CLUTE, Texas – Into a giant sand pit where the remains of a mammoth and a saber-toothed tiger were discovered, some folks want to throw a bus, a couple of antique firetrucks and a space shuttle look-alike that once thrilled visitors at a now-defunct amusement park in Houston.
Why all the junk? To create a world of wonders for scuba divers.
The owner of the 50-acre pit wants to flood the hole and then charge diving enthusiasts for the privilege of exploring the sunken objects.
It would be one of the nation's biggest lakes ever created specifically for diving, and one of the few started from the ground up, instead of from an existing body of water.
“This is a dream come true,” Mike Cryer, who runs a dive shop in nearby Lake Jackson, said as he gazed over the hole up to 70 feet deep that by next year could become Mammoth Lake. Cryer and his wife will help with the project's design and manage the operation.
The guys behind the project are Kenny Vernor and his cousin Tim Sweeten, both 46-year-old diving enthusiasts. Vernor's company owns the soon-to-be-exhausted pit, which has produced sand since the 1950s. He and his cousin also run a junk business that has been saving pieces of scrap that they want to throw down the hole.
Such as the metal skeleton of an old church steeple. A couple of rusty ship anchors. And a number of boats, one more than 40 feet long and another a 36-footer. The salvage company also has a scrap contract with NASA, from which it has gotten a collection of twisted pipes and intriguing metal spheres. And old F-5 Navy jet is already in the pit. The project's organizers are also hoping to acquire a tank.
“Scuba diving itself is very exciting, rewarding,” Vernor said. “You put something down there for somebody to look at, (it) just increases everything exponentially. You can get closer, get different angles. If you want to see what the top looks like you just kick your fins and get up there and check it out.”
The project will need a permit from the zoning board in Clute, a city of some 11,000 about an hour's drive south of Houston, but officials have been enthusiastic.
Diving in and around big junk is nothing new.
At Athens Scuba Park, a lake about 70 miles from Dallas, a couple of sunken buses and a military cargo plane are among the underwater attractions. In Bethlehem, Pa., a former quarry called the Aqua Park at Dutch Springs attracts hundreds of divers weekly who swim in and around a bus, firetruck, car, helicopters and a trolley.
At the sand pit in Clute, pumps normally prevent groundwater from rushing in. By the end of the year, when the last marketable sand has been removed, the pumps will be shut off and water allowed to build up. The pit could take a year to fill.
Cryer said there is “something uniquely cool” about “diving around an antique firetruck, or a tank, or crawling inside a boat that used to float.”
“There's a lot of explorer in most divers,” he added.
In 2003 a backhoe operator at the pit unearthed tusks. A skull and other bones also were found. Scientists determined the skull was about 38,000 years old and came from a warm-climate relative of the woolly mammoth. The artifacts are now at Texas A&M University.
Joseph Ramirez, whose family owns some of the property that overlooks the pit, said the lake will attract more traffic but should be good for the city. And besides, “I've got lakefront property,” he said with a grin.
