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 at the top. Poulson explained for every truck carrying 250 tons, roughly six ounces of gold are recovered. An ounce of gold is roughly the size of the top third of a pinky finger.
“They’re really giant computers on wheels that are being monitored via satellite back to our dispatch center,” Poulson said, as I stared openmouthed as one passed by in the other lane. So large in fact that there was a good chance the driver wasn’t even aware that we were on the road with him. Poulson added the truck’s engine temperature, hydraulic pressure, speed, location, and what they’re hauling were all monitored.
“The thing is, the trucks are twenty-seven feet wide, twenty-five feet tall, and about forty feet long,” Poulson said. “So it’s like driving a two-story house. When they’re in the operator’s cab on the left-hand side of the truck, they literally can’t see the right-hand side of the road for 120 feet. So they drive on the left-hand side of the road so that they can see the berm.”
Everywhere you go in a modern surface mining operation, you’ll see berms at least half as tall as the tallest tire on the road. In this case, the tires are twelve feet tall, so the berms are at least six feet tall. If a driver loses control of a truck, or if there’s a brake failure, the berm is engineered to stop the vehicle from going over the side of one of the deep surface mines. Those mines in fact dwarf the trucks, sometimes going down over a thousand feet in what looks like an inverted pyramid. The size of it can easily boggle the mind of the uninitiated.
The Wild Horse
Poulson and I got out of the truck at the bottom of the six-hundred-foot-deep Wild Horse extension surface mine. I couldn’t help but feel like I was in one of the moon’s craters. These types of mines consist of “walls and benches” with walls between thirty-five feet and seventy feet tall and twenty-foot benches, used to stop tumbling rock. The whole thing looks like stairs for a giant. Poulson explained that the process starts in part with fifty-foot drills that are set up in GPS-specified locations. Approximately 250 of the holes are drilled in one area about fifteen feet apart. A detonator the size of a man’s fist is put into the bottom and the hole is pumped full of ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel.
“We pump that full of explosives except for the top ten feet … I am talking about people who have mega skills,” Poulson said. “I am talking about people who are skilled in what they do and handling every aspect of this.”
The company’s blast technicians then backfill the new hole with crushed rock so that the explosives go off sideways and fracture the earth. In doing the surface
