After yesterday's MU trip to the Hidden Treasure mine, my wife and I found our curiosity sparked by the many mine tailing piles just east of Stockton. We decided to check out the area and found that there were many more mines than appeared expected.
We found a mine (name unknown) that was accessible and explored for 20 or 30 minutes. The mine's coordinates are: 40° 27’ 17.79” N 112° 20’ 35.87” W.
We also stumbled upon what we later found out was the Honerine Mine, coordinates: 40° 27’ 28.45” N 112° 20’ 38.79” W.
We found the main adit passable and decided to go in to explore. The mine had many tunnels and plenty of mine cart track. We also found one mine cart.
As we ventured deeper into the mine we found old spools for wire, maybe communication wire. These spools were found every so many hundred feet.
We came upon a small incline shaft that still had the mine cart track in it. In this same room I spotted what seemed like a large piece of I-beam steel but upon closer look found it to be track. But this wasn’t any old mine cart track, this track was the size of railroad track. We found this interesting and thought maybe it had fallen down from and upper level or even a different mine located above us.
There were multiple small collapses in the main adit tunnel but these were passable traversing over them. Some offshoot tunnels had waste rock back-fill.
Both my wife and I were really excited to find such an extensive mine that we didn’t even know was there and that was open. We were eager to tell MU all about our find. This excitement and joyful mood all changed in a moment as we came to the end of the main tunnel.
Somewhere around a mile and half to two miles in we came into an open room which was the end of the main passage. The room had a deep shaft which the mine cart rails spanned, a water tank, and a winch. The first thing to spark both our interest was a painted message on the water tank. I could make out what looked like “RING TON” which I figured was something miners had wrote dealing something with tons of rock or ore. Then my wife read what looked like it said “REMIHA.” Remiha didn’t make any sense at all to me. Just before REMIHA I saw the letters JE and that’s when I figure it all out, REMIHA was part of what was JEREMIHA and reading the rest of the tank the name ETHERINGTON.
Early in the day down in the Hidden Treasure mine, Stuart was explaining to our group some spray painted logos that were the tag of a teenager, Jeremiah Etherington. Jeremiah would explore mines and leave his logo spray painted on the walls of the mines he explored. Stuart also told us how Jeremiah had been repelling down a shaft inside a mine near Stockton with his friends and ended up falling to his death. Search and Rescue workers had tried to recover the body and ended up giving up on it. That is when Jeremiah’s uncle with the help of Jeremiah’s friend repelled down and retrieved Jeremiah’s body from under a pile of rubble that the boy had knocked down in his fall. Jeremiah’s friend, Corey, painted a sign where Jeremiah had died.
As soon as I realized that we were looking at that sign marking the place of Etherington’s death I began snapping pictures of the area without saying anything to my wife. I figured that I would tell my wife what we had found when we were outside of the mine to prevent spooking her. My wife seemed to have figured it out when she said that she could read “DIED” and “1-13-96.” I said, “I know but I wasn’t going to say anything about it tell later.” As I continued taking pictures of the room I was snapping a picture from behind the tank looking towards the shaft when my wife said, “Look at this” looking and pointing her light behind me with a startled look, “it is that logo Stuart was showing us earlier from that teenager with the initials J.E. next to it.” That is when it dawned on her J.E. and the words painted on the tank including “DIED” and the date it happened. In the picture I snapped you can see my wife’s expression as the scenario of the site dawned on her. I turned to see the logo, sure enough there it was along with Jeremiah’s initials and his friend Corey’s initials. Over the initials J.E. was what appeared to be a cross. My wife wasn’t spooked but she and I alike were in a different mood. I snapped some more pictures of the shaft and two other Etherington logos in the room, one with the date 1-13-96 by it.
We knew which mine we were in now, lol.
Earlier Stuart had also told us how Etherington may have been trying to get down into the Bauer tunnel which is famous for its size and the legend that a complete locomotive is in the tunnel. A thought came to me later about the railroad sized track we had found in the one incline shaft room in the mine. I don’t know if it has any connection at all with the possible locomotive down in the Bauer tunnel but it is evidence that there is larger track big enough for a locomotive in the hill.
Another thought about the small wire spools. I did some small research and found that the Honerine mine was first to have a telephone in Tooele Co. Maybe these spools were used for the phone wire in the mine. But to me the spools seem newer and the thought crosses my mine that maybe search a rescue workers had used some sort of communications to the surface.
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Here is a link to a newspaper article on the Jeremiah incident:
Etherington Accident
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You should do some research on Captain Conner and the Honering Mine. It is quite ironic that I was just telling you about Etherington and you just happened to visit the grisly scene of his last folly later that day. I would love to sit down with his buddy Corey some day and get the real version of what happened down there, I have heard three different versions of the story and don't know which one to believe. I do know for a fact that Corey and Jeremiah climbed, descended, and squeezed into some of the most sketchy of places inside all the mines out in that area. Just yesterday I dropped down that winze with Miah and Crystal and right at the bottom found the initials JE 95 and "Greatest Miner Ever" Corey B. I'm not sure how they got down that winze, but I highly doubt it was done with the proper safety gear. It really is too bad it all ended for them the way it did. 
