that. But at the historical museum “there wasn’t really a lot about salt on display. Here was this town’s namesake, and it wasn’t being fully discussed,” said Smith, now the state museum director for the South Dakota State Historical Society.
One day he chanced to visit Underground Vaults & Storage, a business that leases space in the mine from Hutchinson Salt Co (Underground Vaults also runs an underground storage complex in Kansas City.)
“It looked like you were going to a new world,” Smith said. “I’d been in coal mines and gold mines before, so I was happy to see wide open spaces because it made you feel comfortable.”
That’s when the idea hit: Why not put a museum down there?
Talking to people around town he found that there’d been similar talk back in the ’50s, when Carey Salt gave public tours of its working mine. In 1952, almost 9,000 people visited.
The tours eventually got in the way of the mining. Because the salt and tourists travelled up and down the same hoist, the salt couldn’t move when there were visitors in it. In the late ’60s, new mining safety regulations ended the tours.
People told Smith that the museum couldn’t be built. He knew he’d need the blessing of the two companies already doing business in the mine.
In June 1999 he sat down with folks from the salt company and Underground Vaults. They too tried to talk him out of the idea “about a million different ways,” he said.
But they promised: If you can get federal safety authorities to approve it, we’ll help.
Thus began “one of the most unique partnerships you’ll find in the US, between a small historical society, an underground storage company and a working salt company,” Smith said. “I mean, where do you see that?”
The project lurched forward in fits and starts. Fundraising screeched to a halt after the September 11 attacks in 2001. Building a new, $6mn shaft and hoist — the one now used by the museum and Underground Vaults — had to wait until 2004, and only then could construction on the museum itself begin.
Yes, this is still a story about the salt museum. And yes, there are Hollywood costumes displayed here. They’re kind of a tease, a glimpse of the countless Hollywood treasures stored not far away in Underground Vaults, with 50 acres that are off-limits to the general public, a real bummer for Hollywood buffs like me.
Company president Lee Spence once called the storage company “a kind of Noah’s Ark, without the animals.”
Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros all hide things at Underground Vaults. It’s a veritable Fort Knox safe from tornadoes, floods, earthquakes and all manner of mischief and mayhem, where the 68-degree temperature and 45% humidity are ideal for preserving paper and film.
Turns out those are comfortable working conditions, too, for anyone who’s not weirded out by spending hours underground. Employees wear shorts at work on even the coldest days of winter.
The company stores millions of boxes full of paper and data — oil and gas company leases and maps, insurance policies, architectural blueprints, medical files, tax records, historic New York newspapers reporting Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.
Secret US government documents are locked up here. (The truth about Area 51, perhaps?) Everything is electronically catalogued and bar-coded so it can be easily found.
“What people need to realise is our clients trust us to secure their information. They trust us to make sure that we’re not a tourist facility,” company vice president Jeff Ollenburger said.
“Where there are occasions where we might bring people through for an official tour, it’s very rare that we do that. That’s one of the reasons we support the museum, and we’ve tried to create a small exhibit over there about what we do.”
The Underground Vaults folks are loathe to reveal specifics about their clients. But over the years they have shared that they are the keepers of such historic movies as Ben-Hur and Star Wars, old silent movies, every episode of M*A*S*H and the original film negative of The Wizard of Oz.
Harry Potter and Scooby-Doo live here, too.
Hollywood has been stashing its stuff here for more than 30 years. The inventory morphed as the technology did, from old-fashioned film reels to digital tapes and DVDs.
“The film industry, they just don’t throw anything away,” Ollenburger said. “So all the outtakes and trims and all these things that never see the light of day in the finished product are kept, and they get sent to us in boxes because they never know when they might use them again.
“They keep pretty good records of what they’ve shot, what got used and what didn’t get used. So a lot of times they’ll use a scene that’s already been shot for one film — they might put it in another.
“I’m always amazed when they pull some really old piece and find those never-before-seen elements and put it into a DVD extras package because I know where it’s been. It’s been underground and we’ve kept it safe.”
At the end of my visit I dreaded what lay ahead: a ride back to the surface in that noisy hoist.
In the gift shop I found someone who felt my pain: Sandy Beltz, a visitor from northeast Nebraska. She and her husband like to check out “weird and different places” on vacation, and an Internet search led them to the salt mine museum.
For the ride down, which she compared to being stuffed into an MRI machine, her husband stood close to her side after she “took a Tylenol,” she stage-whispered to me.
She was checking out the salt-themed souvenirs: lamps made of salt, shot glasses, plastic miner’s helmets and, of course, salt shakers.
She settled on a T-shirt that I was tempted to buy for the editor who sent me to do this story.
It read: “I Survived the Shaft.” — The Kansas City Star/MCT
