RIDGECREST, Calif. — The gaping mouths of abandoned mines dot the Spangler Hills east of this Mojave Desert town. Camouflaged by creosote bushes and tucked below sandy mounds that entice off-road enthusiasts, the remnants of California's fevered Gold Rush invite disaster.
On a recent morning, Douglas W. Craig peered past rotting timbers into one shaft, where a 14-year-old Fresno boy was rescued last month after he flew off his dirt bike and fell in.
Braced against a biting wind, Craig then stepped back to watch a bulldozer plug the hole. The mine has honeycombed the hillside for at least 70 years. Now, in a matter of hours, nearly all its tempting surface traces were gone.
"There's something satisfying about seeing a problem solved," said Craig, manager of the California Department of Conservation's Abandoned Mine Lands Unit.
The task seems simple enough. But it isn't.
Craig's office estimates that 47,000 abandoned mines pepper the state. Resources to address the problem are scarce, scattered among a handful of state and federal agencies. The money that is available has been earmarked mostly to clean up mines that leach mercury into the water supply. As a result, the tens of thousands of shafts and horizontal adits that pose physical hazards to a burgeoning population have been largely ignored.
Now, at the direction of the state Legislature, Craig's office has allotted half of its $250,000 budget to starting to fix the problem. By summer, about 70 shafts and side tunnels around the state will be filled with dirt, plugged with polyurethane foam or fitted with horizontal gates that keep people out while protecting sensitive bat habitats.
To stretch the money, Craig has teamed up with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service and the state Lands Commission.
The Spangler Hills job, for example, cost just $600 -- to rent the bulldozer. The BLM's Ridgecrest field office completed the necessary environmental reviews and provided the labor.
It's anybody's guess whether Craig's small slice of funding will survive the current budget crunch. But this year's work has earned more than its share of gratitude from other strapped agencies.
'Busy Little Beavers'
"These guys are just busy little beavers," Linn Gum, assistant field manager for the BLM's Ridgecrest field office, said as he huddled in his denim jacket and baseball cap to watch the shaft's opening disappear. "We just can't thank the Department of Conservation enough for the opportunity to make this a safer place to play."
