I need to write this down while I still can, while I still remember the order of things.

The doctors keep asking me to go over it again, and the investigators from the Bureau of Land Management have been here three times now,

and every time I tell them what happened, they look at each other

the way people do when they think someone has lost their mind. But I haven't. I wish I had. That would be

easier. My name is Owen Price. I'm a geological surveyor for the state of Colorado, and on October 14th,

2023, I was part of a four-person team sent into the Harwell Mine Complex in Mineral County

to locate members of a previous survey crew that had entered the system nine days earlier and never came out.

The Harwell complex isn't on most maps. It was a silver mine that operated from 1881 to 1897,

and then it was a storage facility for the county until sometime in the 1920s,

and then it was nothing.

The mine connects to a natural cave system that runs deep under the mountains.

Nobody knows how deep, because nobody has ever fully mapped it.

The original miners broke through into the caves by accident in 1889,

and lost four men in the first week.

The cave system is massive, miles of it.

The county sealed the connecting tunnels in 1903, and the mine entrance was gated shut in

1951. But in 2022, a group of hikers found a new opening. A sinkhole had collapsed about a quarter

mile south of the main entrance and broken through into one of the upper galleries. That got the BLM

involved. They needed to assess the structural integrity of the upper galleries. That got the BLM involved. They needed to assess

the structural integrity of the whole system, figure out whether there was a risk of more

collapses, whether the area needed to be closed off to the public. The first survey team went in

on October 5th, six people. They had three days of supplies, a full communication

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