New Mexico Mineral Symposium — Abstracts

Now that mining has virtually ended in the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado, it is a good time to look back over the last 30 yrs of mining and mineral collecting. I came to the area in August 1970, after serving in the U.S. Army for 2 yrs. At that time, mining was booming in the San Juans, with almost 800 people employed in the mining industry. Jobs were not hard to find, and I landed a position as mine engineer at the Camp Bird mine located 6 mi southwest of Ouray.

Mining of the lead-copper-zinc replacement orebody at the base of the Telluride Conglomerate had just started, and I was there from start to finish. Over the next 8 yrs hundreds of fine speci¬mens of galena, sphalerite, chalcopyrite, pyrite, calcite, and quartz were collected. The orebody was mined out by December 1978, which put about 100 people out of work. The mine was put on a caretaker basis until 1986 when another round of mining took place until 1990. During this short span, some of the finest scheelite crystals to be found in the United States were recovered from the Camp Bird vein.

The Idarado mine, with access from Red Mountain and Telluride, had a payroll of about 300 and was mining both replacement orebodies and fissure vein deposits. The minerals from the replacement orebodies were very similar to those of the Camp Bird mine, whereas the veins yield¬ed gold and base metal sulfides. The Idarado mine ceased operations in November 1978, and 150 hands were laid off.

The Sunnyside mine, which is located in Sunnyside Basin, was being mined through the American tunnel located at Gladstone, San Juan County During the 1970s and 1980s the mine was the largest gold producer, and hundreds of fine specimens of gold were high-graded by the miners. In the 1980s the mine was in serious financial condition and went through a series of owners. It finally ceased operations in July 1991, with a layoff of the last 150 people. With the shut down of the Sunnyside mine, the industry came to a halt—never again to recover. The golden years were over for mining and mineral specimen recovery in the active mines.

During the 1980s and 1990s sporadic small-scale mining continued, with the recovery of some very fine mineral specimens. Mineral collecting turned from recovering specimens in active mines to field collecting on mine dumps and underground in abandoned mines. In the early 1990s the Mined Land Reclamation Division of the Colorado Bureau of Mines initiated a program of sealing all mine openings, and it then became a race against time to collect and preserve minerals that would never again see the light of day.

By the mid-1990s most of the abandoned mines were inaccessible, and collecting turned to out-crops of fissure veins. Some of the best milky quartz crystals to be found in the world were collect¬ed from solution cavities and vugs in fissure veins in the Leadville Limestone, which crops out in and around Ouray.

Field collecting continues in the San Juans, and important discoveries are still being made by diligent collectors willing to hike to the more inaccessible areas.