High Water Pressure

The old "Pikes Peak or bust!" saying has everything to do with Cripple Creek and Victor, two frontier towns up Ute Pass that went boom and bust in concert with the gold rush. But just because that era is long over it doesn't mean there isn't still gold in them thar hills. In fact, Victor still has a working gold mine and it looks nothing like the ones of yore. Mining is a dirty business. It leaves horrible scars and environmental damage behind and uses up resources like crazy. It ain't pretty. So here's the mine in Victor, and as you can see, they are using some mega powerful sprinklers to do I-don't-know-what. I think possibly it has to do with dust mitigation, since wind is always a problem around here.

The backlighting in this image makes it look quite dramatic. Tomorrow I'll show you the same subject but from the other side of the hill, and you'll understand what photographers mean when they say that lighting is everything.