CREEDE, Colo. — On a chilly, windy Saturday, a woman went for a hike and ended up discovering an elk stuck in an abandoned mine in the upper Rio Grande Valley near Creede, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW).
“I don’t know what it was, but something was drawing me to go up there,” Chere Waters said in a release from CPW.
She took a blustery walk up the hillside on April 18 and her intuition led her to a trail off Bachelor Loop Road just outside Creede. She told her hiking partner they would visit an area she'd been to years ago and recalled seeing a mineshaft.
Waters said she surprised herself when she walked the mile from her vehicle right up to the opening. She saw the hole from about 10 yards away and tossed a rock in, hoping to get a sense of the depth of the shaft.
She was scared, according to CPW, but wanted to peer inside so she “belly crawled” on the ground and had her friend hold onto her ankles so she could peer over the edge.
“So I looked in and see this animal in there. I was so surprised, I couldn’t believe it,” Waters recalled.
Inside that mineshaft, they discovered a 250-pound cow elk. She didn’t bring her phone, but her friend did, and they contacted the sheriff’s office around 2 p.m. A little over an hour later, Wildlife Officers Brent Woodward and Jeremy Gallegos arrived, along with Mineral County Sheriff’s deputies.
“When I got the call, I was told that a deer was stuck in a hole,” Woodward said in a release. “But they thought the shaft was only about 10 feet deep. When I got there, I could see it was an elk and it was probably 30 feet down.”
He could also see the animal’s tracks at the edge of the hole.
Woodward darted the elk from above with a tranquilizer to knock it out temporarily. The shaft was not too far from an old four-wheel drive trail, so they were able to get vehicles close. Using a winch from one of the trucks, Terry Wetherill, the Mineral Count emergency and search and rescue manager, was lowered into the hole.
He estimated the size at about 10 feet by 3 feet, so he had enough room to place some straps around the animal.
He said that over the years he’s pulled deer and elk out of barbed-wire fences, “but I’ve never had to pull one out of a hole.”
In 1889, miners flocked to Creede at the start of a silver boom. Wetherill said there are dozens of old mine shafts in the area, but most of them have collapsed and filled in over the years. He said he had been told about many, but not about the one where the elk fell. The walls of the shaft are still secured with timbers, and the opening has probably been there for more than 100 years, according to Wetherill.
“It’s dangerous, it’s in the shadows and until you’re 20 feet away, you don’t see it,” he said.
Wetherill said they're talking to officials at the Rio Grande National Forest office and Mineral County to determine ownership of the shaft so that it can be covered.
The elk was pulled up slowly and Woodward described its condition as “pretty beat up.”
He thought it could have been there for two or three days.
“It’s amazing that those ladies saw it,” Woodward said.
Once it was out of the hole, wildlife officers allowed the elk to lie on the ground for about 15 minutes while they examined its condition. Then Gallegos administered a drug that reverses the tranquilizer effects. It took a few minutes for it to stand up on shaky legs.
“When she stood up, she moved a few yards, turned and looked at us for a few seconds and then turned and trotted away," Woodward said. "It was great that we could get her out alive."
Waters and her friend stayed for the rescue and took pictures. She said they were so happy that the elk survived.
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