I showed you the salt monument on the main Hutchinson page (see link at bottom). This isn't telling you anything new, but it's in rods so it's cool.


Also outside the museum, this locomotive formerly helped haul out salt blocks. Now I head down several hundred feet to the ancient oceanic salt deposits and the caverns hollowed out within from salt mining.


That locomotive probably hauled these salt cars at some point. They're tiny enough to fit under the low ceilings and not get too laden to be hauled up and out.


Salt mining created large, rectangular, intersecting tunnels, perfect for hosting museum exhibits. Enough of the walls were left to provide stability. The floors are pure salt, as fine as sand. This is one of the few places where salt was hauled out in blocks instead of dissolved and pumped out.


Don't lick the walls. They're watching you.


After the exhibits, patrons are loaded into tour wagons and led around the tunnels. The street signs are not for the tour - they're actually from the relatively recent mine closure, and were used so miners wouldn't get lost in a maze of twisty passageways, all alike. G is for Grue.


Into the highlights of the ride. Like any cave, the salt mines have dripping formations, although they're too young for salt stalactites and stalagmites. The boxes are not just an exhibit - they were stacked there by the miners. They may be filled with dynamite to blast the next section of the mine, or this may be storage. I choose to believe the former.


Some holes are left where they were drilled to insert dynamite. Salt is apparently very sturdy.


Broken but original blades used to carve the tunnels, grinding salt into retrievable bits as the drill moved forward.


Watch the (miners enter the) tram car (to head in and out of the mine), please.


The miners would try to fix what they could, but if something was truly broken, it was left in the mine. Why waste resources to try to bring it up? It's broken. End of discussion. The last two photos are angles of the same piece of equipment, which I believe is a "sled" type hauler.


This tractor lived from 1940-1958, and again starting in 1994 when it was refurbished and brought down to haul explosives and equipment. Miner humor: the "warp core" is the battery.


At a relatively large "cavern," we were set free to explore the immediate area of the mine. A wooden wall is set up to keep us out of the rest of the mine, or more generally, to close off a set of passageways. Someone either got sucked into a crevice, or wore through his gloves and just ditched them.


Poking as far as I dare into places I don't really belong, I can show you what the non-touristy parts of the mine look like. When undisturbed by constant tram rides, the parched floor splits just like a baked desert. (Mmmm, baked dessert.) Elsewhere, an inclined ramp heads down to a lower level of the mine. The ceiling pinches in - I forget whether this was a structural issue that resulted in abandoning this tunnel, or whether that was intentional based on train car height.


Remnants of recent mining: another train car, another directional label (less formal than a street name), another set of tracks leading down a low and dark passageway (so maybe the pinched ceiling was quite intentional), and finally a fairly personal matter. But when you gotta go, you gotta go.


Remember how I said the cave was too young to have stalagmites? Either something very strange happened during tunneling, or this must have been the oldest part of the mine with the newest growths thereon.


I saved what I think is the best for last. With stable temperature and extremely low humidity, a salt mine is an excellent place to store very fragile documents. This includes stacks upon stacks of original Technicolor movie reels. It's also a very safe place, because all access is controlled by the museum and the mine.

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