Photograph of the Golden Cycle Mill from about 31st street in Colorado City. Date unknown. Notice the Whittier School in the middle foreground.

Photograph from the Ed and Nancy Bathke collection

This was the largest cyanide flotation mill in the country, and produced so much gold that there are still 14 million tons of tailings beside south 21st street today. The pile assayed in 1977 when Dave Hughes was a managing partner of the Gold Hill Recyle Project at .0456 ounces per ton. There is still 556,000 ounces of gold and 2,700,000 ounces of silver still there, over half of which COULD be reclaimed through a cyanide-carbon-in-pulp process which has been perfected applying the process to the tailings piles at the Carleton Mill sites between Cripple Creek and Victor. The reason the Golden Cycle tailings have that much left is because, from 1908 to 1948 when the mill operated there were only two known ways to extract the gold from the cyanide solution once the ore was crushed, cooked, and put into the cyanide vats where up to 97% of the gold and silver was dissolved and in solution. Zinc powder (precipitate) or activated charcoal. But there was no charcoal in the US hard enough to withstand the abraiding of the sand particles, so zinc was used which only precipitated out 93%. Leaving 7%.behind. It was not until the end of World War II that it was discovered that coconut husks from the South Pacific could make very hard charcoal. Thus the Carbon-in-Pulp process was tried and perfected. So Golden Cycle took the process to Cripple Creek where it was used, and is still being used to process their tailings, which assay at half the value per ton as the Colorado City pile. But a whole series of financial transactions in the 1970s tried to get the entire pile re-processed. It was never done before environmental changes, disputing partners, killed the project. And now it is being built upon be real estate developers.

Information from Dave Hughes, who lost $1 million dollars had the project followed through. Instead he said that the 'Gold' Colorado City never found was itself all along, and became the principal historian and redeveloper of 'Old' Colorado City, starting in 1976.