Anyone who spends time in and around old mines should learn some mining terms. Some of these are best explained by illustrations, but I will do what I can with words:

• tunnel This is what everybody calls any horizontal mine opening, but in truth it is only a tunnel if it goes in one place and comes out another, i.e. if it is open on both ends.
• adit This is the first thing that most people would call a tunnel. You could think of it as half a tunnel. If you walk into a mountain and come out again the same way, you entered via an adit.
• drift A horizontal opening that runs along the vein. Typically there are many ore chutes from stopes above, and the drift will wander to follow the vein.
• crosscut A horizontal opening that does not run along the vein. Typically a shaft will lead to crosscuts at each level that give access to drifts along the vein. Crosscuts typically run straight as an arrow through worthless rock.
• shaft A shaft can be vertical or inclined. Vertical shafts allow more efficient hoisting and are typical of large mines that followed a vein deep. Inclined shafts are economical in the sense that they follow the vein and stay close to it. Inclined shafts are also less hazardous to mine explorers.
• chute A "spout" built of wood used to load broken rock from above into waiting mine cars. One of these means you are below a stope or raise and there very well may be a ladder next to it heading up.
• raise A raise is like a shaft that starts undergound and goes upwards. Typically a ladder next to an ore chute along a drift goes up a raise and gives access to a stope above.
• winze A winze is like a shaft that starts undergound. They are much less common than raises, but they are really cool. Often the top of a winze has a good sized station that once held (or still holds) hoisting equipment, and enough room to transfer material from hoist buckets to ore cars.
• stope An excavation underground that actually removed whatever it was they were after. These are typically irregular in shape as they follow the ore whereever it goes. If the vein is wide and/or the rock is poor, the challenge in mining is to keep the rock supported while extracting the material in the stope.
• level If you follow a ladder down a shaft, you will arrive at horizontal workings every 100 feet or so, and these are called levels. The levels have a station near the shaft, and are named by the distance down the shaft. For example you might talk about a specimen as beeing from the 500 foot level of the Bull Elk mine.
• station Where each level meets a shaft is commonly a station with benches, electrical distribution, telephone, mine bell signal charts, and lots of cool stuff.
• pillar A block of rock left behind to help support a stope. These provide great opportunities to see what the ore looked like. Pillar robbing is a deadly game that involves seeing how much the pillars can be shaved back before the whole stope collapses.
• square set stope The most expensive mode of underground mining. As ore is removed in a stope, it is replaced by a 10x10 foot lattice of 12x12 timbers. This is fairly uncommon, but really cool when you come across one in good condition. Just remember that the ground was really bad or they wouldn't have gone to all that trouble. Many times the sets are backfilled with broken rock to help support the stope.
• hanging wall Imagine yourself standing inside a stope that angles down into the earth. The vein they extracted was bounded by two surfaces. The one over your head is the hanging wall.
• footwall Continuing the thought above, the surface you are standing on is the footwall. The same nomenclature is used of faults by the way.
• manway Any kind of passage with a ladder in it could be called a manway. Shafts are divided into "compartments" and one of these is very often a manway. Sometimes the manway of a shaft is crowded with pipes and cables and such.