AZTEK DIVER
Contributor
We've never seen any frogs or anything else living in our mine water, but they do pipe it down the mountain for cattle and wildlife water so we're probably ok. Our water does dissolve alumunum cans, though it takes a couple years. Old mines are pretty cool, ours has oar cars and tracks, a wheel barrow and several hand tools. It's also the meanest inviroment I've ever been in, swimming under 100 year old wooden platforms with 20' of built up silt an rock on them, perculation and any fin movement will stir the silt, and once it's stirred you have a week to wait before it's divable again. Walls so flat black that 18w hid's look like backup lights, then you pop into a room that's coated with copper oxide, and the whole room is just the most beautiful blue color. Like any cave, the more you dive it, the more all the silt ends up on the floor, so at least the perculation problem gets better. We would spend about 4+ hours getting the gear into the mountain where the water is, then if your careful you can get 2 dives in over a weekend before the silt gets too bad, then 4 more hours getting it all out again. We spent most of our time working at the 160' level because there's lots of tunnel there, the 55 degree water and 5000' altitude helps to keep it interesting. What a person won't do to find a wet hole to dive in.
