A Crutch for Cripple Creek

In Colorado's famous old Cripple Creek mining district, which produced $24,986.990 worth of gold in its peak year (1901), men have been boring a tunnel for 20 months in search of pay dirt. Last month they found it. Water gushed from the rock, sent them scurrying from their tunnel. Soon the flow reached 20,000 gallons a minute--enough to cover an acre of ground to a depth of 100 ft. in a single day. The water level in Cripple Creek's long-flooded mines dropped fast. By last week the 2,600-foot-deep Ajax mine (formerly workable only with constant pumping) was dry all the way to the bottom. With the water draining from the mines, an estimated $13,000,000 in gold deposits was being uncovered and Cripple Creek was ready for another boom.

The Cripple Creek field (said to be named for a stream in which a cow once acquired a limp by getting stuck in the mud) is 36 square miles of volcanic rock on the southwestern slope of Pikes Peak. There, half-century ago, men's fortunes boiled as furiously as had the prehistoric lava which formed the plateau. A cowhand named Bob Womack, after digging so many holes that he endangered the lives of his employers' cattle, made the first strike in 1891, went on a spree, and discovered next morning that he had sold his claim for $500. Since then some $381,000,000 in gold has been taken from the field.

After 1900 the Cripple Creek boom flattened out. Although the field was 9,500-11,000 ft. above sea level, the miners, as they went deeper, met a mass of spongy rock in a pocket of granite where water had collected for centuries. One tunnel, blasted through the granite in 1903, drained away some of the water. Another, finished just before World War I, gave Cripple Creek another lease on life. But by 1930 the boom days were gone.

Present owner of many of the mines (as well as the field's ore mill and railroad) is Golden Cycle Corp. After the town of Cripple Creek was refused a Federal loan to dig a third drainage tunnel, Golden Cycle decided to risk about $2,000,000 of its own money.

The tunnel is 3,300 ft. below ground, will be about 32,000 ft. long; Golden Cycle claims that it will be the longest of its kind ever dug. The company hopes to sell the water for irrigation purposes. New ore discoveries also will foot part of the bill; last month the diggers struck a vein assaying $65 a ton, six times as much as most of the ore now mined from the field.

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