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I didn't feel like going to work on Wednesday, so I played hookie and went out to the shooting range. After busting some caps, I decided to head down to Clifton Forge to hike up to some abandoned iron ore mines that I knew about.
A while back I'd talked a geologist into giving me a topo map with all the abandoned mine shafts near Clifton Forge labeled on it. I entered all the coordinates onto my GPS unit, which made things much easier.
Following my GPS unit, I dropped my Tacoma into 4L and worked my way up the rocky trails in the mountainside. Eventually I couldn't continue any further, so I got out and started hiking. Almost immediately I found my first iron mine... A depression in the hillside where the adit had been caved in, with a large pile of mine debris outside the entrance. Encouraged, I turned North and walked along the hillside. I soon stumbled across another caved-in adit and debris pile. One after another, more debris piles and filled-in shafts and adits appeared as I hiked along:
One huge debris pile revealed a very cool hollow with mine leftovers, including a piece of track from the Wilton Mine:
The pics in the previous post are also from the Wilton Mine, but from outside a vertical shaft that was recently sealed by the VA DMME.
I found a few more sealed mine adits in this part of the forest, and some more track and some cool old stone foundations. I eventually moved on to a different part of the forest, where I'd heard rumors of iron mines that the DMME hasn't located yet. I hiked several miles through the woods here, but had no success in finding mines. I did find at least one old home site though, including a VERY old graveyard and some old hand-dug wells.
So in the end I didn't find any tunnels to explore, but I had a hell of a good time anyways.
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