Life underground

Mining; its a Sweetwater County thing. More so, it is the livelihood of many Green River and Rock Springs residents, and is an important economic powerhouse for the community. The mines located in Sweetwater County are all in the top 30 percentile of taxes paid to the county. Trona mines make up 19 percent of Sweetwater County's total county evaluation. Mineral production and industrial accounts make up almost 89 percent of the entire evaluation. "And that doesn't account for jobs, or people buying houses that work out there. Trona is a big deal to our county," Sweetwater County Assessor Pat Drinkle said.

Oil and gas make up a bigger percentage than trona, natural gas makes up the largest percentage of the minerals.

"Gas definitely makes up more but when gas goes down, the great thing about trona is its holding steady all the time. Trona just keeps plugging away," Drinkle said. "And so when we see a big dip in gas or oil, we know that we're not going to take that big of hit in the county. We're still going to take a hit, but not a huge hit because we're not reliant just on oil and gas. We have the other minerals that we can fall back on."

The trona mines are vital to our community, Drinkle says, in the evaluation and the jobs they help produce, immediate and beyond.

"It's not just the people that they employ there, it's everybody that has a work relationship with those mines," Drinkle said.

So how many people do the mines employ exactly? Paul Peterson, vice president of manufacturing at Tata Chemicals estimates there are about 4,000 people employed between the four mine sites. Between Sweetwater and Uinta County, there are about 530 people employed at Tata Chemical. He estimates about 70 percent are from Sweetwater county.

"If the mines were not here, the only industry that would be left would be the railroad. I would expect Green River and Rock Springs to dry up and blow away if these mines were not here," Peterson said. "They're a big deal just because they offer very good jobs. There's a lot of money that's put back into the community because of the mining operations that are here. These are some of the best jobs in the country."

Underground at Tata

A tour of the underground mining operations at Tata open up a widely unknown world to the average citizen's eyes. It is, as many mine employees describe it, an underground city. The shaft elevator makes it's way down, deep into the earth's surface, down to where many of the mine employees reside on a daily or nightly basis. The elevator eventually opens up into a vast dusty stone tunnel shaped cavern or roadway of sorts. From there, it is a short walk down the dusty trona stone hallway and around a corner and down a ways through another long corridor to the garage where underground vehicles are kept. A jeep is driven the length of the mine, about 11 miles of underground mined roadway, to where the current mining is taking place. The jeep passes other vehicles along the way, each driver turning their opposite headlight on as to not shine the other in the face.

On the way through the vast underground city of mined tunnels, there is an inlet where there is a group of employees sitting at a table during their lunch break for their 12-hour work day. Caleb Bestgen, senior mine engineer of the group, grew up in Green River and has been working at Tata for a total of three years now and recently helped sink the new number seven shaft for the mine.

"That's a unique career opportunity," Caleb Bestgen said.

He spends one to two days underground per week. The day consisted of surveying for them, going through the mine to make sure the pillars are cut to the correct dimensions. They are more than comfortable working there, underground.

"It's just about as safe as working at your desk. The guys are pretty good about making sure things are bolted up and secured," Bestgen said. "A lot of people are scattered though the mine. You get to go and do your own thing. It's a close-knit community down here. It's a pretty good place."

It didn't take long for Bestgen to adjust to working underground because his dad was a mining engineer before him. The newness and "neatness" wears off eventually for every miner.

"It kind of becomes just part of work," Bestgen said. "More than how neat it was the first time. That first experience is 'Wow, this is neat. There's big equipment under her, its a city here."'

"It's pretty neat. Not many people around the world end up in mines. It's one of those industries, it's small, but it's essential. Everything in the world comes from a mine or was grown, so there's job security," Bestgen said. "At the end of the day, it's something you can look at. Every room you look at, somebody's mined. I could imagine it's kind of what a carpenter feels like when he finishes a grandfather clock or something."