Gold!. Ian Neligh
puking water on me if they’ve been in the water long enough. I’ve had people airlifted out of this valley that I’ve helped extricate out of this water. One day I took four people out.”
Rafters are not the only people using the county’s waterways. Reid said once the economy starts to suffer, people begin to look at the hills again and dream of gold.
“You get the rich investor who thinks he’s going to invest in a mine and he’s going to become richer. Then you’ve got the guy who can’t barely afford a sluice box, pan, or gas to get here. He comes out and he’s starving to death on the side of the river. If he stays off the goddamn bar stool and works hard—he can make good wages over the summer.”
People down on their luck have gone to Colorado’s streams looking for a second chance before Colorado was admitted to the Union in 1876 as the thirty-eighth state. During the 1930s a public works program was created in Denver to pair seasoned miners and prospectors with people who lost their jobs to the Great Depression. The program was profitable and gold panners claimed $1 per day from the South Platte River, which Clear Creek feeds into. It’s thought that the stream’s placer gold deposits weren’t cleaned out during the gold rush but by people trying to make a living during those lean years.
According to Reid, every year people come to him and ask where to go to find gold, and what it is they need to do to get it.
“There’s very few people who stick with it. This is the real gold fever—when you sit here and spend years chasing it.”
When Reid is working beneath the river, a six-hour day often feels double that.
“If you don’t like digging ditches at the surface, you’re not going to like it underwater much better,” he said. “If you look at your real successful treasure hunters, if you look at your real successful miners—they’re the people with perseverance.”
The Life Style
Over the years of rock wrestling and diving under the freezing waters Reid said he has “good days” and “really good days.”
“I’ve had days where it’s just been nothing but a fight all day long. Plug ups and rock jams, cave-ins, but you gotta do it,” Reid said. “But just like any job you have your good days and your bad days too. Good days in this job you can get rich fast.”
Admitting to spending every ounce of gold on trying to find more gold, Reid isn’t wealthy yet. He’s also not getting any younger and the work doesn’t get any easier, but he said he continues to descend into the water every year and put his safety at risk because it still gives him an adrenaline rush.
“You always want more and that’s the fever of it. Kind of like the successful businessman who wants to keep making more money. You just never know. Come springtime when I fire up that dredge and get back in that water and punch another hole—it could be the year that I don’t have to do it no more.”
He likes working outside and looking for gold, and not being stuck at a desk and working a nine-to-five job. Reid said he has lived a lifestyle his father and uncles once dreamed of around their summer vacation campfires.
“I’ve done well. I probably haven’t been the most productive person in American society, but I’ve chased my dreams.”
And he’s not alone.
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