2026-06-25 –, Prime Dome
Severely burnt out after seven years working in DFIR consulting, and at the onset of the pandemic, I needed an excuse to get me outside away from people and computers. I ended up diving deep into a hobby I never thought I'd get into: exploring abandoned mines.
Six years into this, I've spent hundreds of hours studying maps, tagged coordinates of over 10,000 tunnels, researched how to do this as safely as possible, almost gotten stranded in the wildness twice, hiked over 50 miles entirely underground, taken explosives training which aided me in helping with an EOD mission at a mine, and found a small cross-section of hackers also into this hobby who introduced me to an amazing community of passionate explorers.
This talk will roughly cover:
1. How I got into this & identifying signs of burnout
2. How to do this safely, real-world risks & essential gear
3. My research process for identifying mines incl data sources
4. The mine exploring communities I've discovered incl one with hacker
friends in it, and the wild people I've made connections with through
these communities
5. How taking explosives training lead to an opportunity to connect
with another hacker also into this hobby and assist with disposal of
hundreds of sticks of old/unstable dynamite
6. Misc stories and unique content: detailed underground maps of select mines made by a friend, cool historical artifacts found incl 100 year old newspapers & miner's art drawn with carbide lamps, crazy crystal formations stumbled on, etc
polack loves adventure and a good dusty hole in the ground