The Cripple Creek goldfields are in a mining boom too, Walter. With the price of gold where it is, the boom's not unexpected.
I remember what this area was like in the late sixties. There was a little bit of mining going on then, but what money the area had was coming mostly from tourism. The downside of tourism was that because at the turn of the century prospectors had riddled the area with what are known locally as "gopher holes," we'd lose a tourist nearly every year when the idiot would ignore the warnings and wander over the interesting countryside, eventually falling into an abandoned, and by then almost totally obscured, mine.
There's no place where you can stand and take in the whole thing. It goes on for miles. As I said in an earlier post, the little ghost town of Elkton, for instance, now lies under a several hundred foot mountain of tailings. Here are a couple more, Pop, to give you a better idea of the extent of the surface mining. The view to the west includes the area of #2, above, and the view to the east shows the beginning of another thousand foot mound of tailings.
Jeremy, There's enough dynamic range in these pictures that I easily could make the light appear less harsh, but I think the harsh light is appropriate to the harsh scenes. This is harsh country.
