I have been AWOL from blogging for the last week or so. Sorry about that, we went on vacation to the mountains of northern New Mexico. One day we went on a jeep tour that included a stop at a played out gold mine and went into the mine a little bit as the guide explained the multilayered history of mining in the area starting with the Native Americans to the conquering Spaniards, to the depression era when white collar types would try their hand at it. Then he handed out mining pans and a shovel and we tried our hand at it. Talk about dreary work for nothing much. Turns out if there are kids on the outing the guide salts the tailings with gold painted pebbles. We were too old for that. But it was fun to find out how the work was done.

Here is the old mine, sitting about maybe ten feet above the road and the opening is tall enough to stand in. We climbed in and went in maybe fifteen feet. The guide went further in and showed us the other shafts that took off. Most of them collapsed but a few still open. Some of them were only big enough for a person to crawl through on their belly. (That thought chills me.) He said they tied ropes to the miner’s feet so they could pull them out at the end of their shift.

As my late grandmother told me once. “You can have the good old days, there was nothing good about them.”

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