Plugging the Thaynes Shaft with a New Method by Brian Buck and Davey Jones

Park City Museum and Friends of Ski Mountain Mining History will host a lecture called Plugging the Thaynes Shaft with a New Method given by Brian Buck and Davey Jones on Wednesday, October 21, 2026 from 5-6 p.m. held at the Education and Collections Center located at 2079 Sidewinder Drive. More information can be found at www.parkcityhistory.org. What do skier subways, underground caverns, huge foam blocks, underground waterfalls, and the highest building in the country all have in common? Why, the Thaynes mineshaft of course. Brian Buck, Friends of Ski Mountain Mining History, and David Jones, Utah Division of Oil, Gas & Mining (OGM) will describe how all the above relate to the Thaynes mineshaft. It played a one-of-a-kind role in worldwide skiing history with a subterranean skier train carrying skiers 2.5 miles into a repurposed mine tunnel where they rode a mineshaft elevator cage straight up 1,700 feet to the surface, which exceeds the elevator lift of the highest building in the country by almost 500 feet! They will also describe how conventional engineering approaches to closing this collapsing shaft would not work because of groundwater flowing into the cavern caused by the shaft collapse and how the construction team came up with a new method using custom-made foam blocks. This project brought national attention to the Thaynes shaft and the unique approach to safely close it. Brian has degrees in Geology and Geological Engineering. His career has been with the Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining, Getty Mining Company, JBR Environmental Consultants, and Stantec Consulting. All of his 49 years of professional experience has largely involved working with the mining industry in the U.S. West. Since his retirement, Brian has focused on studying the history of the Park City mining district. He joined the local Friends of Ski Mountain Mining History committee in 2016 and has been the Project Manager for their major construction projects for the last five years. Brian has presented a number of mining history lectures for the Park City Museum and written Way We Were Articles for the Park Record regarding mining. Davey Jones grew up in England and obtained a B.S. in Geography from Durham University in 2008. He moved from England to Utah in 2014. He began his career working in flood modelling, producing flood models and running risk matrices on UK postcodes to aid the insurance and re-insurance industry in assessing property flood risk. In 2015, with his move to Utah, he moved into consulting where his primary focus was the production of FEMA flood maps. In this role, he also carried out a number of field inventories of mining districts for Utah’s Division of Oil, Gas and Mining’s (OGM) Abandoned Mine Reclamation Program (AMRP). Davey moved over to work for the AMRP in 2018 as a Project Manager where he has worked on several reclamation projects, including the Defense Related Uranium Mines project, which is a multi-agency project spearheaded by the Department of Energy. He has worked on reclamation projects all over Utah including the Wasatch Front, Oquirrh mountains and in the Moab area. He was OGM’s Project Manager for the closing of the Silver King Coalition Mine shaft in 2023 and the Thaynes shaft in 2025.