Colorado
It may take decades to close all the abandoned gold rush mines.
Mere feet from a prospect pit where miners dug for gold in the second half of the 19th century, bikers whizzed by on the Maryland Mountain trail system west of Denver.
“This one is 15-to-16-feet deep with vertical walls. You wouldn’t have an easy time getting out of it,” said Jeremy Reineke, a project manager with the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety. “You can see how close it is to the trail if a biker decided to take off and miss a corner or decide to go off trail, you could get on this really fast.”
Reineke oversees the closure of mines and prospect pits like this one near Central City, Colorado. The town was situated on what was once considered the richest square mile on Earth because of the gold mining that was a boon to the region’s economy. At that time, the digging involved shovels, picks and mules. And after that hard labor, sometimes there wasn’t enough ore to move forward.
Reineke said there are “thousands and thousands” of unmapped prospect pits.
Soon, the prospect pit near the bike trail will be covered by a metal grate so trailgoers don’t fall in.
It’s critical public safety work, especially as hiking and bike paths are created in former mining areas, said Jeff Graves, director of the state’s Inactive Mine Reclamation Program.
“There have been instances of fatalities in Colorado associated with folks in abandoned mines,” Graves said. “A child fell into a mine shaft just outside of Central City. And so that prioritized a lot of the work here within Gilpin County.”
That was in 1989.
But in a state where mining was fundamental to its early economy, the quiet work of closing up these mines will likely go on for decades.
Around 13,500 mine features have been closed so far, including shafts, adits, stopes, pits, highwalls and hazardous facilities, according to Graves. The state has the capacity to safeguard about 300 each year.
“Maybe we’re halfway through the total, hopefully,” he said. “But likely, we still have at least that many more within the state that need some type of physical safety, closure constructed on them.”
The program addresses hazards that predate Colorado statehood. “Without the mining, Gilpin County would not exist. Probably Colorado as we know it would not exist,” said David Forsyth, director of the Gilpin Historical Society.
He said it’s hard to overstate the importance of mining to the area.
“It was really [miner] John Gregory’s discovery of lode gold up here in May of 1859 that kind of made Colorado’s gold rush permanent,” Forsyth said.
He said news of that discovery drew thousands of miners within weeks.
“The country was still really recovering from the Panic of 1857,” Forsyth said. “And so, a lot of people were still really hurting financially. And easy gold, ‘Hey, I can go out to Gregory Diggings in Colorado and get rich.’”
Few actually made it rich — but the mining did provide jobs.
Forsyth said miners earned around $2 to $3 per day, and houses, stores, schools and theaters were built as the mines operated. But by the early 20th century, mining activity had slowed significantly and halted during World War I and World War II.
“It was not a wartime necessity, and it never really came back after that,” Forsyth said. “A lot of people who had mines up here just parked their equipment inside, shut the door, said, ‘We’ll be back when the war is over.’ And then they weren’t.”
Until folks from the Inactive Mine Reclamation Program came around many decades later — in some cases welding mines closed with old equipment still inside.
“It’s reminiscent of what the miners are doing to some extent, trying to find that original gold,” Graves said. “We’re trying to find what they were looking for and what they caused, what they left in their wake.”
The lack of regulation at the time allowed these mines to be abandoned — and not just in Colorado.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates there are some 140,000 known abandoned hard-rock mining features on federal lands, and hundreds of thousands more may be unaccounted for.
Graves said Colorado’s program benefits from both state and federal funds. Additional money from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will help by freeing up state funds previously used for coal mines.
Even so, Graves said, efforts to close abandoned hard-rock mines are “certainly underfunded.”
“When you look at the magnitude of the problem, even in Colorado it would take us decades to address [it] at the current funding rates,” he said.
It looks like state governments, as well as the feds, will be paying to clean up after the 19th century gold diggers well into the 21st century.
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Lucas Herbert/Arapahoe Basin Ski Area
Friday morning wrapped up a warm storm across Colorado’s northern and central mountains, bringing totals of up to 10 inches of snowfall for several resorts.
Higher elevation areas of the northern mountains — particularly those in and near Summit County and closer to the Continental Divide — received the most amount of snow, with Copper, Winter Park and Breckenridge mountains seeing among the highest totals.
Meanwhile, lower base areas and valleys received rain and cloudy skies, thanks to a warmer storm with a snow line of roughly 9,000 feet.
Earlier this week, OpenSnow meteorologists predicted the storm’s snow totals would be around 5-10 inches, closely matching actual totals for the northern mountains. The central mountains all saw less than 5 inches of snow.
Here’s how much snow fell between Wednesday through Friday morning for some Western Slope mountains, according to a Friday report from OpenSnow:
Aspen Mountain: 0.5 inches
Snowmass: 0.5 inches
Copper Mountain: 10 inches
Winter Park: 9 inches
Breckenridge Ski Resort: 9 inches
Arapahoe Basin Ski Area: 8.5 inches
Keystone Resort: 8 inches
Loveland Ski Area: 7 inches
Vail Mountain: 7 inches
Steamboat Resort: 6 inches
Beaver Creek: 6 inches
Irwin: 4.5 inches
Cooper Mountain: 4 inches
Sunlight: 0.5 inches
Friday and Saturday will be dry, while Sunday will bring northern showers. The next storms are forecast to be around March 3-4 and March 6-7, both favoring the northern mountains.
Colorado
Avalanche discipline, power play falters, Central Division lead shrinks in 5-2 loss to Wild
The Colorado Avalanche had a chance Thursday night to regain some real separation between them and the Minnesota Wild.
It didn’t happen, and special teams were again an issue.
Minnesota’s Joel Eriksson Ek scored a pair of power-play goals, while the Avalanche took too many penalties and did not convert its chances with the extra man in a 5-2 loss at Ball Arena. The Wild scored on two of six power plays, both in the second period, then added a shorthanded goal into an empty net for good measure.
“We took six (penalties). Six is too many, especially against a power play like theirs,” Avs coach Jared Bednar said. “We had a slow start to the second and then just kind of started getting going, then took a bunch of penalties and kind of took the momentum away and swung it back in their favor again.”
Mackenzie Blackwood was excellent early in this contest and stopped 31 of 34 shots for the Avs in his first start since the Olympic break. Colorado, which went 0-for-3 on the power play, has not scored an extra-man goal in back-to-back games since Dec. 31 and Jan. 3. The Avs are 2-for-31 with the man advantage since Jan. 16, and at 15.1% are last in the NHL.
The Wild are now just five points behind the Avs in the Central Division, though Colorado has two games in hand. Filip Gustavsson made 44 saves for the visitors.
“I think we crated enough chances to win the hockey game,” Bednar said. “We give up the (second power-play goal) and that’s the difference in the hockey game for me. We had a chance (on the power play) … we score and it’s a tie game. We haven’t had an easy time capitalizing on some of our chances that we created in the last month.
“I’d like to see that turn around a little bit.”
Minnesota took advantage of three penalties on Colorado in a span of 53 seconds to take the lead with 2:23 left in the second period. Captain Gabe Landeskog was sent to the box for elbowing Eriksson Ek away from the play at 14:15 and Valeri Nichushkin was called for cross-checking at 15:04.
That gave the Wild a 5-on-3, but it went from bad to worse in a hurry for the home side. Brock Nelson won the 3-on-5 in his own end, but Brent Burns’ backhanded attempt to clear the puck out of the zone went into the stands for a delay of game.
Minnesota had a 5-on-3 for 1:56, which Colorado successfully killed off, but because Burns’ two minutes didn’t start until Landeskog’s penalty ended, there was more 5-on-4 time and Eriksson Ek scored his second of the night. The Swedish Olympian was trying to send a cross-crease pass to Kirill Kaprizov, but it hit the inside of Blackwood’s right leg and pinballed across the goal line.
Because of the extended penalty time, both Eriksson Ek and Boldy officially logged a shift of more than four minutes, leading to that goal.
“I’m not a big fan of the penalties we took, necessarily,” Landeskog said. “Obviously, mine is a penalty. Val, I felt like he was protecting himself and Burns, that’s a penalty. There’s nothing to argue about there. But yeah, that tilts the ice for sure and just gives them unnecessary momentum.
“So yeah, undisciplined and we’ve got to be better there for sure.”
Eriksson Ek put Minnesota in front at 7:48 of the second period. Cale Makar was called for slashing when his one-handed swipe while Yakov Trenin was attempting to shoot from the left wing. Trenin’s stick broke, so Makar went to the box.
Blackwood made the initial save on Matt Boldy’s shot from the high slot, but Eriksson Ek was there near the left post to clean up the rebound.
Martin Necas continued his hot run with a goal to even the score at 13:30 of the middle frame. Nathan MacKinnon picked up the puck in his own zone and carried it into the offensive end. He left a drop pass for Necas near the right point and then played fullback, driving Wild defenseman Daemon Hunt back to give Necas space and then providing a screen on a lethal wrist shot from his Czech linemate.
That was Necas’ 24th goal of the season. He added a second goal in the final minute after the Wild had built a three-goal advantage to give him 25 on the season.
It’s also three in two games since the Olympic break. Necas had three goals and eight points in five games for Czechia at the Olympics in Milan, equaling his country’s record for points at the event.
MacKinnon missed Colorado’s first game back on Wednesday because of maintenance. He actually slipped to third in the NHL scoring race as of Thursday morning, in part because Tampa Bay’s Nikita Kucherov has now has 53 points in his past 23 games to track down MacKinnon and Edmonton’s Connor McDavid to make it a three-man race for the Art Ross Trophy.
McDavid (five times) and Kucherov (three) have combined to win the Art Ross in eight of the past nine years. MacKinnon has never won it, but has finished second each of the past two seasons.
Minnesota scored a second goal off a Colorado player to make it a 3-1 game and then added two empty-net tallies around Necas’ second goal to seal the Wild’s sixth win in a row.
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Late Thursday morning, a house fire spreading into the nearby woods in Colorado’s Golden Gate Canyon prompted officials to issue a pre-evacuation order to nearby residents. Firefighters have since brought the blaze under control.
According to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, a house fire broke out around 11:30 a.m. in the 10600 block of Ralston Creek Road in Golden Gate Canyon, located around 25 miles west of Denver. The fire then began to spread into the nearby trees and grass.
Multiple fire units quickly responded to the scene, and the JCSO issued a pre-evacuation notice to all residents within a three-mile radius, warning them to be prepared to leave at a moment’s notice.
At 12:34 p.m., the sheriff’s office announced that the fire is no longer spreading and the burn area has been contained to less than an acre. A photo shared by JCSO shows a structure nearly completely destroyed by the fire.
Pre-evacuation orders were lifted around 1 p.m.
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