20 | July | 2024 | Tales from the Hutt

Monday, 24-June-2024

After exploring the graduation tower, and braving the heat and light of the day, I was ready to descend back into the cool salty depths of the welcoming Earth.

I mentioned that, back when I was first looking at visiting Wieliczka, I realize that I’d need to book tours to explore the mines. And that, if I needed to book them anyways, I may as well pre-book… so I went online, read up on the options, and tracked down some tickets. I picked the Tourist’s route, of course, as it was the most popular and most extensive… but I saw a second options as well called The Miner’s Route.

The Miner’s route included a disclaimer – warning me that it would be dark, include some scrambling through tight place, and would be a bit more physically challenging than the Tourist’s Route. After seeing that, all hesitation left my mind and I got the tickets locked in.

We started off in a locker room, gearing up for our shift in the mines.

It was fairly straightforward, but still quite interesting – We had our overalls, of course, but were also issued / given a hardhat, helmet lamp, and an emergency CO2 filter mask. Cool, and a fun part of the experience, right? Well, yes… but also legally required, it turns out. See, part of this tour was that we were going into some of the semi-working mine areas. While Wieliczka isn’t a truly “Active” mine anymore, they do still extract about 10,000 tons of salt per year. That’s mainly to fill their giftshop, and pales in comparison to the 203,000 tons per year that the mine produced at its height in the interwar period from 1918 to 1939… though it quite impressive in comparison to the 8,000 tons per year extracted by the laborers back in the 14th and 15th centuries.

That brief history lesson aside, we were required to carry safety gear with us – though with the interesting caveat that the safety gear is required for coal mines, and wouldn’t be helpful in a salt mine… Which, in my mind at least, cemented the guide’s credibility. Since, let’s be honest, legal codes being written for something else, and ignoring the small outlier, really fits well with my understanding of the world we live in.

We finished gearing up, and headed into the mines.

A map of the mines, courtesy of the Wieliczka website!

The Miner’s Route was, unsurprisingly, not nearly as touristy-picturesque as the Tourist’s Route. Instead, it was more of a dive into the workings of the mines – how miners had actually extracted the salt, how they’d built the mines, and what sort of condition’s they’d had to contend with.

One of the most interesting, to me at least, was compaction – as time wore on, the mines would settle and the remaining salt would compact. The wooden support pillars would take on the weight, in theory, but over time they’d slowly get crushed until they reached an equilibrium… Our “foreman” stopped us at one area to show just how intense the compaction was – the tunnel we were currently in had shrunk significantly before reaching equilibrium, with one specific wooden log being crushed to about 1/3 of its original thickness!

We walked, navigated the corridors using a map, scrambled through small passageways, tested the air for methane, and even sawed a log! Best of all, we were “paid” for our work with small chunks of rocksalt! Interestingly, approximately the same amount that a laborer would have been paid in ages past – instead of being paid in currency, we learned, the laborers were simply paid in chucks of salt as it was equally valuable to hard coinage of the time.

While the Miner’s route wasn’t as picturesque as the Tourist’s Route, it was absolutely lovely. I believe we spent a full 3 hours in the mines, with our exploring and various activities, though it definitely felt like less. In the end we were given our miner’s certificates, took the elevator up, and returned our safety gear (thankfully) unexpended.

I packed back up my things, called myself a cab, and headed back to Krakow for some well earned dinner… amazing memories in my head, photos in my camera, and one major life goal completed.

Hurray for Wieliczka!

Monday, 24-June-2024

I ascended out of the mines, and into the Sun.

The scent of salt receded as the temperature climbed. My skin, feeling the warmth of the above-ground, rejoiced at the return of Vitamin D at first… then quickly started crying out for relief from the sweltering heat. My body rebelled at the return of the summer heat, and I consoled myself in the knowledge that I’d descend into the cool depths again shortly.

I… also contracted poetry while underground, I guess?

I had a few hours before my next shift in the dark, and intended on taking full advantage of that time. I was well fed, cooled off, and invigorated from the salt air I’d been breathing for the better part of 4 hours. I’d heard about the Graduation Tower on the first tour, and intended on exploring it as best I could.

I wandered Wieliczka a bit, checked out some statues in town, saw some pretty growing things, and made my way to the tower.

I expected a sort of medieval bastion tower, built from rocksalt as a sort of defensive position, or a place to showcase the wealth of the mines – I’d seen photos of the tower in the mines, with sheer black walls mirroring the black rock salt of the mines.

In retrospect, I should have known it wasn’t likely to be built from rock salt. Salt dissolves in water, you may recall, and as such makes for a very poor building material. In fact, one of the more recent methods of “mining” the salt from the mines had been to simply pump freshwater in, and then pump the salt-filled brine out.

Instead, the Graduation Tower was in fact a “graduation tower” – a tool used to increase the salinity of the brine water, allowing easier extraction of the salt… and, as an added bonus, creating a salt-atmosphere area that’s supposedly quite good for your health. Unexpected, but also really cool to see up close! In short, the walls are made up of bundled sticks with wooden troughs on the top, which have valves and notches to allow a steady, but slow, stream of water to run down over the bundled sticks. Water evaporates as it trickles and falls down, increasing the salinity.