Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Dangerous and abandoned open water wells in the woods

Ran onto the well on my place in the morning before dark one morning turkey hunting.

Someone pulled the concrete cap, put some tin over the well top then put the cap back on.

There are several old drill holes in a canyon on our Hill Country lease that we try to avoid. The landowner's property in Boerne has areas that sit over a cave system that has only been partially explored. It's spooky to be walking his place and almost step into a hole that seems bottomless. He thinks it's the same cave system as the Boerne Cave Without a Name which is about a mile from his gate.

We had one on our old deer lease in a spring. It was only about 6 feet deep though. I got too hot once in the summer and climbed down in it to cool off.
I was thankful for it that day.

Yup. There’s a capped one in the uncleared section of the local ball field where I used to walk my dog. I don’t think I could budge that cover with a six-foot digging iron. Another one was on my WMA, just a hole with some rocks around it. Not sure if it was for a farm or the old mineral baths that were there 100 years ago.

Something else that’s really scary are the “breaks” that are common in coal mine country, essentially cave-ins above mine shafts. No telling how deep they might be, but I’m pretty sure there ain’t any cell service at the bottom of any of them. The one I actually ran into was very well-hidden, full of leaves and barely noticeable.

I came across some guys punching in a logging road on a mountainside and they bladed into an vertical raise (shaft) building that road. Yeah roads can have surprises and those old roads put in pre-bulldozer Era are very scary.

Seen some covered and some open.

Worst was when working in the goldfields of Western Australia. Open shafts and stopes everywhere. We’d be drilling with reverse circulation and lose returns only to have dust coming up a shaft 50yards away. Once into the floor we would get circulation back.

A drilling company we used left us to go out past Laverton, way up north of Kalgoorlie, just before Christmas 1987. They were double shifting, this fellow moved a Ute and walked back to the rig but didn’t turn up. He fell down a 114’ shaft, and lived. Fractured skull, pelvis, femur etc. Onto Royal Flying Doctor Service to Perth and turned out ok. They think he fractured skull and was unconscious when he fell in, thus totally relaxed the rest of the way!

Hate to think what was down some of those old workings. No markings they were there at all.

I used to know where a couple were when I was a kid roaming the woods behind the house with a BB gun. I didn't know who owned the land and back in those days nobody cared much.

Found several of them through the years. Always made me nervous when coon hunting by myself.

Had to retrieve a coon hound out of a well one night while hunting by myself. Luckily it had filled in over time and was only about 10 feet deep and semi dry.