Hardy south Dakotans

There are tent campers here who are staying despite heavy rain and hail(!) at the campground. One guy was cooking over a wood fire in the rain. We are soft, happy, trailer campers.

 Of course snow was just unnecessary on Memorial Day weekend.

Today we are going to the Homestake gold mine in Lead and the Deadwood a fun town with casinos. Here we are ready for the tour at Homestake-- the second largest gold mine in the world when shut down in 2001.

 The original open pit part is 1200 feet deep. The underground part is 8000 feet deep! They are establishing a science lab at the bottom to detect neutrinos as they go through the earth. The mine operated for 125 years before they quit due to the price of gold not covering the cost of extraction.
   This mine employed 3000 people at its peak. To get things up and down the mine shafts they use a cable to raise and lower the elevators. Here's the spool for the first 4000 foot shaft. There is another undergoung going down to 8000 ft. The motor that turns the spool is electric and 1,500 horsepower.

Within the mine they used locomotives run by compressed air!

Seven tons of rock ore gives 1 ounce of gold. So it takes a huge amount of processing. They break they rocks down to fine dust to get at the gold. First they tumble the rocks with iron bars that get ground down in the process. The ones below are a new bar and one only one week old.

The rocks are reduced to sand by the bars and then tumbled with the iron balls until it's as fine as talcum powder. We has to get a momento---here's joy's new ring of Homestake gold.

We went to Deadwood for the afternoon-- a restored frontier town with lots of restaraunts and casinos. Joy had a good day at the casinos and we had a great steak dinner that evening. All frontier re-enactments were rained out.