One of the mines near me explored. Options

[Forestwalker]

I've been staying with an aunt and uncle in the Colorado foothills going to school in fort collins and there happen to be tons of little mines and prospects near me. I doubt any were for gold since this area is not known for it and I sampled the river in the drainage below with no luck for gold (although many weird metamorphics and sulfides.

I went to a really cool pair of pits yesterday about 4 miles away in the national forest nearby. There was a surprising amount of metal in the rock, and some were black from staining but mostly rusty red. Other rocks were schistose, others massive. Large ammounts of pyroxene, vein quartz, and metamorphics littered the hillside. A few rocks from the tailings had visible crystals of a dark silvery metallic mineral forming in the cracks.

Here's a very mineralized rock.


Here's another my aunt found that's got what looks like some copper stuff collecting where there was a crack.


A small vein of quartz running up through the schisty stuff in the small pit.


Here's a strange rock, it seems to be a hodgepodge of many of the rocks in the hillside like Precambrian pink granite and pyroxene etc all mashed up.



Then there was a fairly deep mineshaft blasted out going back about 130' into an area that looked a whole lot less mineralized. The rock was safe and not crumbling, hard stuff and it did not dip down so I figured CO2 or radon etc would not pool inside.. so I went inside. It was tall enough to stand and the air smelled good all the way back to the holes they had drilled but not blasted. There was mineralization but not as much, the rock was harder than the pit about 200' away and there were voids filled with small quartz crystals like the ones you can find anywhere on that hill eroding out.

Here is the mineralized ceiling.


Here's a shot of the tunnel, they must have found something that interested them here since they used a lot of explosives and effort to make this hole.