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Sunday, January 20, 2002 - Colorado's colorful gold-mining legacy lives on in the 21st century despite meager prices that have run off all but the biggest producer. The mine's ore-hauling trucks, which cost $2.3 million each and have a capacity of 310 tons of ore, stand 24 feet high, 47 feet with the bed in the upright position. Each tire is 12 1/2 feet in diameter. Last year, a single company drove Colorado gold production to a post-war record, using techniques that would have amazed industry pioneers. Diesel-powered behemoths now roar where lone prospectors once chipped with pickaxes at rich veins of gold. They are the constantly churning machines of the Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mining Co.
		The mine's ore-hauling trucks, which cost $2.3 million each and have a capacity of 310 tons of ore, stand 24 feet high, 47 feet with the bed in the upright position. Each tire is 12 1/2 feet in diameter.

The once-rollicking boomtown of Victor has devolved to a sedate mountain hamlet of 445 residents.

Yet gold still flows from the Cripple Creek mining district, 111 years after prospecting cowboy Robert Womack ignited a gold rush that made the western flank of Pikes Peak the talk of the nation.

The talk is quieter now, unless it's from environmentalists or mining executives preparing to square off in court.

There's nothing quiet, however, about the 24-hour-a-day, 365-day-a-year organized commotion rumbling from Colorado's only remaining major gold mine, the Cresson.

Cripple Creek & Victor's majority owner is AngloGold North America, a Denver-based operating unit of AngloGold Ltd., the world's largest gold producer.

Through Cripple Creek & Victor, AngloGold is the king of Colorado gold producers. Denver-based Newmont Mining, by virtue of its local corporate headquarters, may be the largest gold company here, but it has no gold production in the state.

AngloGold was enmeshed in a $5 billion battle that it eventually lost to Newmont to acquire Australia's Normandy Mining Ltd. But Newmont's victory won't affect AngloGold's dominance in Colorado.

"The Cresson mine is a significant producer of gold," said Stuart Sanderson, president of the Colorado Mining Association. "It has set (post-World War II) records because of its modern mining methods."

Single-handedly, the mine's $70 million annual production has elevated gold to the No. 3 position in Colorado mining, behind coal and construction materials such as sand, gravel and cement.

The Cresson uses high-volume, low-cost mining techniques that enable it to extract gold ore from vast open pits, despite gold prices that have plunged 70 percent since hitting an all-time high of $850 an ounce in 1980.

At last year's average gold price of $270 per ounce, Cripple Creek & Victor grossed an estimated $70 million by producing about 260,000 ounces of gold.

Imagine that amount visually: enough to lay a line of 650 gold bars spanning the length of a football field and still have 34 bars left over. Those remaining 34 would be sufficient to pay most of Broncos running back Terrell Davis' $4.7 million base salary next year.

But at the site of the Cresson mine, there's not a gold nugget to be found. Virtually all of the gold is in the form of microscopic particles locked within volcanic rock formations. To unlock the hidden treasure, the ore must first be dug out in large chunks, crushed and then sprinkled with a cyanide solution to separate gold from ore.

The sight of massive trucks, power shovels and mechanical crushers would have astounded early prospectors, who found the Cripple Creek district's gold by digging narrow vertical shafts to reach rich underground veins.

It may have been lonely, backbreaking work, but solitary miners around the turn of the century often found an ounce or two of gold in every ton of ore they dug.

By contrast, the Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mining Co. must blast, shovel and process as much as 100 tons of ore to obtain an ounce of gold. Even at the most potent concentrations, the mine's gold yields itself grudgingly at the rate of 1 ounce per 12 tons of ore.

The low-grade ore means that Cresson must make up in sheer volume what it lacks in high quality.

Size and continuity are the keywords.

Ore-hauling trucks are sufficiently large to make mine visitors gawk when they see people standing in antlike proportions beside the vehicles.

Cresson general manager Ron Largent stands barely as high as the truck's wheel hub. The $2.3 million truck stands 24 feet high, 47 feet with the bed in the upright position.

Its six tires are each 121/2 feet in diameter. A replacement tire costs $25,000.

Most important, the vehicles have a capacity of 310 tons of ore, compared with earlier versions that carried 100 tons.

The larger loading capacity and a new ore-crushing facility will allow the mine to double its production by 2006.

AngloGold officials said buying the new trucks is a good investment because they boost capacity without adding to labor costs.

Women have priority for driving the larger and costlier trucks. "Women drivers are safer and easier on the machinery," said mine spokeswoman Amy Knous.

That's an important consideration when the trucks are run continuously on two 12-hour shifts per day, every day of the year.

"The way you become economical is to keep running and not miss a beat," Largent said.

The mine, Teller County's largest private employer, uses 300 workers whose wages range from $12 to $20 per hour, with an average of $16.50.

The mining process starts with 9,000 pounds of explosives each day to blast large rock formations. Shovels and loaders then scoop the gray ore into trucks, which unload their cargo at nearby crushing plants. The 3-foot boulders are ground down to 11/2-inch pieces of rock.

Another set of trucks carries the rock to a huge pile, or leach pad, where rubber hoses pour a cyanide solution - 100 parts cyanide per 1 million parts water - at a rate of 10,000 gallons per minute over the rocks.

The cyanide trickles down through the rocks, reacting with the minute gold particles and carrying them to the bottom of the pad where the "pregnant solution" is pumped to a plant that filters out the gold.

The gold particles, along with smaller amounts of silver, are partly refined into conical, 80-pound "buttons" that resemble huge 7-inch-high Hershey's Kisses. The buttons then are sent to smelters in Massachusetts and Switzerland for complete refining and eventual sale to jewelry makers and industrial users.

Cripple Creek & Victor officials say they pay very close attention to environmental matters, especially in the areas of land reclamation, prevention of cyanide leaks and monitoring of water discharges.

Environmentalists say the mine is not careful enough.

The Sierra Club and another advocacy group, the Mineral Policy Center, have filed two lawsuits in federal court alleging that the mine has sent water laden with dangerous metals and toxic chemicals into surrounding creeks. The groups also contend that the mine has not obtained permits for some of its water discharges.

"It's sort of a witches' brew of heavy metals and high acid levels," said Roger Flynn, an attorney for the plaintiffs. "We're saying that the discharges should be permitted, monitored and maintained at safe levels."

Mine officials say discharge violations have occurred on only a handful of occasions when heavy rains and fast snowmelt sent unusually high volumes of water off the mine property. They say some of the toxic discharge stems from mine operations conducted decades ago on properties not owned by Cripple Creek & Victor.

Talks to settle the suits have been called off for lack of progress.

AngloGold officials said they are strong backers of the International Cyanide Management Code for Gold Mining, which seeks to implement voluntary guidelines for the safe use of cyanide leaching.

Jim Komadina, president and chief executive of AngloGold North America, said the Cresson mines regulation is some of the tightest in history because the permitting process was done shortly after the Summitville mine disaster in southwestern Colorado.

"All you can say is that is an aberration," Komadina said of Summitville. "Mining is a temporary use of the land, and if done properly, we can complete the life cycle of the land."

The company also is backing a gold-sector plan to boost the industry's retail marketing budget from $55 million to $200 million a year by levying fees of 30 cents on every ounce of mined gold.

AngloGold said it has spent millions of dollars in Teller County rehabilitating historic buildings and abandoned mine structures to preserve the mining heritage of the area.

"We've worked hard to understand the history of the area," Komadina said. "It's one of Colorado's treasures."