Ruggles Mine and the Fine Art of Digging

The Girls Get Filthy In All The Best Ways

Arch within an arch at Ruggles Mine

I bang my head against the ceiling of the low cave so hard, the mica dust gets permanently embedded in my baseball cap. The girls giggle of course.

We are exploring Ruggles Mine in Grafton, NH, an enormous former mine site recently re-opened as a tourist destination. The girls are wet, filthy, caked with mud and dirt, and mica flakes speckle their faces like glitter. In other words, they love it here.

“Bend down daddy,” Little Bean calls out from ahead, where her and her friend Morgie are having no trouble exploring the dark, tight, claustrophobic cave.

I have to get down on my knees to make it over to where they are digging. After we escape that particular tunnel, owner Joe “Prospector Joe” Bodge happens to be tooling by on a golf cart equipped with mud tires. Prospector Joe and his family reopened the mine as a tourist attraction just this past June after the site had been closed since 2016. This was after a year of renovation and reconstruction as the site had been damaged by vandals and graffiti.

Prospector Joe sees me rubbing my bruised noggin’ and nods knowingly. “Yup, that’s why I call that one the kids tunnel!”

Here’s the thing about this place. You’re going to get dirty. They encourage you to get dirty. Or wet. Ruggles Mine is wild adventure barely contained. There’s nothing here that you’ll fall off of (mostly) or stab yourself on (mostly) but you’ll get bruised. Little Bean took a tumble skittering up a rocky slope and came away with a decent brush burn which she nearly immediately forgot about as soon as she saw the next tunnel. Morgie went half way into the cold cave pond full of algae and slime and came back up happily holding a frog.

This place is a throw-back to those days when I just went outside. Just outside - when you’d get on your bike and ride out with your friends to that field at the end of your street by the railroad tracks and dig around for a while, and maybe find some cool rocks, and you’d come home battered and beat up and toss the rocks into your coffee can in the garage.

They don’t want you chopping away at the walls or using hammers or pick-axes, but nothing else is off limits so we brought our own shovels and garden hoes and Home Depot buckets and off we went. Basically, you pay to get down into the mine and whatever you bring out is yours to take home. Just like those days on my bike.

There’s a lot of quartz down there and enormous, beautiful sheets of paper thin mica. Prospector Joe tells me they occasionally find some Fool’s Gold down in them parts, and the girls swear we brought home a clump of the stuff, but I’m not so sure.

The mine also has some uranium-ore minerals, like gummite, which can light up under UV light. In a recent news article, Prospector Joe said to not worry about the uranium since “it’s not enough for the government to have an interest.”

The mine walls rise 60 feet over us and the whole area is pretty self-contained. It’s tough for anyone to get lost down there so when we walk down the long ramp into the mine area and Little Bean says, “Daddy, where do we go?” my answer is “Stick together, but go anywhere you want” and off they run.

The mine features dozens of little and big dark tunnels and trails running this way and that. Under an archway at the far end of the tunnel, the girls find a whole colony of enormous frogs in a tiny swampy wet area and spend a lot of time in the mud playing with them. Later they describe to me seeing a long black snake with a golden ring around its neck, which is probably a Northern Ringneck.

And in their favorite place in the whole mine, the enormous water cave with the vaulted arches, they discover some orange Eastern Newts.

This is where they spend the majority of their time, wading through the mineral rich, sitting water inside this huge chasm of a cave, lifting rocks, digging in the mud, calling out echos.

This is all charming and raw, unlike anything any of us have ever done. Basically, the owners bought a century old mine, carved some paths here and there, provided the curious with shovels and said… Get digging!

We’re there for three hours. Slowly, the buckets get filled. The trick, of course, is getting our finds back to our car. Sidenote: A Home Depot orange bucket filled to the top with rocks is very, very heavy.

Find mudhole. Get in. Play with frogs.

We finally drag ourselves out of the mine. The girls work together to carry the smaller bucket while I get the Home Depot bucket which I have to carry ten steps at a time. They change clothes before getting anywhere near the car and then we throw everything, the boots and sopping clothes and filthy rocks, into the back.

They eat all our snacks in about five seconds and we talk about rocks all the way home.

The mine closes for the season on October 13. That gives you about a month.

You won’t find a water slide or a fancy gift shop. The rest rooms are porta-potties. There isn’t a cafeteria or pizza or chili.

This is a place to dig in, to come away with black fingernails and green water in your boots. I can’t recommend it enough, and neither can the girls.

As she’s sliding off her muck boots, and tipping them to pour out the water, Little Bean says, “We have to come back and this time we’ll bring more buckets.”

What your hands should look like in Ruggles Mine!