Climax, Colorado
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Climax is a mining area and U.S. Post Office located in Lake County, Colorado, United States. The Climax Post Office has the ZIP Code 80429.[1]
Climax is a ghost town at the Continental Divide at an elevation of 11,360 feet (3463 meters). It is the highest settlement in the United States – it holds the record for having the nation's highest post office and the highest railroad station. The residential houses were transported to the West Park subdivision of Leadville, Colorado before 1965, leaving only the industrial buildings.
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[edit] History
Climax's reason for being and claim to fame is its huge deposit of molybdenum. The Climax mine was the largest molybdenum mine in the world, which for many years supplied three-fourths of the world's total supply of the metal.
Prospector Charles Senter discovered and claimed the outcropping molybdenite (molybdenum sulphide) veins in 1879, during the Leadville boom, but he had no idea what the mineral was. Senter quickly determined that the rock contained no gold or silver, but he kept the claims anyway. The following year he settled down to live with his Ute Indian wife in a cabin a few miles north, and made a living working a nearby gold placer. Each year he faithfully did the assessment work required to keep his lode claims, convinced that his mystery mineral must be worth something.[2]
Although Senter finally found a chemist who identified the grey mineral as containing molybdenum in 1895, at the time there was virtually no market for the metal. But steelmakers found the usefullness of molybdenum as an alloy in producing hard steel, and the first ore shipments from the deposit began in 1915, and the Climax mine began full production in 1918. But the demand for molybdenum fell drastically at the end of World War One, and the mine shut down in 1919.[3]
The Climax Molybdenum Company restarted the mine in 1924, and operated the mine nearly continously until the 1980s. The mine has been shut since 1995 awaiting higher molybdenum prices. The mine's current owner, Phelps Dodge Corporation, continues to work on environmental cleanup of past operations while holding the mine ready in the event of market changes.
On 2006-04-05, Phelps Dodge announced that its board of directors had approved the mine's reopening, contingent upon completion of a final feasibility study and obtaining all required operating permits and regulatory approvals. The target date for resuming operations is in 2009.
[edit] Geology
The ore deposit is a porphyry type, similar to many large copper deposits, where many intersecting small veins of molybdenite form a stockwork in an altered rhyolitic porphyry. Like other porphyry-type ore deposits, the ore is low grade, less than one percent molybdenum, but the ore bodies are very large. Beside molybdenum, the mine also produced tin (from cassiterite), tungsten (from huebnerite), and pyrite as by-products.
The Climax deposit is one of a number of large molybdenum deposits in central Colorado and northern New Mexico. Other molybdenum deposits in the region include the Questa mine in New Mexico, and the Henderson/Urad mines near Berthoud Falls, Colorado.
[edit] Mining
Mining was principally by sub-level caving, a method that removed ore at the base of the ore deposit, causing the rock above to break and drop down in a controlled manner. The method allowed economical extraction of the large low-grade ore deposit.
The ore was crushed on site, and the molybdenite was separated from the waste material by froth flotation. The large quantities of waste, called tailings, were placed behind tailings dams in the adjacent drainage. The Climax tailings impoundment now covers several square miles.
[edit] Geography
Climax is located at (39.365890,-106.185780).
[edit] External links
- Maps and aerial photos
- Street map from Google Maps, or Yahoo! Maps, or Windows Live Local
- Satellite image from Google Maps, Windows Live Local, WikiMapia
- Topographic map from TopoZone
- Aerial image or topographic map from TerraServer-USA
[edit] References
- Voynick, Steve (July, 2004). Climax, Two Decades Later. Colorado Central Magazine 125. p. 16.
- PD Press Release (April 5, 2006) Phelps Dodge Board of Directors Conditionally Approves Restart of Climax Molybdenum Mine near Leadville, Colo. [1]
- ^ ZIP Code Lookup (JavaScript/HTML). United States Postal Service (December 15, 2006). Retrieved on December 15, 2006.
- ^ Steve Voynick (1987) The prospector, the promoter, and the mountain of molybdenum, Old West, Spring 1987, p.14-21.
- ^ Stewart R. Wallace and others (1968) Multiple Intrusion and Mineralization at Climax, Colorado, in Ore Deposits in the United States 1933/1967, v.1, New York: American Institute of Mining Engineers, p.605-664.
