Modern-day explorer focuses on abandoned mines below Jersey ground 179 visited and countless miles of underground terrain walked

Show Caption Hide Caption Video: Inside abandoned mines Vernon, N.J.'s Dan Lopez spent nearly a decade exploring abandoned mines in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. He shared his collection of photographs with Northjersey.com/The Record for this video.

Dan Lopez explored abandoned mines for close to 10 years

He visited 179 mines and entered 70 of them in N.J., N.Y., and Penn.

To find them he obtained rare books and maps

He discovered amazing sights and took 15,000 photos

Not all explorers are relegated to the pages of history books. One modern-day explorer is shedding light on some pretty dark places.

Dan Lopez has spent the last 10 years exploring the dark abandoned mines that lurk beneath the surface of the country's Northeast region.

He experienced black damp (a mine gas incapable of supporting flame or life, according to Merriam-Webster.com), found unused dynamite and bones, possibly saw a ghost and nearly fell to his death down a crevasse.

"There's a beauty to mines," Lopez said. "It's spiritual, ethereal."

During one excursion, the 43-year-old Vernon resident entered a mine in one town and by the time he exited, he was in another town.

"Abandoned mines get a bad rep," Lopez said. "They are historic sites. The dangerous ones are in Arizona and Nevada. It's a shame the state is reclaiming them, burying them."

This subterranean world makes up a once-thriving industry that Lopez is trying to bring to the forefront. During a recent drive down a back road in Warwick, New York, Lopez lamented the disappearance of an entrance to one of the mines he had visited years ago.

"It's a shame," he said of a pile of rubble where the entrance once was. "Twenty to 30 years from now no one will remember Standish Mine. Hundreds of years ago there were people working here."

Lopez began his mine quests in New Jersey in 2003 and estimates he visited 40 to 50 mines by 2007. It was an every other weekend affair for Lopez and a crew of like-minded explorers who eventually moved on to abandoned mines in New York and Pennsylvania. In total Lopez visited 179 mines and entered about 70 of them, he said.

Lopez and his crew would experience some amazing sites likely experienced by few people today. He found little mines hidden in the woods, and huge ones with frighteningly deep shafts.

He came across abandoned rail tracks, coal carts, and an 1800s electric GE locomotive "stopped in time," and rusting away.

He experienced black damp in a Pennsylvania coal mine, and came across unused dynamite. At one point he went a little too far, nearly falling to his death down a crevasse in New York.

Lopez has come across animal bones and even said he's seen a ghost, or experienced something mysterious and unexplained.

In Ringwood he scaled down the side of a cliff using an old iron stranded rope to get into an inclined shaft.

He drank from a spring deep inside a mine in Ellenville, New York, and ate lunch with friends the way miners did centuries ago.

"We’d shut all our lights off," he said. "There’s nothing like the darkness and silence in a mine. It’s like a void. It’s both creepy and very interesting and beautiful in a way. It’s hard to explain.”

Video: Illuminating underground mines Abandoned Mine explorer Dan Lopez, with his collection of mine artifacts at his home in Vernon, N.J., explains the different ways that miners would navigate a dark mine.

Lopez documented these experiences on his now-defunct website, abandonedmines.net. It can be viewed on the Internet Archive. He has also amassed a collection of over 15,000 photographs. Some of them can be viewed on his Flickr site here.

The origins of an explorer

"Ever since I was a kid I always like tunnels," said Lopez.

Long before Lopez became "Miner Dan," spending hours engrossed in old books searching for the perfect mines to explore, he was a kid who happened upon an abandoned railroad tunnel.

He was 13 years old when he entered the old rock tunnel in Fairview near his home at the time and exited a mile away near the Hudson River in Edgewater. He always wondered about the brick ventilation shaft he came across during that first excursion. It jutted out midway through the tunnel up into the sky. Years later he figured out the other end of the smokestack poked out of the ground behind a home in Fairview.

In 2003, Lopez took a tour of the The Sterling Hill Mining Museum in Ogdensburg.

"I thought it was fascinating," he said.

The tour guide told him there were over 400 mines in New Jersey, and Lopez' interest was piqued.

"Then I went on a quest to find them all," he said with laughter thinking back on the beginning of an odyssey that lasted until 2012.

How do you find hidden mines?

Finding them wasn't easy. There were no maps readily available back then. An online search wouldn't get you very far.

"It’s actually a little better now," Lopez said.

The New Jersey Department of Environmental now has a substantial collection of data online about the abandoned mines in the state, last updated in 2011. For the abandoned mines in Ringwood, for example, there are 53 pages of surface and subsurface maps.

Video: Discovering abandoned mines Vernon N.J.'s Dan Lopez explains how he used old books and maps to find abandoned mines he could explore. Lopez spent nearly a decade exploring mines in N.J., N.Y., and Pa. with a crew of friends.

The old surface maps are historic, with some going back to 1867. So one couldn't plug an address into Google Maps on their smart phone and take a Sunday drive to an abandoned mine. Finding them would still take some of the same detective work that Lopez employed. The website mindat.org, which went live in 2000, publishes some of the locations of abandoned mines.

Some of the old books, maps, and geology reports the DEP's Division of Water Supply and Geoscience used for its study, were the same ones Lopez had tapped into years earlier.

Lopez said a great source of information for him is a book he refers to as the "mining bible" for New Jersey mines. Written by William Bayley in 1910, "Iron Mines and Mining in New Jersey" is a must have for mine lovers.

The book is filled with more than 500 pages of details about the mines. The key though, is the large fold-out map that comes in an envelope slipped into the back of the book.

The book, he said, is really rare, but he was able to track down an old copy that still had the map. The DEP has since archived the book online with the map as the last pages.

Lopez said he had a lot of fun overlaying the old maps with current maps and trying to pinpoint the location of the mines.

"I would start walking into the woods and the first thing you want to find is a mine road," he said. "Because every mine had a road to it."

He said the old mine roads look like little trails now.

"They're really eroded," he said.

Lopez developed an eye for spotting tailing piles - big piles of rocks that were mined but tossed aside because they didn't contain ore.

"You knew you found a mine when you found tailing piles," he said.

What he found

Most of the mines were flooded and basically looked like ponds from the surface. When in operation, the mines were pumped dry, but over the years they filled up with water. There often isn't much to see, Lopez said.

"That’s one of the most expensive parts of running a mine," Lopez said. "Is dewatering."

Lopez then concentrated on locating horizontal entrances, known as adits.

"The crown jewel of exploring mines is when you found an adit," Lopez said. He used the 1910 book and located all adits or horizontal tunnels. He said most of the ones he found, were caved in.

Lopez became adept at spotting tunnel portals. He then spent hours with his crew searching for them in the woods, and just as long digging them out.

"We used to think they were caved but one day we took a shovel and we started digging one and we actually opened up the mine portal," he said.

Centuries of erosion and leaves had buried the openings to many. The others had been reclaimed and buried by the state.

Lopez and his crew closed all the mine entrances they had to open in order to gain entry and explore.

"We didn’t want anybody to go back in," he said. "We never gave locations to anybody. We were very tight with locations. We would seal them back up and it was just our own personal experience, which is cool."

Mines, Lopez said can be dangerous spaces. The federal Bureau of Land Management has acknowledged the issue by forming AbandonedMines.gov, a group dedicated to securing the estimated 500,000 abandoned mines in the U.S.

Hidden underground danger: North Jersey's 600 abandoned mines

Through the forest

Lopez said an abandoned mine in Hackettstown really stood out. The entrance is on the side of a steep overgrown and thorny hill, he said. It took miles of hiking through dense forest and a steep mountainside to locate it, he said.

"It’s like trying to find somebody who laid down in the forest," he said. "It’s really hard. We knew the general location."

There were three tunnels into the mountain and the one Lopez and his crew dug open went in about 300 feet, he said. This is where, for the first time, he came across a winze, or a shaft that runs from the floor of the mine to another level.

"That was really cool because we’ve never seen that," he said of the discovery. "They probably had ladders there when it was mining." Now he said, it’s just a hole.

Lopez said the Mount Hope mines were impressive and tremendously deep — 3,000 feet deep.

"They scare me to death," he said of the deep mines.

Those are fenced off and completely dry.

"You can have a lot of fun throwing rocks down the shaft and just hear it endlessly bounce back and forth," Lopez said.

Lopez spent about four years exploring abandoned mines in New Jersey before moving on to cement mines in New York and coal mines in Pennsylvania. He said copper mines at the Delaware Water Gap were impressive and had an old mine road that ran all the way up to Kingston, New York. Those, he said, were made by Dutch miners.

Are mines safe?

Lopez said the New Jersey mines are safe to explore because they were drilled into hard rock. He said The Highlands area of New Jersey is where all the iron mines are located. "It’s all real solid rock. They are super strong. They will be there for thousands of years."

The coal mines of Pennsylvania were dug into soft rock so they had a lot of collapses, he said.

Lopez said his scariest exploration moment was in Rosendale, New York. The cement mines in Rosendale are room and pillar mines the size of an auditorium and a mile underground, Lopez said, adding an 18-wheeler can drive into one.

He descended with the use of a rope and landed on a muddy ledge near a 100-foot drop.

"I was literally a couple inches from a death plunge," he said. "And there was nothing on the bottom except rocks and stuff. That shook me up a lot."

He panicked, and while shaking, managed use his ascenders to climb out.

Lopez considers himself lucky to have escaped injury.

Video: Inside abandoned Raynor Mine tunnel Explorer Dan Lopez takes us inside an abandoned mine tunnel at the Raynor Mine in Warwick, N.Y.

Road trip

Lopez, his voice full of excitement, pointed out a few must sees during a recent tour of the Raynor Mine in Warwick, New York.

It's an open cut iron mine that is accessible from the side of a road in the woods.

During the trek, a vertical flooded shaft is the first sign a mine is near. Large wood beams are visible just beneath the water. Further into the forest there is a series of deep, narrow pits that litter the area along the old mine road.

After a series of open veins and cuts, while on hands and knees, he points out the partially-accessible tunnel that's emerging. A cross-cut tunnel splits off inside and a large vertical crack at the end reveals a cavernous-like expanse.

This particular mining experience was a mere 2.5 on a scale of 1 to 10, Lopez said.

Video: Open cuts, veins, shaft at Raynor Mine Exploring some open cuts, veins, and a shaft at Raynor Mine in Warwick, N.Y. with Dan Lopez.

Thinking back on his time exploring mines, Lopez said he came to realize he was searching for something.

"I think that I was searching for a deeper meaning to things and I went in those mines to find them," he said.

Email: Agnish@northjersey.com