mines. A couple of years later, it had jumped to fourteen thousand tons and climbing. The population of Silverton and surrounding towns ballooned into the thousands.
By then, Olaf Nelson had another mouth to feed, a son named Oscar. Freelance prospecting wasn’t paying off, so he got a real job up at the Sampson Mine, located on the upper slopes of Bonita Peak. It was one of the upstart mines in the area, first staked in the early 1880s. In 1883 its owner, Theodore Stahl, had a mill built in Gladstone along with a tram to link mine and mill, one of the first in the San Juans. Nelson’s job was to run the tram, which carried ore down to the mill and served as a sketchy, primitive chairlift for miners, adding to the long list of ways to die while in the trade. Nelson and his family moved into the mine’s boardinghouse, perched at twelve thousand feet above sea level near the mine portal, in 1885.
That is where Louisa, Olaf, Anna, and two-year-old Oscar found themselves on a January evening in 1886. A blizzard had raged outside since late the previous night and even during the light of day the flakes came down so thick that Olaf couldn’t see beyond the second tram tower. As they sat in the dim light of lanterns they occasionally heard a deep and eerie whoomph as slabs of snow tumbled from the roof. But inside, with a stoked stove and the deep snow providing insulation, they were warm, at least. The baby slept, Anna read, and Louisa knitted. Olaf felt another whoomph, only deeper, louder. He heard a hissing, and noticed that a stream of smoke was blowing out of the stove door. Then the crashing, the world moving, the wall rushing towards them: Avalanche.
A baby was crying. Louisa called out: “Anna. Anna.” Olaf Nelson moved silently and quickly through the darkness. Amid the wreckage he found the pipe from the stove, still hot, and used it as a shovel. He dug frantically through the snow toward the cries, tears rolling down his face.
Once again, Olaf Arvid Nelson had cheated death. Louisa, Anna, and Oscar made it out of the catastrophe with nothing worse than a few scratches, bruises, and a lot of fear. The time-line gets fuzzy here, but it seems that the family relocated down the slope to Gladstone, where Louisa operated a store while Nelson stayed on at the Sampson, now working underground.
Nelson was no geologist, but he had spent enough time poking around in these rocks to get a gut sense of how mineral-loaded veins operate, and what sorts of trajectories they tend to follow through a mountainside. Every day that he stepped into the Sampson Mine and hammered and drilled and blasted at the stope, he was also calculating. He deduced that he and his coworkers were mining in the wrong place; the vein would be richer, thicker, riper elsewhere. He kept his thoughts under wraps, though, and on April 11, 1887, he acted on his hunch, quietly staking a 1,500-foot by 300-foot lode claim on Bonita Peak’s slope, not far below the Sampson workings. He called it the Gold King.
Nelson quit the Sampson and he and the family—he now had five children—moved to Howardsville. Louisa started up another store, while Nelson leased the Philadelphia Mine, a proven producer, so that he’d have a semi-reliable source of income. It was a success; he was pulling out ore that netted two hundred dollars (equal to $5,000 today) per ton, a relatively high grade. He also was appointed constable of Howardsville in 1890, adding to his workload. But what Nelson really wanted was to build a mine from the ground up, to strike it rich on his own, and he spent all of his spare time up on Bonita Peak at the Gold King, working at night, on Sundays, in storms, and in sunshine.
This wasn’t the way mining worked anymore. You were supposed to stake a claim then go out and promote it and bring in some venture capital to finance development. That’s the kind of large-scale capitalism that had turned San Juan County into a mining powerhouse, with the industry employing more than 1,200 people at 176 mines, thirteen mills, and two electric plants. But no, that wasn’t Nelson’s way. He kept his find quiet, working surreptitiously and alone. He endured cold and rain and the dank and dusty underground air for more than three years, sometimes working all night long, ultimately sinking a fifty-foot shaft and a fifty-foot drift. Then he became so sick that he could work no more. They called it pneumonia, a common affliction of the day. It might have been silicosis, or miner’s lung, which had yet to be classified. Maybe Nelson had just worked himself into his deathbed.
Nelson’s breathing is shallow and useless. Outside, huge, lacy flakes of snow catch the soft, late-afternoon light as they fall slowly to the earth. It is April 1891 and Olaf Arvid Nelson is dying. “And for what?” He asks in a raspy voice, speaking to no one in particular. Then he says no more. His obituary will remember him as an “honest and hard working man.” It won’t even mention the Gold King Mine.
ACID MINE DRAINAGE MAY BE THE PERFECT POISON. It kills fish. It kills bugs. It kills the birds that eat the bugs that live in streams tainted by the drainage. It lasts forever. And to create it, one needs no factory, lab, or added chemicals. One merely needs to dig a hole in the earth.
The hole, or mine, exposes once-buried, sulfide-bearing rocks such as iron pyrite (FeS2) to oxygen. As the hole gets deeper, it will penetrate aquifers or intersect groundwater-carrying faults and fractures, and even draw groundwater to it since it provides the path of least resistance. Put those three innocent ingredients—oxygen, water, and iron pyrite—together, and they engage in an atom- and ion-swapping molecular-level orgy. Hydrogen, sulfide, and oxygen come together to form sulfuric acid (H2SO4).20 Thus, the water becomes acidic, or its pH drops. Iron and oxygen hook up to form iron oxide (Fe(OH)3). The iron oxidizes, or rusts, giving the Gold King slug, and acid mine drainage in general, that striking ochre hue.21
As the now-acidic groundwater moves through the mine, it dissolves and picks up naturally occurring metals in the rocks over which it flows, a process known as metal loading. Mine drainage is typically loaded with iron, zinc, cadmium, lead, copper, aluminum, arsenic, and silver. Mercury can get mixed in, too, sometimes even uranium.
It gets worse. As the pH level of the water drops below 4.8, acidophilic bacteria begin feeding off the metals, releasing more acid into the solution and causing metal loading to occur up to one million times faster than in water with higher pH. The result is acid mine drainage, mining’s most insidious, pervasive, and persistent environmental hazard. The water trickling, gurgling, and sometimes gushing out of a mine portal can have a pH equal to that of battery acid or worse. This concoction can carry hundreds of pounds per day of toxic heavy metals with it, picking up even more as it courses over or through the mine-waste rock dump piled outside nearly every mine portal.
“Probably all the waters met with in the mines of the Silverton quadrangle . . . are meteoric waters variously modified by the materials through which they have passed,” noted Frederick Ransome, in a 1901 U.S. Geological Survey report about the region. “The descent of the meteoric water through masses of pyrite and other ore minerals is often sufficient to give it a strong acid reaction and render it highly ferruginous.” The water at the Yankee Girl Mine, just over the ridge from the Gold King, was so acidic that “Candlesticks, picks, or other iron or steel tools left in this water became quickly coated with coppers (sulfate salts). Iron pipes and rails were rapidly destroyed, and the constant replacement of the piping and pumps necessary to handle the abundant water was a large item in the working expenses.”
Acid mine drainage is ubiquitous in mining country, from Idaho’s contaminated Coeur d’Alene River basin to the eerily colored mine pool of the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana, where thousands of migrating snow geese perished in one fell swoop after landing on the contaminated “lake.” The waters flowing from the Richmond Mine in California are more corrosive than battery acid and will devour a shovel in twenty-four hours. Left alone, the mine will continue to spew into the Sacramento River watershed for thousands of years to come. An ancient mine in southern Spain, abandoned four
