Ruin of the White Root Mine

July 26, 2010 · Posted in Gunma, Haikyo, Mines / Factories

The White Root mine is old, so old that only the faintest outlines of its bones remain. Squint hard and you might see fragments of its ribcage scattered over the hillside, parts of a cracked skull just visible through the topsoil. Once it must have been huge, swathing up and down the valley and pumping out smoke, now there’s just a single slurry run and a few walls left.

I went there ages ago, on the same road trip that took me to the Gunma Ski Lift, Hume Cement Factory, and back to the Asama Volcano Museum.

Some kind of storage vat, I wager.

I was pretty disappointed with the White Root mine, to be frank. We went far out of our way, huffed for 20 minutes up an overgrown hiking trail, and found a few bits of concrete sticking out of the dirt like gravestones. I took what photos I could, but the mid-day light was so harsh that all of them came out badly. I decided they weren’t good enough to post, and wrote the place off as a bad job.

Then I tried some black and white posts on another location. Black and whiting saved the photos in that case, so I tried it again with these, combining that with HDR. What we get is a far cry from what my camera initially captured, and far more interesting to look at.

A slurry tunnel.

Inside the vat.

Underneath, a waterfall of bits of wood.

Scrubby hillsides and harsh light.

See a curation of world ruins in the ruins gallery.

See my collection of Japanese ruins (haikyo) in the galleries:

Comments

5 Responses to “Ruin of the White Root Mine”

Tornadoes28 says:

July 26, 2010 at 11:46 am

Very cool photos in black and white.

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David Meyer says:

July 27, 2010 at 9:42 am

Beautiful photos, Mike. Glad you were able to resurrect them with a bit of tech magic.

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MJG says:

July 28, 2010 at 12:12 am

Thanks guys, glad to have gotten some use of these shots after being so disappointed initially.

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Houma says:

August 2, 2010 at 5:05 am

Wow, these photos are very surreal! Some of them don’t even look like real photographs and look more like a computer rendering. Very interesting and I love the look of these!

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MJG says:

August 5, 2010 at 10:40 am

Houma- Thanks, and yes they are a little bit computer generated, having been run through a process called HDR blending, which means combining several different exposures of a given shot into one image.

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