FEATURE COVERAGE

A Legacy of Land
… And Other Perks of Having a Mining Giant in Your Back Yard

Part 8 in “The Mine Next Door” Series

by Samantha Tisdel Wright

Just past a tight S-curve at mile post 82 on Red Mountain Pass – up above Idarado’s old company houses – there’s a little hill that the Idarado Mine blasted flat for a scenic overlook.

If you go up there on a quiet autumn day, you can almost imagine Fred Searls, Jr., Fred Wise and Johnny Wise standing off to one side, hands stuffed in pockets, peering out at the remnants of the mine they helped spawn all those years ago.

Back in the 1940s and ‘50s, Idarado’s founding fathers bought up thousands of acres’ worth of historic mining claims in the Red Mountain and Telluride area and stitched them together into the biggest mine that ever existed in the San Juan Mountains.

Grass on Gray Mountain

Adventures in Tailings Remediation

by Samantha Tisdel Wright

Every workday morning back in the 1970s, Joe Smart would kiss his wife and little son goodbye, step out into the bracing dawn, and tune his ear to the rhythm of the Pandora Mill, a mile and a half up the valley from his company house in Telluride.

As long as he could hear the tick-tick-tick-tick-tick of the big gray mill’s powerful vacuum pumps, that meant it would be a good day.

“But if the mill wasn’t running, I knew it wasn’t gonna be a good day,” Smart said. “Everybody would be scurrying to get the mill back running.” Every minute the mill was down, the Idarado Mine lost money. Muck-bound ore. Idle miners. Cranky bosses. Empty con trucks. Not a pretty picture.

It’s a RAP
The Battle over Idarado’s Reclamation

by Samantha Tisdel Wright

Locals called it the Toxic Twinkie.

By the time the Idarado mine shut down in 1978, the enormous loaf-shaped mound of tailings at the edge of Telluride – otherwise known as the Number 6 tailings pile – had taken on a life of its own in the town’s collective consciousness.  

On gusty days, 20-foot-tall dust devils lifted off the tailings and swept through town, inspiring KOTO (Telluride’s local radio station) to broadcast “tailings alerts” warning town residents to take cover. No one really knew what was in that dust, or what it might do to them when they breathed it in.

Some folks joked (and perhaps secretly fantasized) that the Toxic Twinkie would roll out of town one day of its own accord, like a giant jellyroll filled with slime.

Miles of Tunnels

by Samantha Tisdel Wright

A Brief History of the Idarado Mine

The history of the Idarado Mine is as long the tunnels and as rich as the ore veins that riddle its guts. Its stories are stoked by volcanic tantrums, and sculpted by the winds of history that blew Americans across the West.

How far back do you want to go – World War II? Manifest Destiny of the 1800s? Dominguez and Escalante in 1776? The Tertiary period 35 million years ago, with its great belching supervolcanoes and collapsed calderas that spawned the fabled ore bodies of the San Juan Mountains?

All had a role to play in the rise of the largest mining operation that ever existed in the San Juans.

The Big Bonanza