Roosevelt

The cache is not located at the posted coordinates – please read below to find the actual location.

One will find abundant evidence of the historic and modern gold production of the Cripple Creek region by driving along the highway through the towns of Cripple Creek, Victor, and Goldfield. Old rusty-colored mine dumps, teetering headframes, and weathered ore bins from the late 1800s and early 1900s dot the hillsides, while the big trucks of the Cripple Creek & Victor open pit gold mine can be seen hauling rock from the pits to the valley leach facility 24/7 above the towns. The mines of the Cripple Creek district have burrowed into what is known as a diatreme, a crater-like structure that formed as a result of a massive series of explosions when rising magma encountered ground water near the earth’s surface approximately 31 million years ago. As diatreme explosions occurred, fractured pieces of the country rock (which in this area is made up of Precambrian granite, gneiss, and schist), Tertiary volcanic rocks, and even pieces of ancient trees fell back down into the crater that had been created. The unconsolidated nature of the material that fell back into the diatreme meant that it was fairly permeable and could store an abundance of groundwater. The relatively impermeable granite, gneiss, and schist that surrounded the diatreme formed a natural “container” of sorts by not allowing water from the diatreme to drain efficiently into the older country rock. When miners began sinking shafts in the Cripple Creek district in the late 1800s, the ground was fairly dry near the surface. However, as they dug deeper, the water contained in the permeable rocks of the diatreme presented a major challenge to chasing the deeper extensions of the gold veins. Their solution? Drainage tunnels!

The goal of the Cripple Creek area’s drainage tunnels was to puncture holes into the impermeable country rock and allow the trapped water of the diatreme to drain out, thereby lowering the water levels in the mines and allowing the old timers to mine deeper without the need to employ more costly water pumping solutions. Several drainage tunnels were built for this purpose; as the miners kept going deeper, additional tunnels were constructed to lower the water levels further. These tunnels are the Ophelia/Moffat Tunnel (the massive dump pile from this tunnel is held back by an impressive amount of cribbing directly adjacent to Shelf Road, not far south of the town of Cripple Creek), the Standard Tunnel, the El Paso Tunnel, the Roosevelt Tunnel, and the Carlton Tunnel (the enormous dump pile of the Carlton can be seen on the north side of Shelf Road near the confluence of Cripple Creek and Fourmile Creek; the Carlton Tunnel continues to drain a substantial amount of water from the main part of the mining district to this day). While I have had some difficulty in researching where the portal of the Standard Tunnel is located, the other tunnels all drain out into Cripple Creek (the creek itself, not the town) and its tributary gulches. Among all of the tunnels, the Roosevelt and Carlton are the most impressive, having both been driven a considerable distance beneath some of the district’s most productive mines.

Driving of the Roosevelt Tunnel began in 1907, and was not completed until 1918. On USGS topographic maps, the Roosevelt Tunnel’s adit is marked right beside Shelf Road south of Cripple Creek, from which point it travels northeast to intersect the shaft of the El Paso Mine. It then turns due east and continues all of the way to the workings of the Vindicator and Golden Cycle mines near Goldfield (a final 3,000-foot extension to the Roosevelt Tunnel was made in 1921 to intersect the Vindicator Mine). In the Cripple Creek district, the engineering of the Roosevelt Tunnel is overshadowed only by the Carlton Tunnel, which was built over the course of only two years and connected the deepest workings of the Ajax and Portland mines above Victor to the Cripple Creek-Fourmile Creek confluence six miles to the southwest. If underground gold mining were ever to resume in the district, water levels within the diatreme would likely present the largest challenge to production. The great depths reached by the Ajax and Portland mines (3,000 feet and 3,500 feet, respectively) are controlled largely by where the water level begins - not where the gold ends. I hope you enjoy the fascinating geology and history of the Cripple Creek area, especially along the Shelf Road corridor that hosts so many of the drainage tunnels that put the world-class gold deposits of the Cripple Creek district in reach of the hard-working miners of the past.

And of course…the puzzle! It’s not so much a puzzle as it is a freebie solution. The cache is located at the portal of the Roosevelt Tunnel. Check out a USGS topo map to find the location, or use your knowledge of geocaching.com’s sister-websites to find some coordinates. My GPS was having some accuracy issues when placing, but the final two digits that I got for the North and West coordinates are: N38 XX.X31, W105 XX.X67.You’ll notice a decent breeze coming from the gated portal - this is caused by air flowing through the historic workings open at the surface far away near Cripple Creek, Victor, and Goldfield, and exiting here. Kind of like the mines and hills are alive and breathing – pretty cool, right?

Sources:

Greeson, LJ.A., The Vindicator Mine: History and photo gallery: Victor Heritage Society

Hunter, E., 1998, The Carlton Tunnel – “it was never a bore!”:The Mining History Journal, p. 40-52

Jenson, E.P., and Barton, M.D., 2007, Geology, petrochemistry, and time-space evolution of the Cripple Creek district, Colorado: The Geological Society of America, Field Guide 10, p. 63-78

Photos below are from the Victor Heritage Society:

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