Cripple Creek making gold ‘kisses’ nowadays
Gold bars don't come out of Cripple Creek anymore. They're more like Hershey's kisses, reported Jan Mannon, community
affairs manager for the Cripple Creek & Victor (CC&V) Gold Mining Company in a presentation Sept. 10 at the Old Colorado
City History Center.
She showed a slide of such CC&V “kisses” on an assembly line, saying that each one weighs 65 to 70 pounds and is worth $250,000 to $300,000. Six or seven of these products of the company's gold-mining and milling processes are shipped out two or three times a week, Mannon said. That didn't seem quite so lucrative after hearing Mannon's earlier explanation of the cost of making Cripple Creek gold in the 21st century - including extensive test drilling, lab analysis and reclamation efforts. When Bob Womack discovered gold in Cripple Creek in the late 1800s, the stuff averaged 12 ounces of gold for every ton of ore. Nowadays, only .03 ounce of gold can be found in a ton, Mannon said. Gold was milled on the Westside, predominantly at the Golden Cycle Mill southwest of what is now Highway 24 and Eighth Street, until 1949. The process, which moved to Colorado Springs in the mining heyday because it cost too much to mill the gold in Cripple Creek, moved back there in the early 1950s. CC&V has been in existence since 1976, is open around the clock and employs 320 people, Mannon said. Westside Pioneer article |