2 carloads of us ventured over to Victor/Cripple Creek for the tour on Monday, slipping and sliding our way over there as it had snowed the night before - for those of you that have been to Cripple Creek, you'll know it's an extremely curvey road alongside of a mountain! But we made it safe and sound and soon Larry picked us up in a van for our tour!
Our first stop was the machinery shop - WOW - the size of these machines are amazing! For the large ones (pictured below - and note the trucks are so large I couldn't even get an entire one in the picture!), cost is 3.4 million per truck! They each hold approximately 240 tons of crushed rock!
Take a guess at how much each of these tires would cost if you needed to replace it - hopefully you guessed around $30,000 per tire! We felt pretty small next to them! Guess you wouldn't want to get in their way! We also got to climb ladders to get to the top of the truck - yes, it's pretty high up!
Our tour continued at the crushing plant! Each of the large trucks dumps their tons and tons of rock into this huge pit and a crusher crushes them into smaller pieces and then they go through a couple more crushing procedures - it was all totally amazing to watch the procedure!
Larry gave us all kinds of facts and figures (which of course I can't seem to remember) and our final stop was the actual place where they pour the gold into "buttons" as they're called! The heat from the kiln was pretty darn hot and it was exciting to watch the gold pour into the bucket - they cooled it off and before we knew it, the gold "button" was sitting on the table!
We each got our turn to pick it up - all $650,000 worth of it - but because it weighed a little over 42 pounds, some of us with no arm muscles had a hard time picking it up!!
All in all, it was a fantastic tour and I learned a LOT about the process of mining gold!
3 comments:
Wow!!!
What fun! And I love your sweater (lol - I think that is the one we share ;)
Whoa those are some huge trucks! Could you slip that gold nugget in your pocket.....? Oh wait you couldn't lift it!! LOL
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