My friend, Martie, has been suggesting a visit to this place for years. When I saw them on the Harvest Host map, I knew it was time to stop, do a tour, then spend the night in their parking lot.

The Strataca Museum is located 650 feet below the city of Hutchinson, Kansas. This is an active salt mine; currently the Hutchinson Salt Company uses the “room and pillar” method, which we will see below. Square-shaped caverns are excavated using explosives with about 25% of the salt left behind as supporting pillars. This salt is hauled out by conveyer belt and processed for icy roads and animal feed. There are 150 miles of tunnels underground, some of which we get to visit on the tour.

Salt for human consumption is also mined in town, including Cargill Morton Salt, where they form wells, pump in water to dissolve the salt, pump out the salty water (brine), and dry it for use. This makes a really pure form of salt.

We started in the lobby topside, where displays are set up to occupy our time while we wait for our tour to begin. I didn’t end up with pictures from the history room, but it shows examples of the salt and has displays through time of the industry here. Geologically, we are at the Permian Period with this layer of salt, which puts us even further back in time than the Petrified Forest we were seeing in Arizona.

The movie props shown below are a nod to the Kansas/Oklahoma setting of “Twister: (1996). The iconic farm house where the F-5 tornado hits toward the end of the movie is in Iowa. Our daughter, Lauren, and her partner, Bonnie, visited it recently:)

When it was our turn for the tour to begin we watched a short safety video, get our hard hats, and enter the elevator that will take 90 seconds to deliver us to the rest of the museum below. There are two elevators, one on top of the other to transport about 30 people at a time.

The museum gallery down in the mine has a history of mining with the tools of the trade on display. They have come across bubbles of water that have been trapped since the Permian Period with live bacteria in them. There was a whole display done on the science behind providing evidence that these were ancient bacteria rather than modern ones introduced by our tools. We also saw bomb shelter storage from the Cold War still here. Bet those crackers are yummy!

We took a train ride that shows areas with old mining artifacts, including trash left behind, a toilet area, and a cavern where the ceiling is now on the floor. After the train ride, we walked through underground storage where irreplaceable things like Hollywood films, memorabilia, and important documents are stored.

We also got a ride through tunnels to see some of the geology and beauty of the mines, the current monitoring of stability, and to select our own (fist-sized or smaller) sample of salt to take home with us.

And now that we are amazed at salt mining and impressed with the facility here, we exit to find that it is really hot with no shade in the parking lot. We ran the a/c for the cats while we were inside, but now, as there are several hours of daylight left, we need to take a drive to charge up the batteries. We find a Harvest Host in Emporia that takes same-day requests, put in a request, and start driving in hopes that they say yes. A local RV park will be our back-up. We’ll be fine with fully charged batteries and fewer hours of sunlight left by the time we get to Emporia. A safe place to park for the night and a shorter drive home tomorrow sounds nice.