Abandoned desert mines dangerous

Abandoned desert mines pose danger to drivers

By Charles F. Bostwick, Staff Writer

Rocketdyne retiree Paul Etner was driving his wife and daughter up a dirt road off the Antelope Valley Freeway when they almost drove into tragedy.

Trying to turn around on a brush-covered hill, he backed into a 12-foot-wide, 53-foot-deep abandoned mine shaft, coming to a stop with his station wagon's left rear tire hanging over the hole.

"If I'd been over a few feet more ... we'd have gone in," Etner said. "We were just astounded. We had no idea it was there. When I looked in the rearview mirror to back up it just looked like an open gentle slope.

"I've been in the desert a lot but I've never seen anything like this. It was scary."

State Office of Mine Reclamation officials came out Tuesday to use a backhoe to fill in the hole -- one of more than 47,000 abandoned California mines, most clustered in the Mojave Desert and the Gold Rush country of the western Sierra Nevada........

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