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, 2002 -- 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.
Another theory: He was looking for gold. "You do get gold fever," said one local prospector. "You just have to keep going, the next foot, the next rock, is going to be the strike."
But Schmidt passed right by rich mineral deposits that indicate the presence of gold.
In other words, at some point, the tunnel became an end it itself — and finishing it his sole obsession.
"Anyone who spends that much time alone, there has to be a spiritual component to it," says Younkin. "There's a lot of meditation going on. You couldn't do that kind of thing otherwise."
"He just committed himself to finishing that tunnel," she adds. "And I think he felt as long as he was working on it, he was going to live."
Sharp Turn Near the End
Schmidt tunneled straight through for a third of a mile. By then, he was 60 years old. Afraid he was running out of time, he took a sharp right turn with his digging, the shortest route to the outside of the mountain. And as the next years passed, and he grew older, the tunnel grew narrower.
"As you get older," observed one tourist, "you kind of tend to slow down and get smaller. It's kind of a metaphor, maybe, for his life."
Schmidt died in 1954 and is buried not far from the tunnel that consumed so many of his years.
Despite its remote location, the tunnel still attracts tourists, who have a wide range of reactions. "It's a monument to persistence," says one. "It's a monument to futility," says another. And almost all of them ask, "Was he crazy?"
Caretaker Ayres has an answer for them. "His theory was the harder he worked, the longer he lived. He lived until he was 82. So it worked for him. So maybe he wasn't so crazy after all."