July 25, 2006

• 3000 foot down, but not out.
  
   
  We rode the miners’ cage down the shaft by a hoist cable, until the darkness ended and we were 1000ft underground staring into the lighted drift cavern of an old gold mine in Cripple Creek, Colorado.   Our guide was an older good-natured man who was an experienced miner himself.  He spent most of the  seventy’s in humid ninety-degree heat, three thousand foot underground in the nearby Ajax gold mine.  He began showing us how hard rock gold mining was accomplished, from the turn of the century, until now.   
  
  Our guide explained how drilling and blasting was done and how ore carts were filled.   Then he mentioned that, as fun as all of that might have sounded to us, miners had a quota of one ore cart an hour that they were expected to fill.   Well, I have to admit, that would add to the stress of what already appeared to be a very dangerous job.  Then, our guide mentioned that World Heavyweight Boxing champion; Jack Dempsey, had grown up nearby and worked in the gold mines when he was a young man.   He told us that Jack Dempsey got fired from the mine he was working at, because he could not keep up with the one full ore cart-an-hour quota.   He said “The reason I am telling you this, is that just because you fail at one thing, does not mean that you won’t be a success at something else.”
  
   I thought that was a neat little point he made, so I wanted to recount it for you here. 
  

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