Peru - Trapped Miners Are Rescued - NYTimes.com Peruvian miners trapped for six days in an abandoned copper mine prayed, told each other jokes and even danced in an attempt to hold onto hope, before they finally were freed Wednesday. The miners, above, ranging in age from 23 to 58, walked out, unaided, from a reinforced tunnel that rescuers had built as they removed more than 26 feet of dirt and rock. The miners were trapped by a cave-in caused by an explosion they themselves had set at the Cabeza de Negro mine. They had communicated with rescuers through a hose, in place before the collapse, by which they also received food and medicine during their ordeal in a horizontal shaft dug into a mountainside. President Ollanta Humala, who was there to meet the miners, said the episode pointed up the dangers of working in abandoned mines in Peru. He said he had given instructions for Cabeza de Negro to be sealed definitively. The rescue drew some comparisons to the 69-day ordeal of 33 Chilean miners trapped more than 2,000 feet underground in 2010. The Peru rescue was not by any measure a comparable engineering feat because the miners were not trapped nearly as far underground.