Friday Field Trip - Fall Colors

On Monday, Hubster and I drove the Victor/Cripple Creek route to take some pictures of the turning aspens. And so did a LOT of other people. Everyone was pulling off to the side of the road. Some had camera phones, other full blown gear with tripods. One man told us this is the best color he's seen up here in 10 years.

One thing I've learned. Aspens grow in clones. The different clones will have different schedules for leafing out and turning gold. Some are gold, some yellow, some red-orange. Looking out over the mountains, the different stripes of color were breathtaking. And, for the record, our deck aspens are a very "late" clone--most of them are still quite green, and just starting to turn yellow. The ones on the other side of the house are already gold.

OK, enough talk. Enjoy fall in the Colorado mountains. Clicking on an image should enlarge it.

Friday Field Trip: Mollie Kathleen 1

Hubster and I went to Cripple Creek for an overnight on Tuesday. The weather was NOT conducive to picture taking. I'm talking snow, cold, and gloomy skies. But on Wednesday, things were better, and on our drive home, we stopped to tour the Mollie Kathleen mine. The tour takes you down 1000 feet. This week, we'll look at what it was like down there, and next week, I'll share some of the pictures from up top.

There were 5 of us plus a guide on the tour. We barely squeezed into a cage that was supposed to hold 8 miners for the descent to 1000 feet. Those guys must have been small. Small wonder they posted this sign at the top:



Down below, we were given demonstrations of tools and mining methods, and how they progressed with time. The tunnels were dimly lit, but our guide would show us the reality by turning of the "tourist" lighting, leaving us to see what the miners had to deal with. Between the dark and the noise of the jackhammers and drills, working conditions would hardly pass today's standards. (They used to use burros to do the work, and they lived their entire lives in the mine until regulations said they had to be brought topside once a day. The cost was prohibitive, so they simply brought them up and released them, leaving men to do what the burros had done. They had a car loaded with its "normal" load of a ton of ore. A burro could pull 2. Neither of the men brave enough to try could move it more than a few inches.

So -- these are some views from inside the mine: