Cripple Creek Colorado – tierneycreates

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!

Well I’ve been on more summer adventures than spending time crafting, so it’s another post about my travels.

Last weekend we did a road trip to Cripple Creek, Colorado. Out of the blue we received an invitation for a free hotel room, $75 dining credit, and $75 free slot play at the new Chamonix Hotel and Casino in Cripple Creek. So we took advantage of a free-ish weekend getaway and an excuse for me to see another part of Colorado I had not yet visited.

Chamonix Hotel & Casino, image from Casino Careers website

Cripple Creek is one of the historic Colorado mining towns that were granted gaming/casino building licenses to try and revive/save the old mining towns. The other mining towns in Colorado granted this special license are Central City and Black Hawk, Colorado where John goes to play poker tournaments. Gambling is only legal in these three towns in Colorado, except for two Native American run casinos in the Four Corners area of Colorado.

The Roadtrip

Driving from our home to Cripple Creek we passed by some beautiful and interesting sights, some of which we had to pull the car over to see better.

Of course I had to sneak in some Black & White photography…

We came across and old abandoned under the mountain passage that we think was once used for gold mining since we were in historic gold mining country:

Cripple Creek

When we arrived in Cripple Creek, Colorado Donkey Derby Days was going on.

According the the Visit Cripple Creek website:

“People from all over the world descend on downtown to be inspired by the town’s resident donkey herd, who roam Cripple Creek in honor of the original Cripple Creek donkeys from the town’s Gold Rush days.“

They had lots of booths/vendors set up as well as donkey exhibits and we had fun wandering about. They also had a beer garden and food court with an United States Air Force cover band playing (they were really good!) playing good blues, rock and country music in their military uniforms.

After wandering the festival for a while and then checking into the hotel, we ate a nice buffet dinner at the casino with an amazing desert bar: