four had signed up for the course simply as a way to spend the final summer of their college years together before going their separate ways after their upcoming senior year.
The team members put on their hardhats and clicked on their headlamps as they followed Clarence through the door. Chuck turned on his headlamp and followed. A stream of outside air coursed past him, drawn into the tunnel.
A mining engineer Chuck had hired at the beginning of the summer to assess the security of the mine tunnel had declared it safe from the risk of roof collapse, pointing out that no explosives, which might have damaged the tunnel’s structural integrity, had been used in its construction.
“They did it the old-fashioned way,” the fire-hydrant-shaped engineer told Chuck, putting his finger to one of the countless indentations in the wall where miners had chipped away at the granite interior of the mountain, lengthening the tunnel pickaxe blow by pickaxe blow.
The mining expert led Chuck deep into the tunnel, walking on the floorboards between the ore cart tracks three-quarters of the way to the bare back wall of the mine before turning and declaring it safe.
The engineer tapped the thick floorboard planks with the sole of his boot. “I like that they installed rails to cart out the tailings. And the quality of the floor, too. Shows they thought they were in it for the long haul.” He directed the beam of his headlamp at the wall of the tunnel. “It’s too bad, all this effort—pick-work, flooring, rails—and they just quit.” He turned to Chuck. “I’ve seen it before, though. Probably ran out of money. Happened all the time.”
“At least they didn’t go too deep before they moved on,” Chuck said.
The engineer faced the tiny rectangle of daylight that marked the doorway at the mouth of the mine one hundred fifty feet away. “They must’ve dug thousands of these things back then. Hell, tens of thousands.” He grunted. “Just another empty hole.”
Chuck trailed Clarence and Team Nugget down the mine tunnel. The six students fell silent, subdued by the darkness and the tunnel’s chill. They positioned the solar-powered LED floodlights to illuminate the day’s work area and set about dismantling the final, fifteen-foot stretch of ore cart tracks and underlying floorboards. Each time they removed one of the planks, the young men crouched shoulder-to-shoulder around the newly uncovered rectangle of debris, looking for anything of interest.
At the start of their work in the tunnel three weeks ago, the students of both teams had groused about the extent to which Chuck required them to sift through the layer of gravel that comprised the base of the tunnel.
“We’re searching for a needle in a haystack,” Jeremy complained.
“Which is exactly what you signed up for,” Chuck responded. “Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. August, 1951. Hundred and ten in the shade. Louis and Mary Leakey scraping away at the side of a hill blazing day after blazing day. And what is it they found?”
“Frosty the Snowman,” joked lumpy, disheveled Carson.
“Broken bits of stone tools,” Chuck corrected. “Tiny pieces of bone. Tooth fragments. It was years before they came across the skull that made them famous.”
“Oh, my God!” Carson exclaimed with an exaggerated shiver of fear. “A skeleton!”
“Everybody loves the mystique of archaeology’s biggest discoveries,” Chuck continued as Carson traded a fist bump with Jeremy. “Olduvai in Tanzania. The Valley of the Kings, Egypt. Machu Picchu, Peru. But the truths archaeologists work to uncover aren’t tied up all neat and tidy in ribbons and bows. They’re covered by jungle growth, buried in dirt and rubble, or—” he pointed at the base of the tunnel “—hidden beneath floorboards in an abandoned mine. Gravity is an archaeologist’s best friend. Stuff falls down, other stuff covers it up, and it all lies there, waiting to be dug up and studied.”
Jeremy gave a dismissive sniff. “Nothing’s ever fallen in here.”
“The laws of gravity aren’t suspended underground,” Chuck said. “Which is why each time we remove another board from the floor is so important.” He added a note of wonder to his voice. “Who knows what might lie below?”
By now, Chuck knew the same thing the students knew: they wouldn’t find much, if anything, amid the broken rock and rubble, just as they and Team Paydirt had found little of note upon disassembling the rest of the tunnel’s floor over the last three weeks.
That, in fact, was the point, as Professor Sartore had explained to Chuck when he’d suggested the students excavate the tunnel. While the excavation of the cabin site was sure to provide a trove of finds, the tunnel would provide the opportunity for the students to realistically judge whether they wanted to go into the field of archaeology after experiencing the tedious, day-in-and-day-out work and dearth of discoveries that, in truth, comprised the bulk of archaeological inquiry.
Aside from a few rusted, Civil War-era peg nails dropped beneath the boards during the tunnel’s construction, the students had uncovered only three items of interest: a broken pickaxe tip, a soggy box of matches, and a brass lipstick container. Of the three items, only the pickaxe tip dated from the tunnel’s initial construction in the 1860s. The matches and lipstick container were from the 1950s, about the time park officials affixed the iron door to the mouth of the mine, putting an end to the increased exploration of the tunnel that had come with the completion and opening of Trail Ridge Road.
Fortunately, the teams’ finds beneath the collapsed cabin numbered in the dozens—intact bottles, rusted tin cans, broken china and crockery and glass, and a few leather boot soles, dried and curled with age—precisely the type of items the National Park Service sought, by encouraging archaeological digs in its parks, for eventual display in park visitor centers and museums.
Chuck shuttled back and forth between Team Nugget and Team Paydirt throughout the morning, assuring himself Rosie was on the mend and banishing any thoughts of how Janelle would receive him when he returned to the cabin at the end of the day. Not long before lunch, he stood with Clarence between the tripod-mounted floodlights illuminating the final stretch of the mine tunnel. They looked on as the team pried loose their sixth floorboard of the morning, this one little more than a body’s length from the end of the tunnel.
For the past few days, in a welcome attempt at overcoming the monotony of dismantling the floor of the tunnel unrevelatory plank by unrevelatory plank, Team Nugget member Samuel had taken to injecting some showmanship into the lifting of each loosened floorboard.
As his teammates prepared to remove the next plank, Samuel, green-eyed and sporting a prodigious, leprechaun-like red beard, stood beyond the other team members on the last of the intact flooring, his back to the chipped stone wall at the end of the tunnel. He spoke into his fist, assuming the role of a play-by-play announcer, his voice artificially deep.
“All is hushed,” he intoned into his imaginary microphone.
Samuel’s teammates crouched, unmoving, over the loosened plank.
“The members of Team Nugget, acting as one, work their fingers under the floorboard,” Samuel continued.
Chuck couldn’t help but smile as the five team members did as Samuel described, eliciting a quiet squeak from the loosened board as it moved in its place.
Samuel pounded the intact floor at the end of the tunnel with his boots. “What might be hidden beneath one of the last boards to be lifted from the floor of the famed Cordero Mine?” he asked. His breath, lit by the floodlights, clouded in the moist air of the tunnel. “Could it be an ancient scroll? A map to hidden treasure? A key to a long-forgotten tomb?”
He paused. The team remained still, allowing the tension to build. Chuck bit his lower lip, caught up in Samuel’s patter. It didn’t matter that five times already this morning the team members had found nothing beneath the planks they’d lifted; Samuel’s invented suspense was exhilarating nonetheless.
Samuel