Life in B&W, tierneytravels

Cripple Creek Road Trip, Part II

tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post Cripple Creek Road Trip, Part I  about our road trip to Cripple Creek, Colorado.

Gold Mine Tour

The next day before heading home from our visit to Cripple Creek, we spent a morning at the The World Famous Mollie Kathleen Gold Mine Tour.

John has lived in Colorado all his life and has never been on a gold mine tour. It was of course my first gold mine tour.

If you’d like to read the history of Colorado and the gold rush/gold mining, here is a link to a wonderful article – Colorado Gold Rush. Like parts of the Pacific NW where I used to live (Washington and Oregon), the hunt for gold help put Colorado on the map of the United States.

We went on an awesome tour guided by a 5th generation descendant of Colorado miners of the Mollie Kathleen Gold Mine, descending down 1000 feet in a mine elevator, packed in like sardines (the tour was not for the claustrophobic).

I’m just going to now share a bunch of photos from the tour without explanation but you all can figure it out (and you can see I just had to take some Black & White photos…)

We had a blast during the tour and the tour guide demonstrated some of the historic equipment that miners used in the 19th and 20th centuries to mine for gold. We only went down to 1000 feet underground but our understanding from the tour was the full gold mine goes to 3000 feet+ down under ground! Here are a couple more photos from the tour including the awful “restroom” that miners had to use of a bucket that got emptied out by the children that worked in the mine for 50 cents a day; and the large bucket that was used to transport miners up and down the mine!

The mine is no longer used as a mine; and according to John in Colorado they no longer do underground mining in Colorado, they only do surface mining as underground mining is now too expensive.

After our mine tour, we had a car picnic in the parking lot:

Here is a view of the Cripple Creek valley that I photographed before we headed back home:

It was a great little road trip exploring more of Colorado I haven’t seen!

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Published by tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

Quilter, crafter, obsessive tea drinker and lover of all furry creatures (especially dogs and cats) - join me on my tierneycreates blog as I share stories from "A Crafter's Life".

22 thoughts on “Cripple Creek Road Trip, Part II”

      1. Yes. Coal miners have a tough time of it. There’s a book by George Orwell, Jordan Peterson recommended. There’s a story of British coal miners there. No thanks. I’m with you.

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  3. A lot of my Mum’s family were underground coal miners in Yorkshire, England and its exactly as scary as it looks and sounds. One of my Uncle’s got buried in a mine collapse and they only just got him out.

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  6. We have a lot of abandoned gold mines in this part of Australia, and the old towns always attract a lot of tourist attention. Some of that scenery is quite familiar, so I guess methods of mining gold don’t change much from place to place!

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      1. Oh my word yes! To quote Geoscience Australia: “Australia is estimated to have the world’s largest gold reserves, with 9,500 tonnes or 17 per cent of the total world estimated gold reserves of 57,000 tonnes. Geoscience Australia estimates that 60 per cent of Australia’s gold reserves are in Western Australia.”

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