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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Three-quarters of Colorado residents said they were worried about whether they would be able to afford to continue living in the state, according to a poll conducted this spring.
Last year, about 70% of people responding to the Colorado Health Foundation’s annual Pulse poll said they weren’t sure living here would remain financially feasible. That rose to 76% this year.
“That majority concern was cutting across regions, across income levels, across racial and ethnic groups,” said Lucia Del Puppo, senior vice president at FM3 Research, which works with Democrats.
The poll found that the majority of those sampled said they had already cut back on entertainment spending and charitable giving, with smaller shares saying they’d skipped meals, delayed medical or dental care, or paid a utility bill late.
Only about one in four people said they hadn’t changed their spending or dealt with a financial setback in the last year, with older people and Republicans reporting less budget strain.
“It’s significant and it affects the overall economy” when people reduce their discretionary spending, said Lori Weigel, principal of New Bridge Strategy, which works with Republicans.
The responses suggested a significant minority expected further financial strains in the coming year:
- About two in five worried they or a family member would lose health insurance
- Three in 10 worried about affording enough food
- One-third thought they might lose their housing because they couldn’t afford their mortgage or rent
Notably, more than half of renters were worried about whether they could continue to afford their housing, Weigel said. One-third said they’d avoided asking their landlords to fix problems to avoid rent increases, and one-quarter said they’d taken on high-interest debt, such as payday loans or credit card balances, to deal with housing costs, she said.
Lower-income people and those who identified as Black, Hispanic or Native American reported greater financial struggles than other groups.
Even people who haven’t had to cut back are worried about affordability. When asked to rate the seriousness of a list of potential problems, 85% said both the general cost of living and the cost of housing were either “very serious” or “extremely serious.” Additionally, 82% said the cost of health care was a very serious or extremely serious problem.
Younger people were particularly worried about housing costs, with 94% of millennials and 90% of Generation Z members describing the problem as very or extremely serious.
At the same time, when respondents got the chance to name the most important issue facing the state, the largest share — 28% — chose government and politics. The cost of living and inflation came close behind, with 25% deeming it the top issue.
Just one year ago, only 13% of people considered cost of living and inflation their top concern, Del Puppo said.
“It has jumped really since 2025,” she said.
The two may be related, as 72% of respondents said they weren’t satisfied with the government’s response to economic issues. The only question where a slight majority said they were satisfied with the state government’s performance was making the state “safe and welcoming” to everyone, Del Puppo said.
The poll asked more than 2,200 people about their personal finances, experiences with health care and perceptions of the state between March and April, then weighted their results to represent Colorado’s demographics.
As usual, both a Democratic and a Republican firm ran the poll, to reduce the risk of bias.
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