The Camp Bird Mine is a famous and highly productive old

gold mine Gold Mine may refer to: * Gold Mine (board game) *Gold Mine (Long Beach), an arena *"Gold Mine", a song by Joyner Lucas from the 2020 album ''ADHD Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characteri ...

located between Ouray and

Telluride, Colorado Telluride is the county seat and most populous town of San Miguel County in the southwestern portion of the U.S. state of Colorado. The town is a former silver mining camp on the San Miguel River in the western San Juan Mountains. The firs ...

. The mine is within the Sneffels-Red Mountain-Telluride mining district in the San Juan Mountains. It was discovered by Thomas F. Walsh in 1896, and is (or was) owned by the Federal Resources Corp. The mine produced about 1.5 million troy ounces of gold, and 4 million troy ounces of silver, from 1896 to 1990. At 2009 prices, Camp Bird's production would be worth over US$1.5 billion. Walsh sold the property for US$5.2 million in 1902. Walsh's daughter,

Evalyn Walsh McLean Evalyn McLean ( Walsh; August 1, 1886 – April 26, 1947) was an American mining heiress and socialite, famous for reputedly being the last private owner of the Hope Diamond (which was bought in 1911 for US$180,000 from Pierre Cartier), as wel ...

, later purchased the

Hope Diamond The Hope Diamond is a diamond originally extracted in the 17th century from the Kollur Mine in Guntur, India. It is blue in color due to trace amounts of boron. Its exceptional size has revealed new information about the formation of diamonds. ...

. Walsh died in 1909. His daughter Evalyn Walsh McLean devotes several chapters to the mine in her autobiography "Father Struck It Rich". Camp Bird is named after the "Camp Birds", probably Gray Jays, that ate many a miner's lunch. Western Colorado native David Lavender related his experiences working at the Camp Bird Mine in the 1930s in his classic memoir ''One Man's West.'' C.W. McCall sang "Way out in Colorado, in the Camp Bird Mine, down deep in the darkness, on level nine..." The song moved the mine's founding to 1892 to make the rhyme work and added a ghost. The Camp Bird Mine filed for a permit to resume mining in late 2007, but remains inactive as of August 2008. In 2012, the mine received permits to rehabilitate existing mine workings. In August 2017, the

Environmental Protection Agency A biophysical environment is a biotic and abiotic surrounding of an organism or population, and consequently includes the factors that have an influence in their survival, development, and evolution. A biophysical environment can vary in scale ...

(EPA) and the

State of Colorado Colorado (, other variants) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It encompasses most of the Southern Rocky Mountains, as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of the ...

signed an Administrative Order on Consent with Caldera Mineral Resources, which purchased the property out of bankruptcy. The Order specifies on-site erosion control "to prevent the downstream migration of contaminated soil", with work to be accomplished in two phases. Phase 1, the EPA’s Time-Critical Removal Action, was started in August 2017, and was scheduled for completion in October 2018. "Camp Bird Mine", EPA. Retrieved August 24, 2019.
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Notes

External links

Ghosttowns.com: Camp Bird ghost town
— ''with photo gallery''. {{Coord, 37, 58, 16, N, 107, 43, 40, W, format=dms, display=title, type:landmark_region:US-CO Gold mines in Colorado Colorado Mining Boom Buildings and structures in Ouray County, Colorado San Juan Mountains (Colorado) 1896 establishments in Colorado

See also

Notes

External links