South Canyon Mine

Add your text here South Canyon Mine, South Canyon, west of Glenwood Springs, 1911.
Four miles west of Glenwood Springs, in South Canyon, there was once a profitable bituminous coal mine that operated for more than sixty years.
And it has been on fire for 116 years.
The mine was started in the mid-1880s by Edward E. Pray, who ran it for about a decade. But it had sat idle for a few years when the Boston-Colorado Coal Company bought it in October 1902. The new owners wasted no time, and had engineers and workers at the mine in November. Their first task was to build a road grade for an electric tramway that would carry the mined coal three miles to a railroad tipple. They completed the grade in the middle of winter so snow removal was also part of the project, but the ties and rails were able to be emplaced in the spring.
One of the company’s goals was to tackle a coal seam known as the Wheeler Vein. The company built a mining camp with housing for the 300 men the mine would employ. The first year in operation, 1904, the men dug out nearly 21,000 tons of coal.
But in December of that year, the Wheeler Vein caught on fire. Unable to extinguish the fire, the miners blocked off the seam, ventilated smoke out of the remaining mine, and kept on digging.
In 1906, they dug out nearly 56,000 tons.
The mining continued uninterrupted for another decade, but the failure of the Colorado Midland Railway forced the mine to close. The company dismantled the tramway at that time. (This was possibly done to recoup some costs by selling the scrap and machinery, or as part of a wartime scrap drive.)
Mining resumed at a greatly reduced scale within a few years of the end of World War I, but with the tramway gone, they turned to hauling coal to the tipple by horse-drawn wagon. A new, smaller miners’ camp was built closer to the mine, and this time it included accommodations for families and a one-room school, making life just a little friendlier for the miners.
Still, it was a life that would have easily been recognized by their parents and grandparents, a life of hard –– incredibly hard –– dirty work, no running water, lamp-lit homes, weekly bathing and laundry by stove-heated water, gardens for vegetables, hunting for meat, canning for winter, and low pay. All the while, sales became increasingly local, smaller in scale, and lower in profitability.
The Wheeler Vein, burning since 1904, erupted into an uncontrollable fire in 1951, and the mine closed for good shortly thereafter. The fire broke through again in 2002 and started the Coal Seam Fire that burned twenty-nine homes and buildings and more than 1200 acres. The Wheeler Vein burns still today, and steam from winter snow melting on the ground above from the intense heat below is still a regular sight at Glenwood Springs.
Photograph taken in 1911 by Albert Leon Beekly (1883–1952), a geologist for the United States Geological Survey. Courtesy USGS.

 

---