Steifel Park Mine
This mine entrance was shown to biologists by local cave club member Rob Kilbert. Mr. Kilbert showed us several different mines that day, and we did not have much luck finding bats until reaching Steifel Park. This site was unusual in that the the Ellwood City Borough has reclaimed a strip mine by constructing two baseball fields and a maintenance shed. The mine operation switched to deep mining techniques briefly when excessive overburden prevented easy surface mining. The company opened at least four portals into the hillside behind the present-day backstops of the baseball fields.

Only two entrances remain today. Someone at one time attempted to close the gaping entrances but ran out of earth and rock before completing the job. These earthen mounds are key to a cold air damming effect, keeping the temperatures in this relatively short mine cool and stable.

This mine is also flooded. The lake at the main entrance is only a few inches deep, but the trend of the rock layer dips gently downhill. The water at the far end of the mine, near the second entrance, is over fifteen feet deep. The host rock is the valuable Vanport limestone. While only 10-30 feet thick in northwestern Pennsylvania, the rock is generally flat lying. Huge mining companies which go after the Vanport can tunnel complex network mazes totaling miles in length under a relatively small parcel of property. Steifel Park Mine only contains about 2,500' of passage.

Our first trip to this site seemed like a break in the usual arduous action of hauling a bulky canoe through the woods and mud to just to get to the water. We could pull right up to Steifel Park Mine and the water is encountered just inside the entrance for a change. We saw a few bats here and there, then we started down the last passage. We quickly found we were paddling way too fast to count the clusters, we nearly capsized.

After counting over 1,000 little browns and a handful of pipistrelles, we spoke with city officials who jumped at the chance to eliminate a attractive nuisance in their popular park while preserving the habitat for wildlife. The mine entrances were gated and a survey completed in 1997. The site will be surveyed once each winter until five years of data is compiled, then the site will be visited once every other year.

Stifel Park numbers:
1996:
1997:
1998:
1999: 1200 little browns, 16 eastern pipistrelles