Strataca Underground Salt Museum, Kansas

Checked out of Lake Scott State Park in the morning, headed to Hutchinson, KS to visit the Strataca Underground Salt Mine and Museum. This is also a working mine, producing road salt only, not table salt. I bought the ticket online, arrived an hour before the 1 pm tour and found that I was the only one scheduled for that time slot. I donned a hard hat and was escorted to the mine shaft elevator which took 90 seconds to descend to the mine (in darkness). There were a few other visitors already in the underground museum which offered a self-guided tour. The exhibits and videos placed through the tunnels gave a history of the mine and the process for extracting salt from it. At the end of the exhibit was the train ride through parts of the mine with narration to explain what we were seeing. This was followed by a shuttle dark ride where we passed artifacts, boxes of dynamite, old equipment and trash left behind from the old days. The shuttle stopped for a couple of minutes to allow visitors to take a few salt rocks for souvenirs (a small cloth bag was provided).

The photos above are above ground, the rest are of the underground museum. At one point during the dark ride, the tour guide pointed to the ceiling where a road sign was posted informing us that we were directly under that same road we had driven earlier to get to the parking lot of the museum. And yes, someone asked about the possibility that the ceiling will collapse on this: we were assured that this was not going to happen.