Mines

Why is there so much month left at the end of the money?

                                                                               Miners creed

 

 In the winter of 71, disillusioned with what was quickly becoming the ‘Plastic Bavaria’, Vail, I took a job with New Jersey Zinc Company in the hard rock mine at Gilman Colorado. I felt that I had outgrown my spoiled ski-bum self & friends & could now relate to those tough individuals that call themselves miners. I figured they would appreciate me for the move.

 They didn’t.

 I was lucky to survive that miserable winter.

 

 The Gilman mine, 10 miles south of Minturn is a labyrinth of 300 miles of underground tunnel. Over a half mile deep it boasted the largest underground mill of any mine in the states. They ran two shifts, with 300 men per shift. 590 miners of Mexican descent, 10 gringo foremen & me.

 We mined zinc, gold, silver, lead, molybdenum & lord knows what else. A hard rock mine is exactly that, supposedly safer than it’s counterpart a coal mine, or soft rock. A coal mine is not only prone to cave ins but rife with poisonous gasses, & apt to explode at any time. A hard rock mine is more stable, less gaseous & less prone to explode. One only has to worry about  silicosis of the lungs from dust, electrocution, cave ins, generator failure, unstable dynamite, floods, head lamp failure, air pump failure, timber floor collapse, lead, mercury, or arsenic poisoning, falls, gas, foul air, explosion of methane gas, hoist cable breaking resulting in a 1600 foot fall, a homicidal partner, & showering with 295 Mexicans who hate your guts.

 Allow me, if you will, to describe a typical shift at the Gilman mine.

 

 A condemned bluebird school bus departs Minturn at 6:15 in the morn. It’s pitch dark & will be again when we surface 10 hours later. Two weeks day shift, two weeks night. By the time we miners see the sun again we’ll have to wear two pair of sunglasses to cut the glare. Our skin looks like a cadavers, white, with a greasy gray pigment imbedded in the pores.

 The driver reeks of alcohol & fights to stay awake on the icy switchbacks that cling 1000 feet above the eagle river, yellow & dead with mine tailings. We arrive at Gilman, a company town with replica houses that is now evacuated due to the mines predicted closure. The remaining miners must reside in Red Cliff or Minturn, two hard-scrabble communities of trailer houses, plywood shacks & dismantled 57 Chevys.

  A large rusting tin building houses rows of lockers, a single huge shower room with 100 shower heads & freezing cement floor, & the headframe, a metal structure which supports a cable that lowers the hoist (open elevator) into the earth.

 We change into steel toed boots, overalls stiff with ore dust & cold, a hard hat, & shuffle to the hoist, passing a huge sign which reads NUMBER OF DAYS WITHOUT ACCIDENT AT GILMAN MINE & the removable letters below read 7. Great, I think.    I never saw it pass 14. The entire building is greasy gray with dust & depressing with age.

 We clamber aboard the metal hoist, basically an elevator that comes up to your waist & swings from a half inch cable. 20 men squeeze in till your packed like sheep to slaughter.

Somebody gooses me but I’m jammed to tight to look around & too outnumbered to complain. Suddenly the 1000 horsepower winch groans to life & with a sickening lurch you start to drop. Bare rock races by our faces at a breathtaking speed. Like being lowered into a well, 1600 feet down.

 Finally the hoist slows, we bump to a stop on the main level & disembark into a surreal world. The ceiling here is 50 feet high, strung with garish electric lights that reflect damp bare rock & rusting narrow gauge tracks. Two or three trains scuttle about carrying ore & men into the tunnels leading of the mainline. The place smells like a grave...a cold, damp, metallic, lifeless stench that will permeate my life for the next 4 months.

 We hike about a half mile stepping over high pressure air hoses & massive electric conduits. The noise is overwhelming with shrieking air, diesel generators, & rumbling trains. No one talks.

 In a room off the main line we assemble for our headlamps & battery pack. The batteries are good for 13 hours, your on a 9 hour shift, if something happens or you get lost, they have 4 hours to find you in the 300 miles of tunnels. The foreman then doles out numbered   lead dog tags. When we return from the shift the tags are hung on a board. Missing tags will account for missing men. Next your given a handful of poppers. In case the miner encounters a vein of poisonous gas & you feel yourself passing out, you grab one of these little babies from your shirt pocket, break it under your nose & your heart takes off like a dragster, giving you enough energy to get away from the gas...& a splitting headache.

 Then your assigned partners. No one works alone. As an apprentice I fill in for anyone who didn’t show. I’ll spend half the day setting dynamite charges with a mean greaser by the name of Raul then the other half with an older fellow down in the flooded lower depths setting up pumps.

 Raul glares at me and walks off, I follow wondering what happened to his last partner. We board an open rail car that is lowered down a 50 degree angle & stopped at each level 100 feet apart. We get off at the 23rd level & hike to the dynamite room.

 This is a disturbing cement cubical with massive steel door behind which is housed about 500 cases of dynamite sticks, underwater fuses, & blasting caps. Old & damp dynamite is extremely unstable & there is plenty of it here. Raul takes my pack, fills it with 50 some odd sticks & hands it back without a word. We depart deeper into the bowels of the earth.

 At this point the tunnel narrows, just wide enough for the ore train to pass. The tracks are elevated a foot or so above ditches on both sides. Piss-ditches they are called for obvious reason, they are filled with vile leakage from mine & miner.

 The ore train drivers delight in catching a miner in mid tunnel, where without an escape route the hapless miner is forced to dive face down in said ditch to avoid the speeding train.

 

 Finally we reach our stope. The Gilman Mine was a timbered stope mine. In other words your walking on timber supported planks as you drill into a solid rock wall. Dynamite charges are pounded into the 6 foot deep 2 inch holes, the planks are pulled back, the fuses lit & the resulting blast drops the ore 100 feet down to the next level. You wait an hour for the dust to clear, then venture back in, replace the planks, & commence drilling again with a hundred pound shrieking air pressure run jackhammer. Mining is an extremely repetitious, loud, dirty, backbreaking, dangerous job.

  Raul spent an hour pounding home dynamite sticks into a dozen holes he & his mysterious partner had drilled in the previous week. He then handed me the remaining 20 or so sticks, & informed me I would be exiting the tunnel above when the fuses were lit.

 Every entrance to a stope must be guarded while the fuses burn to avoid a miner or foreman walking unsuspecting into a blast area. The problem was, the tunnel I was to guard was a hundred feet up. Up ten rickety ladders, through ten tiny hatches, with a backpack of dynamite on, just to reach the escape route.

 Raul started firing the fuses, 30 seconds apart. By the time he was halfway across the wall, the first fuse had disappeared into it’s hole.

 The hell with Raul, he simply had to scamper back out the tunnel we had walked in, I had to climb ten stories straight up....I was out of there.

 My boots caught on the crude ladders, the backpack hung up in the narrow hatches, sweat stung my eyes in the 90 degree heat as I scrambled & clawed my way up the ten floors to the exit. Seconds seemed like minutes as surly the ensuing blast was eminent. The shock wave would surly ignite the backpack of remaining dynamite I struggled with, pulverizing me into the gray dust that coated everything. Dust to dust half a mile beneath the earth.

                                     To be continued.

 

                                                          MINES II

Thank God men cannot as yet fly & lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

                                                                                 Henry Thoreau 1817-1862

 

 

 Raul was very upset that I had abandoned him in the tunnel full of lit dynamite.

 Raul was upset because the most important rule in mining is that you never abandon your partner....especially after the fuses to 50 sticks of dynamite have been lit. You never abandon each other at this point because if one miner were to fall or twist an ankle the other would supposedly help get him out before the inevitable blast.......simple really.

 Raul was so upset as a mater of fact that there is little doubt in my mind to this day that he would have killed me on the spot had not the headlamp of a foreman been spotted coming at us.

 Now the Gilman mine, as I have said, contained 300 miles of tunnel, many of these miles being perfectly straight. A seasoned miner could spot a foreman & name which one it was simply by the gait or in this case the motion of the headlamp, from 1/2 mile away.

 There were many a shift in the Gilman mine spent curled in the rocks of a hot & dusty stope with ones headlamp off simply snoring away, one eye on the entrance for the faint reflection of the foreman’s lamp. It was impossible as a matter of fact to remain awake in that thick black atmosphere, & the simple act of sitting down would induce a deep sleep. There is no darker dark than 1/2 mile underground, there is no quieter quiet.

 Anyway, Raul was irate & didn’t sugar coat my cowardly action to the arriving foreman.

 I was immediately transferred.

 I was transferred to the bottom of the mine. Almost a mile underground. The flooded 32nd level.

 I was transferred to a maintenance crew setting up huge pumps in the middle of the earth. Going straight to hell would of looked like a love boat cruise compared to this.

 

 Now I don’t know how many of you have been in a flooded mine shaft a mile underground, with icy black water up to your chin leaving only a foot of stagnant air to a dripping rock ceiling, but it is an extremely disconcerting feeling. You cannot shake the nagging knowledge that if anywhere in the 20 miles of the 32 level, a large rock were to drop from the ceiling into the water, the afore mentioned water table would immediately rise effectively cutting off your short miserable life.

 The really disconcerting thing I suppose was that at this point you would effectively  be buried. No one would even attempt to resurrect the drowned body of a miner in twenty miles of black submerged tunnel, simply to bury you again closer to the surface.

 You would forever be entombed a mile below the sunlit surface, alone. So far away from your loved ones they would completely forget about you by the following afternoon.

 At times during my subterranean tenure I would clamber above the water to contemplate the enormity of my situation. With head lamp off & the blackness so total as to not knowing whether your eye lids were open or not, the mind would wander to it’s perimeters. The thought of a mile of solid rock above your head gives one pause to consider clausterfobia. The mind is an incredible muscle however & always within seconds of wandering over the abyss of total mental breakdown it would snap back to relative stability. It apparently takes a lot to drive the fragile human physic bananas. 

 I spent a month at the 32 level salvaging rusting equipment, maneuvering huge canvas piping in an vain attempt to stop the earth’s seepage into that black hellhole.

 And after a month of standing in 4 feet of freezing water a mile underground it suddenly occurred to me that I wasn’t having any fun.

 I quit my job with the New Jersey Zinc Company that night, moved to Hawaii the next morning & lay in the sun until I was hospitalized.

 I have never gone back underground & have requested not to be buried there.

 

The New Jersey Zinc company closed the Gilman Mine in 1976 & 300 miners were left  with black lung disease & unemployed. The towns of Gilman, Red Cliff & Minturn all but withered away. The company returned years later on threat of suit by the EPA & restored the Eagle river from stagnate yellow to it’s normal self.

 Mining companies throughout the world have long held carte-blanch to achieve their goals in resurrecting the precious minerals & fuels to feed our consumer societies.

The Guggenheim family that made it’s fortune from Leadville mines & in the process laid waste to thousands & thousands of acres recently returned to the decimated town a gold embossed plaque commemorating it’s long dead miners.

 Arizona mining towns such as Globe, Bisbee & Miami were not as lucky. They received no plaque for their barren polluted earth. Why, as we speak Midland Mining Ltd of England plans to go after an 8 foot seam of coal 6000 feet below Newstead Abbey one of the countries most prized historic buildings. Midlands own survey suggests their operation could cause ‘slight’ damage to the 800 year old Abbey costing ‘about 5 million’ to repair.

    The giant mining firm Amax holds mineral rights under our own Red Lady bowl. If you think they don’t have the power to destroy a place go look at their open pit copper mine in Green Valley Arizona.

 If they set their sites on going after that molybdenum....be afraid...be very afraid.