Funding Gaps Delay Empire Mine Tunnel Billed As Big Potential Tourist Attraction

GRASS VALLEY, Calif. (CBS13) - Taking a trip back in time to the gold rush days could get a lot easier once tours at a local mine resume.

The tour at Empire Mine is billed as the closest anyone will get to being a miner.

"They're going to have on hard little hats, lights on the hard hats they're going to have a raincoat on because it's going to be wet in there," said Empire Mine Park Association President Larry Skinner.

Visitors will squeeze into a mine car and head in for a firsthand look at mining through history – from the 1930s, back to 1905, to the late 1880s.

"This is realistic. This is the way the miners went in. They were very tightly packed," said Skinner.

But right now nobody's seeing anything inside the mine. Construction of the 850-foot tunnel has dragged on more than a decade with stops and starts due to lack of money.

These days, park volunteers are telling the state department of parks and recreation to finish what it started. They're pushing for more funding to complete the underground tour and finally get it open. The tunnel is now a tantalizing 90 percent complete.

Some of the struts inside the tunnel have corroded and need to be replaced.

"And hopefully find some way to go that extra 10 yards get it over the goal line and get it open again," said Matthew Green, California State Parks Sierra Gold district superintendent.

Tens of thousands of people visit the historic park every year.

"It'd be really neat to get further down and even getting this far is really interesting," said mine visitor Rob Potter.

When the new tourist attraction opens, the yearly economic impact is estimated to be in the millions of dollars. It is predicted to be a new kind of gold rush in historic gold country.

The hope is to have the underground tour open by 2016.