Dennis Bakhuis

Dive site · mine · German quarries, pits and mines

🇩🇪 Stiefelgrube Christine

Willingen (Upland), Hessen, Germany

A flooded slate mine near Willingen with 1.2 km of guide line — and a pile of miners' boots left underground, which is where the name in the log comes from.

Dives here
2
Deepest
25.3 m
Water
fresh
First · last
2017 · 2018
Getting in
Turn off L 3393 here; the site is about 0.4 km further on an unpaved track. (51.2951, 8.6128)

Revision 1 · changed 10 Oct 2026

History
  1. r1 10 Oct 2026 Imported from the personal log · Dennis Bakhuis

Site data © divelog-sites contributors (ODbL), descriptions and maps CC BY-SA 4.0 · 53edcaf

1 map

17 m18 m12 m21 m42 m14 m19 m25 m21 m11 m17 m18 m18 mEinstieg (Bremsberg)↓0 mUmkehrpunkt 29.01.2017Kammer mit PfeilernStiefelSchildN10 m
  • Entrance
  • T
  • End of line
  • Marker
  • Unsurveyed
  • Depth
  • Along the line
Stick map · 14 stations · 253 m of line · max 0 m

Schematic only: redrawn from Dennis's own hand sketch in the logbook for dive 297 (29 January 2017), the route in along the Bremsberg from the entry, left at the T along the main gallery past the boots and a sign, then up a side gallery to the turn point. The sketch has no scale and no north: distances assume about 100 m of penetration for a 22-minute dive with 25 bar used, and the orientation is arbitrary (north up is not real north). No published plan of the flooded levels was found; the mine has about 1.2 km of permanent line on the 23 m and 41 m levels (Sabine Kerkau, UnterWasserWelt).

Properly Schiefergrube Christine, at Willingen in the Upland. Four separate slate fields were combined under the name Christine in 1863; mining continued until 1971, and when it stopped the levels flooded.

Divers know it for the miners' boots left behind underground, which is why the log calls it the Stiefelgrube — the boot mine. The flooded workings are dived along about 1.2 km of guide line.

Like Nuttlar this is a mine, not a karst cave, so no cave system applies.

Two dives, January 2017 and January 2018, to 25.3 m. Both were short — 26 minutes at the longest — which in 6 °C water in a mine is a full dive.

The workbook had this on the summit of the Iberg; the stored position is now the mine entrance on Schwalefelder Strasse.

Dived here with

Daan Ilse

Nearby sites

2 dives at Stiefelgrube Christine

Dives per year

  1. 6 Jan 2018 with Daan cavemine date6 Jan 2018 depth25.2 m time26 min water—
  2. 29 Jan 2017 with Ilse cavemine date29 Jan 2017 depth25.3 m time22 min water7 °C

Sources

  • First-hand observation (Dennis Bakhuis)