Today is Thursday and we will plan to spend half the day exploring the mining situation in and around Cripple Creek. Later this afternoon we will drive up to Woodland Park and have dinner with our friends, Mel & Sandy Castle.
There is a published route that takes you in a clockwise loop, starting and ending here in town. It points out numerous mining sites of years gone by, trails that may be taken to get back up there where the action was, the city of Victor, lots of stuff. There is also a side road that takes you up to the American Eagle Lookout, an area on top of an enormous open pit mine with a view to everywhere.
As we headed uphill from Cripple Creek we came to a great spot in the road and took this picture of town. The area of red brick structures at the lower left center of the picture is the downtown area, where all the shopping and casinos are located. The Gold Hill Casino, three blocks from our B & B, has a large area with tables and free WI-FI so we have been spending a bit of time there.
We took the aforementioned road up to the lookout and gazed out on the massive open pit in front of and below us. This is the Cresson Open Pit Mine and I apologize for not knowing what they are mining for. Those little vehicles that you see running up and down hill are really huge ore hauler trucks, the ones with the tires that are higher than us. We observed two of these guys hauling rocks as we crossed the ‘haul road’ coming up to the top. They crawled their way uphill, dumped the load somewhere, and barreled back down for more..
The picture below is the same pit, looking towards the right hand side. If you look off to the far horizon in both of these pictures you might see the Collegiate Peaks way out there, probably about 70 miles away.
Time to backtrack a bit. When we arrived at the top of the road there was a sign indicating parking for us and another for handicapped. So we parked where we should have and I huffed and puffed up a bunch of stairs to the level where I was able to get the pictures of the pit. I then ambled over to the fence and voila, there she was, waving at me. The town of Victor is in the background. The uphill drive you see is the road to the handicapped parking area, at the same level as I was standing. So, huff and puff down, drive up to the top, and both of us could explore much more of this site.
The starting point for this old time form of mining was the huge head frame. This structure sat over the mine hole. Near by was a large winch assembly with cables going to the top of the eadframe, over a pulley, and down into the hole. The winch was used to put down miners and empty buckets and raise same, with the buckets full of ore. Some of these holes went down as far as 2000 feet.
In this picture you can see a portion of the head frame, the winch assembly (which is too big for Matt’s truck), and some other piece of machinery. If you glance through the bottom of the head frame you will see the top of good old Pike’s Peak, which is less than ten miles from our site here.
This is yet another of the dozens of abandoned head frames in the area. I took this picture as we were able to see a couple of the huge trucks running around the rim of the open pit mine; the present and the past.
We left this immediate area and drove through Victor, which was apparently quite the place a century ago. It is still quite the place, in somewhat of a more negative note. The miners and the money have left and Victor doesn‘t look all that great. We returned to our B& B and decided to take a picture of it for any or all to enjoy. Our room was on the second floor, in the brick building, with the bay window. The building dates back to around 1890..
No comments:
Post a Comment