Kansas Underground Salt Museum

Giant underground room in the Hutchinson Salt Mine

"Back to the salt mine" usually doesn't mean fun, but dropping down into the old salt mine in Hutchinson, Kansas is actually pretty nice.

To get to the mine, an elevator drops you 650 feet down in about a minute and a half.

When the mine opened in 1923, the owner hailed it as the "most modern in the world."  Miners used what was then new technology to excavate vast "rooms" in the salt vein.  They would drill into a wall of salt, place explosives, then blast off a layer.  Big machines would crush it into gravel, then elevators would haul it to the surface.

Picking up souvenir chunks of rock salt

The method is called room-and-pillar for reasons that are pretty obvious once you're in the mine.  It's a series of enormous rooms with big pillars of salt left standing between them to hold up the roof.

The size of the rooms is amazing.  They're also cold, so if you go, even in summer, take a sweatshirt or coat.

Down in the mine, you can see where equipment scraped salt from the walls, the equipment miners used for blasting and crushing the salt, the underground rail line that hauled crushed salt to the elevators and you can pick through a pile of salt rocks for specimens to take home with you.  It's all pretty interesting.

No one is producing commercial salt from the mine anymore, but it's still in use. It's now a secure, constant-temperature, underground storage site.  It holds everything from corporation records props and prints of old Hollywood movies.