So things have been super busy lately.  With my wife going to school and me working extra shifts I haven't been able to screw around on the internet as much as I would like.  I have also been trying to figure out how to consolidate some of my student loans so that I'm not making 10 different loan payments a month. 
Anyways, I haven't done much mine exploration in the past month but I have gone underground.  I have found a really fun tunnel to go explore.  It is quite long and very tiring to walk down but at least it isn’t far from home and it fills my need to go underground.  I’m not going to tell anyone where it is because I don’t know if I’ll get in trouble for going in it.  It isn’t posted or anything so I think I’m okay.  I have a couple of other tunnel prospects that I am going to explore over the next week or two.  They are relatively close to my home so it should be easy to find time to explore.  Anyway here is a picture of the tunnel from last week.

The next thing that has kept me busy is the Marine Corps.  We are trying to get ready to go to AT.  I’m not going to say where we are going because of force protection and I want to keep everyone in suspense.  If you know me then you’ll know where we are going.  (hint it is our state’s sister country).  So after 7 months of being home from Afghanistan (I know it has already been that long) we finally got to go shoot some ammo.  It was the close quarters range.  We got out there Saturday and the weather was just perfect for shooting, not too hot not too cold.  But that was in the morning and I didn’t get a chance to shoot until the afternoon.  Of course in the afternoon the sun disappeared and it started to rain like mad.  There is nothing like shooting in the freezing rain.  I think the shakes from all the caffeine in the rockstars counteracted the freezing shakes I was getting from the rain.  I was steady as a rock and only dropped 4 points out of 100.  I think I did alright.  As much as I hate being cold I really like shooting and blowing stuff up, I guess that is why I love the Marine Corps.

I was talking with some guys about the difference between Marines and the other branches yesterday and it got me thinking.  Don’t get me wrong because anybody that is willing to join the military is higher in my book than the average citizen.  The Marines just seem to be more professional than the other services.  As Marines we pride ourselves on being the best and for being able to take a crappy situation and make the best of it.  We go in when no one else wants to.  We live where people shouldn’t and we are still able to take the fight to the enemy.  Now I haven’t been in the other branches so I don’t know exactly how they operate but I do know that I would rather be with a couple of Marines than with a company of any other branch during a fight.  Again I’m not saying the other branches aren’t great, I’m just saying that the best of the best are the Marines.  I know people will say what about the Rangers, SF, Para rescue and Navy Seals.  Those guys are only a small percentage of the group, they are the exception.

Been a while

So it has been a while since I have written anything in this blog.  I have truly been busy.  My wife says I'm on the computer all the time but in reality I check my email on my phone and am not really on the computer much at all.
Anyways as some of you know I am in the Marine Corps Reserve and have been back from Afghanistan for about 6 months now.  I have been drilling again for a few months.  Now the drills haven't been really that hard as far as being out in the field training.  We have basically been in admin mode since we have been back.  We have shot weapons 1 time and that was only half the Marines here.  I love the Marine Corps and joined so that I could blow stuff up and hopefully in the next 6 months we shoot more and are out in the field more.  That is what I like about the Marines and I hate the paperwork part.
Onto the next thing, I have been really researching about the lost mines in Utah.  I haven't been able to go mine exploring because of the winter snow so I research instead.  There is a lot of proof that there were Spanish gold mines in Utah.  At the very least the Old Spanish Trail in southern Utah is now a national monument so that shows that the Spanish did travel through Utah.
Now I have read a lot about the Lost Rhoades mines, The Josephine mine, Carre-Shinob and many others.  I have only started my research on these but do believe that they have existed but whether they are still lost or not is still up in the air for me.  Out of the thousands of people that have searched for these mines you would think that 1 person would have found them.  Also the thousands of people that go hunting in those mountains might have come across one of these mines.  I have read stories of people finding what they say are these mines but didn't find the lost gold.  So as far as whether I believe that the mines are lost and that the plethora of gold is still there, maybe.  Further research is needed.  These are interesting stories and there could very well still be a single gold bar hiding out in some cave or hidden alcove but untold riches maybe not.  I am going to try my hand at finding some of these hidden mines.  I would also like to see what an old Spanish mine looks like.
The next thing that I am going to try over the summer is panning for gold.  I guess I have a little gold fever.  I have not found any gold anywhere but I know of places this summer that I should be able to find some gold.  It's not going to make me rich but it will be an experience that I can share with people and it will give me something to put on the wall.  It will also be an excuse to get up in the mountains and spend some time in the beauty that is nature.
Well I should be able to write in this blog more and will be better about it.

Ghost story continued

I have been reading a book on the hisorty of mining in Utah.  It is a great book; it talks about the early miners and who was in power and whe they found precious metals and how they found them.  It was funny because even the book said that it was mostly luck as to who found these minerals and wehre they found them.
Anyway, to go with my ghost story of my previous post.  I was reading a chapter on mining superstitions and it talked about "Tommy knockers" and what not.  The part that got me was it talked about miners in the early 1900s hearing noises as if people were working the mine.  They knew these mines better than anybody and they knew that nobody was working these areas or that the vein had ended and it was a dead end tunnel and nobody was down there.  Yet, they still heard these noises of people working the mines and they would sometimes hear these "miners" talking to each other as they worked. 
This was written in a mining history book that was published in 2006 with many of the information coming from PhDs and professors of history.  I'm only saying this to make people believe my story a little more.  And I'm saying this because the paragraph in the book sounds exactly like what I heard down in that mine that day.  It was very surprising to read something that was so close to my story. 
So if you still don't believe me then you need to come with me one day to one of these mines and we will try to get a ghost experience.  At the very least you will see how utterly quiet and dark the mines are and how it is extremely unusual to hear anything like we did.

Ghost Story

So the other day my 2 brothers, one of our friends and me went out mine exploring.  We have really started to get into this mine exploration thing and have tried to go out at least once a month.  Well we went out a week or so ago and visited a mine (not sure of the name).  We really had to work to get to this mine entrance and then to get into the actual mine was a bit of an adventure in itself.  Anyways we got down in and explored some of the major levels.  We had been down there for about 4 hours and had heard various noises like water dropping, pipes banging together when we would lean on them and rocks tumbling when we would slip or lose our footing a little.  But when we would sit still for a break we wouldn't hear anything and when we would turn our lights out it was absolutely dark and quiet.  It was actually kind of eerie because of that.

Well we started to make our 2000' ascent up the main tunnel of this mine.  When you are going down it doesn't seem that bad but when you turn around and start to make your way up it is a bugger.  We are all about in the same physical shape so we could climb a few hundred feet at a time then take a break for 10 or so minutes.  Whenever we would stop we would look down the slope and see how far we had come and you could see a long way down the slope.  On one particular occasion we were about 500' from the top and decided to take one last good break then make our way to the top and out.  On our way up to our last break our friend asked it we could hear that noise.  We could all hear it but played it off as rocks falling down the slope since we were walking up and when a rock fell you could hear it for a minute as it traveled down the slope.  We finally made it to our resting spot and sat down.  We started visiting and planning our exit strategy.  Our friend once again said he could still hear that noise.  Again we told him we had just stopped and the rocks we still probably falling.  After about 10 minutes he told us to shut up and listen to the noise.  It was a distinct metal on metal a couple of times, then a scrape and dump.  We sat there for a minute and listened.  It didn't get farther away, it didn't slow down and it wasn't random.  Then we could hear faint voices.  When I say faint they might have been louder but I am partially deaf and could hear them.  I pulled out my camera and my iphone and started a voice recoding on my phone and a video on my camera.  We turned our lights out to try and see if we could see any lights down below and to sharpen our other senses.  We did this for about 7 minutes and the noise was going the whole time.  So, total time so far for this noise was about 25 minutes of it going nonstop.  We knew nobody else was in this mine because of the weather and the remote location of it and the difficulty getting to where we were.  It was definitely a couple of guys working the mine.  We talked for a minute where we were and decided that we needed to get a move on so that we weren't hiking in the dark.  The last thing we did before we moved out was to try something I've seen on Ghost Adventures.  I yelled, "Shift's over fellas.  Let's pack up and go home."  The noise instantly stopped.  How weird is that; the noise was constant for 25 minutes then stops after I say something.  It's either a strange coincident or it was some miners from days past that were still working their old mine.

It was really a neat experience and I truly believe that there were some miners down there with us and that they were just doing their job.  I don't think that they were bad ghosts or anything they were just down doing what they always did and that was mine.  Next time we go out we are going to take a voice recorder with us and try to hear something.  I'm not going to do a paranormal investigation but we are going to try to hear the miner again.

So I had a coworker tell me that I was a nerd the other day.  I was listening to Pandora on the computer and a song came on.  My coworker came through and heard the song and this is what he tells me.  "You're such a nerd.  When people make PVPs in WoW they use this song.  In fact I think it is the most used song for PVPs."  My response was "What the hell is PVPs and WoW?"  He explained to me that PVP stands for player vs player and that WoW is World of Warcraft.  So he is telling me I'm am nerd because I was listening to Pandora and Flirtin' with Disaster came on.  Who's the one that knew all about WoW and all that crap?  This is the reason that I don't really like people in general.  I'm not saying I don't like this kid I'm just saying that people, in general, are stupid and they come up with the dumbest things to say.