Word: mines
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...mile underground at the Homestake mine two men are at work, dim silhouettes beneath bright balloons of light cast by their head lamps. They are standing in a low, dark cavern, about 200 ft. long and 50 ft. wide, which is just now acquiring a festive look. Long blue and yellow streamers trail down out of the darkness from the jagged rocks overhead. Richard Aberle is patiently connecting up the streamers to make an electric circuit: yellow to yellow, blue to blue. They lead to detonator caps and charges buried deep in the rock by Aberle's partner...
When the smoke settles, the miners must hustle down to the 5,900-ft. depth, work out under the cavern where the new rock has fallen, and begin hauling out stone, which is then hoisted onto ore carts for the long trip to the mine head. There it is pulverized, milled down as fine as flour, and the gold is chemically extracted as minute particles of dust...
...Some of the great old names-virtual ghost towns since the price was pegged at $35 per oz. in 1934-are bustling with new business. Cripple Creek in Colorado, Sierra City in California and Virginia City in Nevada, home of the Comstock Lode, are opening or planning to reopen mines, reworking old tailings with fancy new equipment, moving tons of rock to get at ore seams that for years were thought uneconomical to mine...
...Homestake, by contrast, has been worked almost continuously for more than a century, ever since 1876, when two brothers, Moses and Fred Manuel, first stumbled on a promising vein of quartz in the Black Hills schist. The mine's total yield to date adds up to about 10% of all the gold ever mined in the U.S. (an estimated 325 million...
...quite a few guys working their butts off and not making any money," says Burns. The alternative to working on a contract team is to hire out at a flat $7.50 an hour in support jobs like motorman or cage operator. Adds Burns: "If you're going to mine gold, you might as well make money at it." Aberle agrees. But as they call it a day after 7½ hrs. underground and start on the regular 40-min. commute upward to the surface, he ponders some roads not taken. Says he: "And I always wanted...