Reporter's Notebook: Tap 'er light: Going underground resurrects ghosts of mining past

Since I arrived in Butte a year ago, I’ve heard my share of tales about Butte’s mining legends and history. One favorite is the story of kids and women being able to hear the miners — the dads, brothers, uncles, cousins and sons — talking and whistling in the tunnels just below ground.

I was thinking about those men as I entered into the tunnel's mouth at Golden Sunlight. The portal is about 200 to 300 feet above the bottom of Mineral Hill Pit, where the underground gold mining operation began two weeks ago.

Butte’s ghosts were with us as I descended — along with Sean Chabot, the underground mining supervisor; Brock Morgan, mining safety supervisor; and Standard photographer Walter Hinick — into the tunnel. We scooted along in an open-air personnel transport (it looks like a dune buggy) around a winding, wet, rocky mile of road leading around and around underground.

The headlights and our headlamps shined pinpoints ahead of us — lighting up the rock's face, creased and worn and rough and plain. Our focused lights cut through the dark, landing for a moment on a miner's face inside a small haul truck parked just off the main tunnel. Though I only caught a glimpse of his face, he wasn't a ghost. He was a man, a miner, perhaps a Montanan. But behind him stood a long line of miners that goes all the way back to 1864, when the first miners arrived in Butte, thinking as they panned the water in Silver Bow Creek that they had struck gold.

The personnel transport, driven by Chabot, traveled on around, farther into the tunnel. We stopped and met Matt Ulrich, a young man from Idaho, who works as an electrician in the tunnels for Redpath. I asked Ulrich if he gets lonely working underground. He laughed and said, “yeah.”

We saw another ghost near the pocket where the explosives are kept. We saw more ghosts as we heard the roar of the fans flushing fresh air in from outside. We saw one ghost flit by just as we stopped so Chabot could talk to the front-end loader operator (called a mucker) ahead of us via radio. The mucker stopped mucking — meaning he stopped scooping up the ore — turned off his equipment's lights, and got out. A strapping fellow, Gary Severin, stood before me. He was no ghost.

In front of him was a wall. Behind him — and behind us — was the mile or so of winding road, through the dark night of the tunnel, through the humid, earthy smell, before the tunnel’s mouth, which itself is about 800 feet below the top of Mineral Hill Pit. Severin was a really long way from what you and I think of as earth, the ground we walk on.

But when I asked him if he gets lonely, he said, “No ma’am. You get used to it, and you’re never by yourself.”

Maybe Severin has seen the same ghosts I have — the ghosts of Butte’s mining past.