Late Night

Hank Stuever: Looking for something to do in Kansas on a sunny Saturday last spring, I chose darkness, and drove to Hutchinson (pop. 42,000) to take a tour of the subterranean salt mines at the edge of town. At a museum, you buy a ticket and ride a large, clanky freight elevator 650 feet underground, into pitch black.

There was no crowd. I had the vast, dimly lit caverns almost to myself — and what a place. A long series of featureless gray tunnels gave up millions of tons of rock salt over the last century (and still do), excavated over decades by laborious room-and-pillar mining techniques. Down there, it's always dry and a perfect 67 degrees. You take a little train through the dark and…