Touring Colorado's MINERAL BELT

It's a Showcase of Mining History & Minerals

- STEVE VOYNICK

Mineral collectors and mining history buffs in search of mining lore, collecting opportunities, 19th-century ghost towns and very-much-alive mining towns replete with historic mining districts, museums and underground mine tours should head to Colorado. All these attractions can be found amid the scenic Rocky Mountains within a relatively small, mineral-rich, geological anomaly known as the Colorado Mineral Belt.

This 150-mile-long, 10-to-40-mile-wide, northeast-southwest-trending mineralized zone extends from just west of Denver to Colorado's southwestern corner. Since 1858, Colorado Mineral Belt mines have yielded $8 billion (year-mined value) in gold, silver, lead, zinc, copper, tungsten and molybdenum, along with a plethora of fine mineral specimens.

THE COLORADO LINEAMENT

The Colorado Mineral Belt is geologically unique. In other mountainous mining areas, mineral deposits are aligned with fault systems that parallel the mountain ranges. But Colorado's mineralization trends across mountain ranges an anomaly that is explained by tectonic-plate theory and proven by geophysical remote-sensing techniques.

Colorado’s position on the North American tectonic plate is directly above a deep section of heavily fractured basement rock called the Colorado Lineament (LIN-eea-ment). Some 200 million years ago, the North American Plate subducted the much smaller Farallon Plate. Mineral-rich fluids that later rose from the subducted plate could pass into the overlying North American Plate only through its fractured Colorado Lineament. Hence the configuration of the emplaced mineral deposits within the Colorado Mineral Belt is aligned not with mountain ranges, but with the deep lineament that trends across the mountain ranges.

IDAHO SPRINGS & CENTRAL CITY