'Spanish' Mills

[RGINN]

Camped again down by Turtle Rock north of Buena Vista last night and hiked over to 'Spanish Mills'. It's an old arrastra for crushing ore along a creek. I'd heard this place was posted, but didn't see any signs and still a well beaten path to it. (Saw lots of signs popping up in other places, though) This wasn't made by ancient Spaniards but by miners around 1900 and used for crushing up ore from their mine. Chaffee County Times last year published a pic of the arrastra in use around 1900. (added that pic) I'll go with that explanation, but the pic they have is not a pic of the place I went. The one I went to is down in a creek bottom. Their pic appears to be higher up a hill on a ledge. That is how they operated though. Looked for the actual mine with no luck, but rough country and I could have walked right by it.

 

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[newnan man]

You know that was hard living back then. We've got it great.

 

[tamrock]

Been awhile since I made a visit to that old mill. Sure be nice to know the full story of what all from where was being milled in that little operation. Ive looked and never found any mine or any sign of a tailings dump near that mill either. Maybe they covered up all evidence of it ? Looks like a beautiful day up there.

 

[RGINN]

Most of what I see in that area TR is pits dug into the ground. I haven't seen any hard rock mining evidence. So if that's the case in this one, their glory hole would probably be up the hill to the south. Wouldn't be outstanding til you walked up on it. Then again, maybe that was the community arrastra.

 

[tamrock]

Most of what I see in that area TR is pits dug into the ground. I haven't seen any hard rock mining evidence. So if that's the case in this one, their glory hole would probably be up the hill to the south. Wouldn't be outstanding til you walked up on it. Then again, maybe that was the community arrastra.

Yeah, it seemed to me no one could really say why it was there and who put it there. Maybe it was setup as a bogus mining operation and they hustled folks to come see the operation and milled some salted ore with the flakes they gathered from the Arkansas to show promising results of this mine they had up for sale. They found some sucker's who handed them the cash and then they skipped town never to be seen again. I read some stories of how that kind of bamboozling was a pretty common practice back when the early mining booms began in the Colorado Rockies. It still goes on today every now and then other than they don't really cheat with inflated values, but instead talk more to investors about what kind of values that are in the ground and speak less about all the money it's gonna take to get that value out of the ground.