Visting a Gold Mine

On the Streets of Victor, Colorado

Victor, Colorado was unique from any other town we have visited. It was hard to believe we were still in the United States of America. The buildings dating back to 1800's ,antique sign boards and street lights, commercials written on the walls reminded us of the by gone era. Life was set at a slow motion, people were laid back, there seemed absolutely no hurry to pave the roads or build new building. It was almost like everything was in a trance - looking through the dust we had created driving to town.

Cripple Creek & Victor museum gave us a warm welcome - or so I would like to say - there was hardly anyone except the clerk when we arrived. Then one by one people started to come - all serious kind - no smiling faces or friendly gestures and absolutely no kids. So what? Here we are with three lovely kids all eager and excited about the trip. After some formalities like signing the release forms, watching a short instructional video and fitting us with a safety helmet and glasses, we were on the tour! A tour to one of the working Gold mines in the States.

Inside the gold mine

We normally think of mines going deep underground, but this was a mine going deep above ground! Let me clarify. What they are doing is breaking the HUGE mountains from top and making the holes wider and wider and wider to make roads inside, and leave the uncut portions as high walls and clearing the trees and everything on the way thus forming a 800 feet mine measuring from the mountain top from where the drilling first started! Trust me, this was news to us and a huge relief to me as I was a little nervous about taking the kids into underground tunnels.

The bus driver also acted as the tour guide. As we drove deeper and deeper into the mine she showed us different size trucks each called by a model # (like 521, 537 etc.), way too bigger than the normal ones we have seen on the roads. These were monster machines with monster "arms" and "fingers" capable of loading themselves with tons of gold ore, overkill or other rocks. When I say tons I mean tons - 300 tons! 400 tons! etc depending on the model. What struck me most was that in one truck load on the average they would get 3 to 4 oz of gold! "Is that all?!" we asked.



Monster machines!



The trucks take the ore to the crusher where they are broken into 3/4 inch pieces. At the end of the crusher there are other huge trucks lined up to carry the broken down ore to pile as mountains elsewhere, where a .035% cyanide solution is poured through the pile thus separating the gold from the rock and collecting it into an underground pool.

The liquid gold is then purified through flames made of coconut shells from Srilanka to finally become solid gold. In this particular mine they do a pour every Thursday and their per day gold is approximately 800 oz!! We were convinced their hard work thus pays off.