A WEIRD ENCOUNTER ON BLACKLICK CREEK

In the Spring of 1996 a friend and I ran the South Branch of Blacklick Creek in Western Pennsylvania . It was a nice Class II-III run at “two days after a heavy rain” level. We ran into a unique hazard which we thankfully avoided. About a half mile below the put-in at Twin Rocks we came around a moderately sharp sweeping turn with a cliff on the outside and noticed a hole near the cliff. The hole was a mine shaft and it was swallowing about a fourth of the river. It  looked big enough to pull in a lot more water. We wondered where the water went (we know of a discharge about six miles downstream) and then said, “What would this be like at high water? The thought of a whirlpool leading to an abandoned underground coal mine was the stuff of nightmares.

SOURCE: rec.boats.paddle