Mine tour: Into the belly of the Devil

The mine tour takes you 290m into the bowels of the 89-year-old Mount Diablo’s foothills. Photos: Sacramento Bee/TNS

They call it a portal but, really, it’s more like a gaping maw. The opening’s steel-enforced gates, padlocked, take on an almost predator-like aspect, a gangster’s grill-work sneering back at you. A dozen of us stood before this threshold, awaiting entrance, staring at the concrete portico bearing the chiselled inscription, “1930,” and trying not to obsess over minute cracks in the foundation.

Our guide for the morning, Mickey Rovere, sought to reassure us – and by us, I mean just me and maybe that wary eight-year-old in the back – of the safety of the Hazel-Atlas Mine, a long-dormant operation that extracted first coal, then silica, from the foothills abutting Mount Diablo. But, in the very act of assurance, in his repeated furrowed-brow recitation of preventive measures and liberal use of the phrase “structural integrity,” Rovere only heightened my anxiety.