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CHAPTER 4

ALADDIN’S CAVE

Sunglasses, neon hard hat, vest, hoodie—Brad Poulson was wrapped in layers of clothing specifically designed to alert someone else to his presence. Safety in the world we were about to enter is key. I waited as he walked around a company SUV with the words “The Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mine” printed on the side. He checked the mirrors and tires, put a magnetic antenna on the top, and did a careful check around the vehicle.

We were about to drive into the last commercial gold mine in Colorado, which is owned by the Newmont Mining Corporation—the second-largest gold mining company in the world. Newmont purchased the surface mine from its previous owners in 2015 for $820 million and added the operation to its roster of others located in New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, Suriname, Peru, and Nevada.

Poulson took his time. Every action, every word he uses is specific and calculated; he clearly knows what he is doing and has done it a thousand times before. The company’s communications specialist met me in the historic mining town of Cripple Creek. Obviously knowledgeable, he speaks succinctly and clearly, choosing his words carefully and often stressing the last syllable of the last word in a sentence. When he finished his safety checks we climbed into the vehicle, he beeped the horn several times to let anyone nearby know he was backing up, and then began the short drive to the mine.

With its own traffic laws, vehicles the size of houses, and a manmade ashen gray geography, it felt like we were about to drive across the surface of another planet. Poulson, who has worked for the mine for the past three years, told me that Newmont employs 580 people at its Colorado operation, paying them on average $79,000 a year with benefits. For various reasons, including the fact that many of the homes in Victor and its sister city, Cripple Creek, are historic, most of the mine’s employees live outside the old gold towns in the northern part of Teller County.

A vehicle gate let us in, and Poulson used his radio to ask for permission to enter. The sky was blue, but almost all the recognizable landmarks of the surrounding mountains were hidden behind hills and berms—conversely, nearly all the mine’s workings are hidden from the outside. We heard the thumping of a distant rock crusher just under the crisp radio chatter prepping for an explosive detonation. Poulson received permission and pulled onto the mine’s property.

“Here at CC&V because of the way that this area developed, the property is actually privately owned,” Poulson said. “To begin with, this was a ranching area, this was high summer pastures for ranches along the Front Range. Some of the land was sold off by the federal government to ranchers, and then when gold was discovered the federal government sold off the land in patented mineral claims and those patented mineral claims were aggregated over time to the land package that CC&V currently owns or leases.”

The discovery of gold in this area led to a mining claim purchasing rush in 1891. At one time the area had some five hundred different mines that were eventually purchased and aggregated. It’s been estimated that there are some 2,500 miles of underground mine workings that exist between the towns of Cripple Creek and Victor. In fact, the sixty-five ounces of gold covering the state’s capitol dome in downtown Denver originally came from the mining area in 1908 in honor of the gold rush. The Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mine most recently provided the gold in 2013 when the dome needed to be replated. As a schoolkid in Colorado I remember tours of the capitol dome and the tale of at least one senator who snuck up to the dome after every rainstorm to collect an untold amount of gold dust.

A Caterpillar mine haul truck is loaded with gold ore at the Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mine. (Courtesy of CC&V)

Located southwest of Pikes Peak, the CC&V, a surface gold mine, was started in 1976 shortly after the deregulation of gold by the federal government. Today the mine’s property stretches nearly six thousand acres and quite literally dwarfs the nearby towns.

“In the 1970s the price of gold was deregulated, and mining came back to the district, eventually building to the regulated, large-scale operation we have now,” Poulson said. The mine currently has twenty-five Caterpillar mine haul trucks to move the ore around. Having never seen one in person, I’m stunned by their massive size. Costing about $5 million and capable of carrying 250 tons—or more than the weight of the Statue of Liberty—the vehicles are enormous. A person essentially has to climb a long metal staircase to get to the driver’s cabin at the top. Poulson explained for every truck carrying 250 tons, roughly six ounces of gold are recovered. An ounce of gold is roughly the size of the top third of a pinky finger.

“They’re really giant computers on wheels that are being monitored via satellite back to our dispatch center,” Poulson said, as I stared openmouthed as one passed by in the other lane. So large in fact that there was a good chance the driver wasn’t even aware that we were on the road with him. Poulson added the truck’s engine temperature, hydraulic pressure, speed, location, and what they’re hauling were all monitored.

“The thing is, the trucks are twenty-seven feet wide, twenty-five feet tall, and about forty feet long,” Poulson said. “So it’s like driving a two-story house. When they’re in the operator’s cab on the left-hand side of the truck, they literally can’t see the right-hand side of the road for 120 feet. So they drive on the left-hand side of the road so that they can see the berm.”

Everywhere you go in a modern surface mining operation, you’ll see berms at least half as tall as the tallest tire on the road. In this case, the tires are twelve feet tall, so the berms are at least six feet tall. If a driver loses control of a truck, or if there’s a brake failure, the berm is engineered to stop the vehicle from going over the side of one of the deep surface mines. Those mines in fact dwarf the trucks, sometimes going down over a thousand feet in what looks like an inverted pyramid. The size of it can easily boggle the mind of the uninitiated.

The Wild Horse

Poulson and I got out of the truck at the bottom of the six-hundred-foot-deep Wild Horse extension surface mine. I couldn’t help but feel like I was in one of the moon’s craters. These types of mines consist of “walls and benches” with walls between thirty-five feet and seventy feet tall and twenty-foot benches, used to stop tumbling rock. The whole thing looks like stairs for a giant. Poulson explained that the process starts in part with fifty-foot drills that are set up in GPS-specified locations. Approximately 250 of the holes are drilled in one area about fifteen feet apart. A detonator the size of a man’s fist is put into the bottom and the hole is pumped full of ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel.

“We pump that full of explosives except for the top ten feet … I am talking about people who have mega skills,” Poulson said. “I am talking about people who are skilled in what they do and handling every aspect of this.”

The company’s blast technicians then backfill the new hole with crushed rock so that the explosives go off sideways and fracture the earth. In doing the surface mining, up to 1,100 holes can be drilled and detonated, but no more.

“We have certain regulated permit caps on the amount of seismic motion that we can create within the earth,” Poulson said. “We want to keep it well below that, so we’re in permit—but most importantly so that we minimize the seismic impact to our neighbors.”

The explosion will turn the rock into rubble that is five feet in size or less, which is what is needed to fit into the mine’s crusher. The rubble, or “shot muck,” is shoveled into the back of the mining trucks. A digital readout on the side tells how many tons they’re carrying. Poulson said the area’s original miners were digging out gold from veins or removing high-grade ore. What the Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mine is hauling to their crusher is disseminated ore. It takes many tons of disseminated ore to get an ounce of gold.

“That’s why we have to move so much of it to make it economic,” Poulson said. Every year sixty million tons of rock is moved, which includes twenty million tons of ore, and forty million tons of overburden, or waste rock.

A Vug of Gold

We got back in the company truck and headed out of the Wild Horse extension surface mine to see one of the other, larger mines. Poulson slowed down as we pulled in behind one of the massive haul trucks.

“You never pass a haul truck without permission and if it is moving you don’t even ask for permission, you just get in line,” he said. “Haul trucks have the right of way.” It’s easy to see why. Anything the size of a multistory house with wheels that belong on a monster truck is going to win a game of chicken every time. Poulson told me the area was historically so rich in gold that the miners could dig out large veins of gold, sometimes as big as five feet wide. In 1914, a miner discovered a “vug,” or giant pocket, of gold in the area. It yielded sixty thousand ounces of gold.

The Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mine’s Cresson Surface Mine. (Courtesy of CC&V)

“The vug of gold disclosed the beauty of an Aladdin’s cave and the wealth of the United States Mint,” reported a 1918 edition of The Mining American. It wasn’t the last vug of gold discovered in the area.

“Thirty-eight coming up the Joe Dandy, in the wrong way, and going around the blade,” the radio chirped incomprehensibly, taking me from thoughts of massive caves filled with gold. Poulson said the mine’s exploration geologists work to create three-dimensional underground images to get an idea of what lies beneath the surface.

“An engineer can apply very sophisticated tools to determine the cost inputs, versus the revenue inputs, from the ore body that is being mined,” Poulson explained. “Ultimately that determines the shape of the surface mine.”

The Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mine currently has two surface mines in operation and a third and fourth in the process of being opened. The 1,200-foot-deep Cresson surface mine shows scars along its steps of the 100-year-old mines that came before. Today’s miners often come across and have to backfill those original mine shafts and tunnels.

“The old-timers went much deeper than where we are,” Poulson said.

A LIDAR unit, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, uses lasers like a radar uses sound. The mine uses the lasers and a slope radar to measure and draw a picture of the mine’s wall to help determine if there’s going to be a collapse. There are also old mine stopes, or underground empty spaces where ore was once extracted, large enough to swallow one of the big trucks. Poulson said the mine is constantly monitoring and keeping track of where historic mining activity took place and where voids might appear.

“We have historic mapping, that is now computerized … and then all of our exploration and blast hole drilling is logged with GPSs and they find voids,” Poulson explained. When voids are found they are logged, mapped, blasted, and filled with rock by remote controlled vehicles to keep the miners out of danger.

“We’re not bragging—but modern mining is safe because we maintain a safety focus,” Poulson said.

“Pregnant with Gold and Silver”

The ore is transported to a crusher for processing. Crushers grind the stone like a massive mortar and pestle. The mine’s primary crusher works through seventy thousand tons of ore a day, and twenty million tons a year. The ore then goes past an electromagnet that pulls out old lunch buckets, ore tracks, lamps, or anything metallic that doesn’t belong. It then goes on a conveyor belt where it is sorted into different sizes or sent back to another crusher. There are a series of conveyor belt tracks that look like the highest, most unpleasant roller coaster in the world.

Lime is mixed in with the crushed ore to keep from evaporating the process solution’s sodium cyanide, used to leach the gold and silver out of the ore. The crushed ore is stacked in these gray hills, and the solution is dripped out onto them. Since the early ’90s, four hundred million tons of crushed ore have been collected in this part of the property. The gold and silver dissolves in the diluted mixture of sodium cyanide in water and flows down with the solution to self-contained underground ponds or wells. Poulson said none of the fluid escapes this double- and in some areas triple-lined facility, and the solution is recycled back through the process after the gold and silver are removed.

“The gold and silver is more attracted to the diluted mixture of sodium cyanide in the water than it is to the elements in the rock,” he said. “So the gold and silver leave the ore and attaches to the sodium cyanide and the process solution becomes pregnant with gold and silver.”

That gold- and silver-rich solution is then pumped to another facility where the minerals are removed from the solution and put into a furnace. The melted metals are poured into “button” molds that weigh about sixty pounds and consists of about 63 percent gold, 30 percent silver, and some impurities ranging from copper to iron. It is then sent to another facility out of state where the metals are further refined.

“Last year we produced about 190,000 ounces of gold and about 60,000 ounces of silver,” Poulson said, driving alongside the leaching pads. “Next year we’re estimating over 350,000 ounces of gold because of our investment in new process facilities.”

That gold is sold into the market. Gold can be used for bullion, jewelry, or a reserve currency for governments; as an investment; and in the high-tech manufacture of smartphones, avionics, and satellites.

Builders of high-rises use gold in glass to reinforce it and to filter out radiation. Colorado’s only commercial gold mining operation is growing and has plans for expanding and may one day even consider plans for more traditional underground mining operations.

The gold will eventually become depleted from the area. This inevitability comes to all mines and across all eras. Strict regulations on modern mining will also require the company to reclaim the area and match the surrounding geography and ecology.

But the search will continue as it has since antiquity and the Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mine is not alone in looking for gold in Colorado.

Across the state, and in the historic mining districts, there are people picking up gold pans and prospecting supplies for the first time. And then there are those who have hunted for gold their whole lives.