Old Town Mine

The story

You didn't hear it from us, but the most lucrative hole in Gilpin County isn't sitting under a neon casino sign in Black Hawk. It's rusting away in plain sight along County Road 279 in upper Russell Gulch. Active from the late 1880s through the mid-20th century, the Old Town Mine was the heavy hitter of the district, earning a reputation as the most consistently profitable ore producer along the two-foot narrow-gauge Gilpin Tramway. While lesser diggings folded after skimming surface quartz, mining engineer George K. Kimball controlled the operation for over two decades, directing crews that drove an inclined shaft 2,205 feet straight down across 21 distinct levels, eventually racking up more than five miles of underground tunnels.

To keep the deep workings from drowning in groundwater at 9,100 feet, Old Town's owners engineered a subterranean workaround: at the 21st level, they bored a 4,326-foot drain passage—cynically dubbed the 'Hot Time Lateral'—that connected directly to the four-mile-long Argo Tunnel under Quartz Hill to flush out water and circulate air. The vein was so complex that USGS geologists probing the lower shafts in 1952 even detected pitchblende uranium in the ore. Today, the engines are dead, leaving weathered timber headframes, slumping shaft houses, and iron-stained tailings piles melting back into the pine hillsides.