Storage facility hosting family-themed party in underground mine
A barbecue, complete with live music and bean bag tosses, will be held in underground tunnels beneath Bradys Bend Township on Feb. 4.
Brady’s Bend Underground — a storage facility for cars, boats and RVs — will host Winter Fest Underground, a family event. All proceeds from ticket sales for the first-time event will benefit Bradys Bend Community Initiatives, which serves different charities in the Bradys Bend area, said the underground storage’s general manager Deborah Maley.
Tickets cost $20 for adults and $5 for children ages 2 to 16, and ticket sales will support an accessibility project for Petrolia Valley Youth Center and other community-building efforts.
“The proceeds from those tickets will come back to the community,” Maley said.
Maley said she hopes Winter Fest will mark the first of many other activities and events at the site.
“We’re a seasonal business, so our springs and our fall are very busy, and so we decided to just take a shot at the wintertime,” she added. “Everybody’s just looking for something to do in January and February, so we’ll see how this goes.”
The company will host the event both indoors and outdoors. Other activities at Winter Fest include underground mine tours and a snowman-making contest, if the weather accommodates that, Maley said.
The origins of the company, whose underground roads descend between 200 feet and 300 feet underground, date back over a century, Maley said.
U.S. Steel first excavated the mine in the early 1900s, she said. A family that acquired the site from U.S. Steel converted the site into a storage facility for vehicles during the 1970s, providing a shelter to shield these from the elements.
“It’s come and go, so it’s not that you have to stay all day,” she said about the festival. “So you can come and have some food and listen to the music, do the tour … We have a lot of old pictures of the mine and the area, so we’ll probably have that on display, as well.”
The outdoor-indoor format of the event offers the advantage of extra options, if inclement weather hits, Maley said. If a snowstorm or a rainstorm stymie the Winter Fest outdoors, organizers and guests can migrate indoors for refuge.
Other considerations that affect planning involve just preparing people for the underground environment, Maley said.
“Average temperature’s 54 degrees,” she said. “That’s the ambient temperature. … Sometimes it feels a little warmer; sometimes it feels a little colder, depending on where you are in the mine and the airflow.”
Tickets are available for purchase at eventbrite.com.
Guests should wear outdoor apparel and footwear and take their own chairs.
