Mountain Rampage Read Online Free PDF Page B

waiting to be dug up and studied.”
    Jeremy gave a dismissive sniff. “Nothing’s ever fallen in here.”
    â€œThe laws of gravity aren’t suspended underground,” Chuck said. “Which is why each time we remove another board from the floor is so important.” He added a note of wonder to his voice. “Who knows what might lie below?”
    By now, Chuck knew the same thing the students knew: they wouldn’t find much, if anything, amid the broken rock and rubble, just as they and Team Paydirt had found little of note upon disassembling the rest of the tunnel’s floor over the last three weeks.
    That, in fact, was the point, as Professor Sartore had explained to Chuck when he’d suggested the students excavate the tunnel. While the excavation of the cabin site was sure to provide a trove of finds, the tunnel would provide the opportunity for the students to realistically judge whether they wanted to go into the field of archaeology after experiencing the tedious, day-in-and-day-out work and dearth of discoveries that, in truth, comprised the bulk of archaeological inquiry.
    Aside from a few rusted, Civil War-era peg nails dropped beneath the boards during the tunnel’s construction, the students had uncovered only three items of interest: a broken pickaxe tip, a soggy box of matches, and a brass lipstick container. Of the three items, only the pickaxe tip dated from the tunnel’s initial construction in the 1860s. The matches and lipstick container were from the 1950s, about the time park officials affixed the iron door to the mouth of the mine, putting an end to the increased exploration of the tunnel that had come with the completion and opening of Trail Ridge Road.
    Fortunately, the teams’ finds beneath the collapsed cabin numbered in the dozens—intact bottles, rusted tin cans, brokenchina and crockery and glass, and a few leather boot soles, dried and curled with age—precisely the type of items the National Park Service sought, by encouraging archaeological digs in its parks, for eventual display in park visitor centers and museums.
    Chuck shuttled back and forth between Team Nugget and Team Paydirt throughout the morning, assuring himself Rosie was on the mend and banishing any thoughts of how Janelle would receive him when he returned to the cabin at the end of the day. Not long before lunch, he stood with Clarence between the tripod-mounted floodlights illuminating the final stretch of the mine tunnel. They looked on as the team pried loose their sixth floorboard of the morning, this one little more than a body’s length from the end of the tunnel.
    For the past few days, in a welcome attempt at overcoming the monotony of dismantling the floor of the tunnel unrevelatory plank by unrevelatory plank, Team Nugget member Samuel had taken to injecting some showmanship into the lifting of each loosened floorboard.
    As his teammates prepared to remove the next plank, Samuel, green-eyed and sporting a prodigious, leprechaun-like red beard, stood beyond the other team members on the last of the intact flooring, his back to the chipped stone wall at the end of the tunnel. He spoke into his fist, assuming the role of a play-by-play announcer, his voice artificially deep.
    â€œAll is hushed,” he intoned into his imaginary microphone.
    Samuel’s teammates crouched, unmoving, over the loosened plank.
    â€œThe members of Team Nugget, acting as one, work their fingers under the floorboard,” Samuel continued.
    Chuck couldn’t help but smile as the five team members did as Samuel described, eliciting a quiet squeak from the loosened board as it moved in its place.
    Samuel pounded the intact floor at the end of the tunnelwith his boots. “What might be hidden beneath one of the last boards to be lifted from the floor of the famed Cordero Mine?” he asked. His breath, lit by the floodlights, clouded in the moist air of the tunnel.