I was a sample boy and mine engineer's assistant in the Idarado. Think it was in 1963. The place is closed now, and some big environmental contamination clean up...God, I lived in that muck.

Idarado is a huge mine, parts of it go back to the 1800s and were boarded off even 45 years ago. We really did carry candles to check the air. The geology inside is incredible. Fault lines where solid rock was turned to clay by the pressure. Stopes full of crystals or peacock copper...was like being inside a royal treasure room. The high levels were so cold they had ice crystals growing like leaves...but only your eye can see them since a flash picture shoots the light right through them.

Even though we were still 10,000 feet above sea level it still got hot in the depths of the mine, the 2,900 foot level where all the ore ran down to for the trip to Telluride to be crushed. Back then Telluride was only a tiny mill town to process the ore out of the Idarado.

My sample boy duties involved wandering the mine alone. I was probably the only guy in the mine without a partner. Downside was that I got blown up a lot. When the guys working the stopes had a rock too big for the shute they'd stick dynamite under it to bust it up. Since they were so remote they'd not bother to go down to the main shaft and see if any sample boys happened to be about. I know first hand what a bullet feels like.

Upside of the sample boy job was following the new veins as new ground was broken in shafts or a stope. One vein had a thin string of tar in it...now we're 10,000 feet above sea level, but when I brought in the tar in the vein it was just a couple days later that they had petroleum engineers underground and looking at it. The miners were actually afraid that when they drilled their dynamite holes them might tap into some vast underground oil lake and be drowned.

Mine engineer's assistant part of the job meant being the rod man as the engineers surveyed. The miner's were paid by how much ground they broke and the engineers surveyed to figure that out. But the engineers also had free run of the mine and they delighted in taking me to neat places...like old portals that opened to high mountain meadows full of wildflowers in full bloom. Course they also had me hanging off rinky dink ladders nailed together from dynamite boxes holding a plumb bob out over a new shaft...never bothering to tell me I was 1,000 feet above the floor of the shaft at the time.

The Idarado was a beautiful place back in the day. A real treat for an 18 year old engineering student.

Ron