Country Boy Mine

It's Memorial Day weekend, which is supposed to mark the first weekend of real summer.  Not so here in Colorado.  May has been a crazy month in Colorado Springs.  On one day, we received five inches of hail at our house.  This is not an exaggeration.  Traffic was snarled (took me almost 90 minutes to drive home), trees lost their buds, and flowers were destroyed, not to mention a significant claim for hail damage to our house (nothing structural--just cosmetic dents and chipped paint).

We are fortunate to have Devin with us for the weekend.  Last time she visited, I documented the event with Dickensesque-style posts.   Not so this time--I don't have the mental strength nor the vocabulary to do that again.  We decided to come up to the mountain estate.  We arrived yesterday (Friday), and enjoyed a quiet evening at home.  We ended the night watching some of The Lego Movie.  Here's a nice shot of Bode and Devin on the couch.  Joey's also in the picture, as he kept wanting to say hello to his lovely niece.

Note also the rubber snake on the floor :-)  Today, we had hoped for nice weather.  Alas, snow showers mixed with intermittent sun.  We decided to explore the Country Boy Mine just east of Breckenridge.  It was actually quite cool and informative.  There is currently $35 - $40 million dollars in precious metals under the mine.  Sadly, the estimated cost of extraction is over $40 million dollars :-) Here are some good pictures.  First we have a shot of Bode and Devin in front of one of the old buildings.

This is a fully functional mine, although they claim to "mine" only for tourists.  They have the required equipment and also some donkeys.

They had also converted one of the old mining chutes to a kid's slide.  It was 75 feet long.  Devin and Bode both did it.  Here's a shot of them running from the bottom; I took the picture from the top of the slide.

Before we headed into the mine, Ashley and Devin stopped for a picture.  Very sweet.

The entrance of the mine is below.

We went over 1100 feet into the side of the mountain, which is pretty scary if you think about it (and all I could think about the whole time was, "What if there's an earthquake???").  We did have to wear hard-hats...

Here's a shot of the tunnel.

I was surprised how much water there was seeping in from the rocks.  This mine had nice wooden boards lining the ground.  Miners of old did not have this luxury.  The water temp is 33 degrees.  Working in these conditions with nothing other than a candle would have been miserable.  They did let Devin practice driving a metal chisel into the wall.

We were told it took almost three hours to drive the chisel ten inches into the rock.  Once there were enough holes, dynamite would be placed in the holes and ignited.  Each blast resulted in about ten inches of progress.  Recall I said the tunnel length was over 1100 feet.  Crazy.  At the end of the tunnel, we paused for a group shot.

When we came back out of the mine, it was snowing rather heavily.

After the mine tour, we headed downtime and had lunch at Eric's and then spent some quality time in the arcade.  I kept dying on the easy level of Donkey Kong.  We'll be up here for a few more days.  Pleasant day to all.