The strange story of Schmidt the mole man, who spent half his life digging a tunnel and went missing

In the southwestern part of the USA, on the territory of the states of California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah, the Mojave Desert stretches. This is an uncomfortable place where the temperature rises to +54 degrees in summer and drops below zero in winter. There are many mysterious and simply interesting places in these expanses, and one of them is the William Henry Schmidt tunnel. Its length is more than two kilometers and it leads nowhere.

William Schmidt lived alone on a farm in the depths of the desert and did not communicate with anyone. No one, not even the local sheriff, knew for many years that he started digging a tunnel underground in 1900. And when they found out about the farmer's work and began to question him, he answered briefly and incomprehensibly — "I'm looking for the shortest way."

Schmidt was considered crazy and this is quite understandable. The fruits of his labor are impressive in their scope and uselessness. An underground gallery with a length of 2087 meters took 32 years of the life of an amateur miner. What he was looking for and whether he found it in the end, no one knows. He just disappeared, leaving the gate to his mine open and taking a minimum of things from home.

One day the locals noticed that Schmidt had not been seen for a long time. They noticed that his mine was open and decided that trouble had happened to the "mole man". Mojave is an inhospitable place, with rattlesnakes, scorpions, spiders and dust tornadoes. But everyone logically assumed that something had happened to an already elderly farmer underground, for example, a landslide.

A small group of locals led by the sheriff approached the underground entrance. Having shouted enough and not getting an answer from the depths, the representative of the authorities with several desperate guys entered the vaults. The sheriff and his companions walked a couple of hundred meters and returned speechless. The passage, pierced with a pick and shovel, was not going to end, but it looked very unreliable.

Therefore, reassuring themselves that Schmidt would be found by himself, the rescuers went home. But the Mole Man didn't show up a week later. I had to go to the tunnel again, but this time with professionals of underground searches. And only then it became clear that the farmer had dug more than two kilometers. The tunnel, 1.8 meters high and 3 meters wide, ended in a dead end, in which a wheelbarrow and several shiny stones were lying.

It was not difficult to determine what a stubborn man worked with. The tunnel floor was littered with broken tools, including picks, shovels and wheelbarrows. Rails were laid on the floor of the gallery for a trolley, which Schmidt began to use quite recently.

Shiny stones are pyrite. A mineral with a copper luster, lying next to copper or... gold. Because of this, the local authorities have several hypotheses about where Schmidt went. The most likely was that William was looking for gold and in 1938 abandoned this venture and left.

According to another version, the cunning man found a vein, worked it out and got away with the gold. It was possible that he was just a madman with an obsession. The Schmidt Tunnel can still be seen now - it attracts tourists and romantics, although it is increasingly unsafe every year.