B3Site

I brought my handy digital camera along when I visited the Iron Mine where the Sci Fi Channel planned on holding their RoboDeath Competition.

Though this incarnation of the competition has been cancelled, I loved the mine so much I decided to keep the pictures here.

The eerie beauty of this abandoned mine (closed in 1986, I think) was hard to escape.

Big hatch cover, with mined hills in the distance.	A hole to the nether reagions; what might be down there, my precioussss?	The direct approach	Not all who enter this realm return unscathed (true story; a survey team from a different movie had a member seriously wounded in here).
Art rarely looked so good.	Trees in the desert.

OKAY... down to business. I just had to include those previous images, because they help capture just how wild this location is.

Did I mention it's a ghost town? Just a double-handful of people live out here.

This was what the battlefield looked like when it was a mine.	An overview from the TerraServer. Notice the disks in the top-right.	Standing on the edge, looking into the pit. This is 250 feet across, and the wall is some 10 or 12 feet high. The combat arena will be built into this.	A close look at the center. That tube is thick steel, and about 4 feet across and high. We don't know how deep it is, though.
A side-view of the gravel ramp. This may be improved for the show, but right now it's about 30 degrees of hard-packed gravel. The guy at the mine says he can winch robots out, or lift them with his crane. Lots of heavy equipment nearby.	More view of the wall and upper surface. Two sides of the pit have these very sturdy fenceposts embedded in them. Some new chainlink, and some lexan, and it's the start of an audience barrier.	Just another picture from in the pit, giving some sense of scale.	Robot Central. Big. Mostly empty. 110 and 220 power available. Big fans, too, and maybe even swamp cooling!

Contents