Mohave Man's Tunnel to Nowhere

L A S T  C H A N C E  C A N Y O N, Calif., Feb. 8 -- It may not look like much, just a tunnel through a remote mountain in the Mojave Desert. After all, it goes nowhere, connects to nothing. People who visit invariably ask the same question: "Why?"

Why would anybody do that," asked tourist David Lawrence, who had just completed a walk through the tunnel. "Just dig and dig and dig most of their life?"

He's talking about William "Burro" Schmidt, the man who dug this tunnel.

Diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1906, Schmidt moved to the desert for his health. He was told he didn't have long to live, under the best of circumstances.

Then he began digging, one foot at a time, until he had created a tunnel a half-mile long.

It took him 38 years.

His Life's Work

"It was just a great accomplishment for one man," says Elva Younkin, curator of a museum in the Mojave Desert that chronicles Schmidt's life. "He did it all by himself. And I think he was proud of that."

He did the work by himself, along with two burros and a rail car to haul out the stone. He toiled on a very tight budget, supported by occasional prospecting jobs he found in the area.

"It cost money for the fuse and dynamite," says Younkin. "So he used very short fuses and then ran like … to get out of the way."

Schmidt lived alone in a rundown shack insulated with newspapers. But he was no hermit; the other so-called "desert rats" who lived in Last Chance Canyon came to find Schmidt's obsession with the cave endearing, even understandable.

Which gets back to the central question of "why?"

What Drove Him to Dig?

There are actually several theories.

"Burro did it for a shortcut. That's all he would ever say when he was asked for an answer," says site caretaker David Lee Ayres.

But if Schmidt had intended the tunnel as a shortcut for hauling ore down the mountain, the plan had a few holes in it. There was never a plan for a railroad siding on the other side of the mountain, which would have been necessary for such a plan to work.