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Yeah, I get that a lot with that truck, the honking.

usually chicks, wanting a ride in the yellow beast.

I've gotten so used to it that i don't even notice anymore when they honk.

chick magnet.

Oh my...I best ride shotgun next time Dave goes to town...or better yet, maybe I should drive Ol' Yeller to town myself. Possibly to work one day? Wonder if I'll get similar reactions.

oh I think you'd get a reaction.

I can see your co-workers. "note to self, Pam's one crazy chick. Tough as nails & possibly mentally unstable, beware."

hows the fishing forecast looking for you this weekend dave? Yuo and the mrs.nd going to be out at the ice shanty? i'll possibly come back out that way if possible to get around with my wheel house. i got to find a couple tires for it. i got one rubbing, but the way the fishing was out there last week i might have to try to repeat it again.

When I was 12 years old I moved to a new town. I moved to live with my dad.

I didn't know the town, hell I didn't even know my dad. It was all completely new for me.

It was late June 1982 in an old iron ore mining town on Minnesota's iron range. I met a lot of new kids before the school year started in the fall. In the summer time when you don't have school classes to separate everybody out by grade/age the kids just kind of blend into bands of similar ages. I became friends with this goofy high energy kid that was a year younger than me. There were quite a few of us that hung out & did things together, fishing, exploring old mines & caves etc. But we were 2 of a kind, wild mischievous, adventurous.

We were good friends, always on some sort of adventure in those days. Times were pretty tough, everybody was poor, (everybody we knew anyways). But nothing that we did ever cost any money. If our parents knew half the things we got into back then we would not have been allowed to be friends. Not so much bad things, just dangerous.

Always goofing off & exploring by these old iron ore mines. A lot of that stuff was pretty dangerous.

We once led the way on an adventure which took our group of elite explorers to the bottom of an old pit mine. The old mine in question was very deep, the sides went straight down & you couldn�t see the bottom from the top.

I had learned of an old cable ladder that had been used long ago by the miners, story was that they had better means of getting up & down the mine but this was sort of an emergency ladder.

I had heard that the ladder had been used by some adventurous kids in the 50�s & early 60�s. But it�s location had become lost for many years.

My friend & I searched diligently for the mysterious cable ladder. Legend had it the cable ladder was broken on one side, it hung from one side only and was undoubtedly camouflaged with moss along a shaded cliff wall of the old mine.

I remember the day we spotted it from the opposite side of the pit. It was very hard to see as it had taken on the colors of the cliff wall. It wasn�t going to be easy, to our surprise the cable ladder did not go from the bottom to the top, you would have to climb down part way to where the cable ladder hung.

We assembled our band of explorers & set off to conquer the depths of �the china pit�.

We used a rope to climb down to the cable ladder. The ladder did only hang from one side, the other side had been frayed & broken for who knows how man years. The rungs were steel bars attached to each cable side, some of the rungs were attached to one side only, some rungs were missing completely. The ladder hung a little crooked from the top.

The ladder didn�t follow along the cliff wall for very long before the cliff wall tapered inward away from the old rusty cable ladder. From there down the ladder hung free from the cliff wall high above the rocky bottom which we could now see.

It was a long ways down, we knew we should only go one at a time down the old broken ladder. Everyone was scared, but this conquest, this adventure, it would separate us from our peers. We would become legends amongst kids for generations to come.

I went first, as I often did on such adventures.

My good friend was shortly behind me, if I remember correctly there was only one other that would go through with it. The ladder hung a bit too high off the bottom, you had to hang & drop.

Once on the bottom, a great feeling of accomplishment, a feat of bravery.

It was only one of many such adventures we carried out together as children.

The last time I saw my friend we laughed like kids again & he reminded me in detail of adventures such as this one.

I got word yesterday that my friend has died.

I believe he left behind as many or more than 5 children.

As I understand it the papers read that he died unexpectedly of natural causes.

I never knew him as an adult, met up with him a few times but only for short visits. He hadn't seemed to have changed from The friend I knew. He was a brave, adventurous, funny kid.

Here�s to my friend Thad. I�ll never forget you for who you were buddy.

Dave

I'm not sure buschy. I'd like to pull our house a little north as well. unless it's no place for a permanent house? I'd have to go up & scout it out first.

the good news is...nobody will park next to you at work, so you'll have plenty of room and no door dings. or you could drop that plow and make your own parking spot.

Dave, sorry to hear of your friend. I wish his family and children well.

lots of perms where we were on sunday. there moving all over up there. we were just east of south tip, not as far north as whiskey. look for a lime green house and we were just west of him and he has been doing very good where he is. its only bout 20ft there but we had some good action going on.

Sorry to hear about your childhood buddy Dave. Memories you make with those friends will be vivid forever even if you don't see them as adults.

Cool mine story ya crazy bastage! One question though...how did you get back up to the bottom of the ladder? I was waitin to hear the fire dept had to be called because it didn't dawn on you that you "had to get back up!"

If I remember correctly we had to climb a ways up the pit wall & jump out to the ladder to get back up out of there. Leap of faith sort of jump, crazy stuff.

We would go back down there from time to time. There was a huge cave at the bottom on the west end.

We never explored out too far out from that area because we knew we could be spotted by a park ranger if we went too far out from the bottom of that ladder area. It was the only part of the mine pit that couldn't be seen from any side of the top.

In the middle of summer there would be snow inside that cave at the bottom. It never got any direct sunlight.

sounds like a great place to dump a fairly new Chevy Tahoe...:)

that would be a terrible thing to do to that pit mine

we used to throw rocks from the top & wait to hear them hit the bottom.

it would take a while.

How did they get the ore out? Bruce

heavy rigging & hoists I suspect.

That pit didn't have a sloped side to it like you might expect for a set of rails for mule carts. I really don't know how they got the ore out of that one. it could be that the east end was conected to a larger pit just to the east of this one.

I really don't know for sure. There are also several shaft type mines in the area which had elevator cars to bring up the ore.

I guess i always immagined they used similar means to lift the ore from the old pits. possibly an elevator tower with verticle rails to guide ore cars up?

It was also common for a mine to start out as a pit mine & end up with a shaft mine at the bottom of the pit or at some spot in the pit.

there was a mine like this in the area (pit/shaft mine) which sits full to the top with water today. The story goes like this:

The mine was in full operation with a team of mules down the shaft taking there turn in rotation. All the equipment, everything to do with normal daily operation was down the shaft.

the shift ended, the guys went home as usual. They came back the next day & it sat full of water just like it sits today. all the mules & equipment are still down the shaft. Shaft opening is covered with water of course. It was one of our favorite summer time swimming holes. We'd jump from different heights off the cliff walls into the cold clear water in the pit. You could see a square shaft opening under the water on one end. i'm uncertain if this was the shaft that floded, there may have been more shafts deeper in the pit. (you could also see fish in that clear water, but that's another story.)

crazy stuff huh? That area is rich with that sort of history. I always found it fascinating.

It's actually all very interesting to me & I'm sure my buddy could have told us a lot if he were still with us today. i understand he became very interested with the local history in his adult life.

I'm sorry to hear you lost another friend Dave. Good memories though. That's something.

Craig

Near Clanton,Alabama there is a rock quarry filled with water that people said filled with water one night with all of the machinery at the bottom.We went skin diving in it and found nothing at the bottom.I just wonder how many of these same type of stories are urban myths.
Another one is the diver coming from the depths of a lake and refusing to go back down because of the size of the catfish he had encountered.
Dave,sorry to hear of your friends demise.
It's been rainy here all day.

Stan

thanks Craig.

They were poor times financially, but as my childhood goes, they were rich times. Rich in excitement, adventure, roaring hard belly laughs, very good times with a very good friend.

most of this was 26-27 years ago.

what happens to the time?

Having my favorite beer tonight, remembering my buddy.

hoist a glass, have a drink to a once skinny wiry dark haired iron range kid named Thad. Always smiling, always with mischief on his mind. His face would be pointed at your feet. But when you loked at him, his eyes would be on you, looking up through his eyebrows, that grin, hands in his pockets...

And you just knew, it was going to be a good day.



To my friend Thad Pecha: I hope they don't make you climb no rusty broken cable ladder to heaven. I'll take the cable ladder if it's the only way they will let me in. But I hope they let you take the elevator.

Stan, I googled the mine in question.


i found a story.

Written in 1971

story tells nothing of the mine filling with water overnight as we had heard when we were kids.

It tells rather of business decisions, politics etc... i don't know stan, maybe the damn thing is full of rain water

it's still a hell of a neat swimming hole though.