Bottomless Pit Discovered In Woodinville?

There's a hole in Woodinville, -- but it's no ordinary hole. King County officials have been at wits end trying to find the bottom.

The hole is in a quiet neighborhood -- maybe a dozen homes are around. But long before they were built, there was something else beneath the surface there.

Last Friday, a small hole appeared in the asphalt. And neighbor Jim Van Noy began investigating.

We shoved a 16-foot pole down there it didn't hit," he said.

When a King County road crew showed up, they pulled away the asphalt and found a gaping hole.

From the surface it doesn't look like much, but when you look down, the bottom is nowhere in sight.

And it's too deep to hear a brick hit bottom.

Woodinville Fire Department dropped what they thought was 1,000 feet of rope in there, and it still didn't hit the bottom.

So the mystery deepend as no one knew just how deep the hole was, where it goes, or even what it is.

"Maybe there's gold down there?" wondered Van Noy. "Then we'll split it..."

The county says there are no current records of old mine shafts or water wells in this area, and no record of anything this deep.

But timbers and an old concrete slab indicate it's probably manmade.

"I had no clue - so I'm fascinated," said neighbor Keith Amodt. "I hope they find out what it is."

And once they figure out what it is, the county will have to figure out what to do with it.

Eventually it'll be plugged up and filled in.

"Best excitement we've had up here for a long time," Van Noy said.

But just as neighbors were forming stories about the mysterious bottomless pit, the King County Road Department showed up and took some of the fun out of the story.

They determined that, after lowering a camera into the hole, that it was probably only about 230 feet deep. Still -- that's 1/3 the height of the Space Needle.

They'll start filling the hole with concrete Tuesday.