In 1906, miner William Henry “Burro” Schmidt began excavating a tunnel through the El Paso Mountains. A dangerous ridge separated his mining claims from routes toward the Mojave smelter, so he started cutting through solid rock instead of hauling ore over the terrain.
Schmidt used hand tools and dynamite and continued year after year. During construction, road improvements made the tunnel unnecessary, but he kept digging. By 1938 the passage extended roughly half a mile through the mountain.
The strange ending is that the tunnel never became the ore-hauling route it was intended to be. It became famous because of the enormous labor invested in a shortcut that transportation improvements had already rendered obsolete. The site later appeared in Ripley’s Believe It or Not and California-history programs.
The tunnel is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Cabins, mine-related remains and tunnel portals survive in a remote landscape, but old mine workings, rough roads and disputed access make the area hazardous. ODDKNOWN treats it as an abandoned engineering mystery rather than a paranormal case.