Re: Silverton Northern overlay

The 260' spur as Wilfley-Mears sounds right (actually Mears & Wilfley Mining Co per the Colorado State Archives). This mill operated for several years prior to WWI to recover gold from the tailings dumped into Silver Lake by the Stoiber brothers Silver Lake Mine. As originally built, the mine milled its ore at Silver Lake and they dumped the tailings into the lake, and the lake started to fill up--in fact, there is still a nice sandy beach on the north shore of Silver Lake. Mears got together with Wilfley (see www.wilfley.com) and they came up with a sand pump that pumped the tailing through a pipeline and the creek to the mill on the Animas. There they used the Wilfley table to separate out the gold, and since there are no related tailings piles, they dumped the tailings into the river--standard practice up until 1929 when the Sunnyside started the first contained tailings ponds that remain with us today. The Wilfley-Mears mill operated during the summer months as pipelines froze up in the winter. The water line that crosses the Animas at the same location as the Wilfley-Mears line is now frozen, so as soon as the stored water at the Sunnyside mill runs out, we start hauling water to our office--not much has changed in the San Juans in the past 100 yuears.