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Blue Bell tunnel (1891-1903?)

Last updated: 11.01.2009 17:15

The Blue Bell claim is in Squaw Gulch, just below the town of Anaconda, and is developed by a tunnel several hundred feet long and some minor workings on a quartz vein intersecting the granite and the granite-breccia.
The vein varies in strike in different places from almost due north and south to about N. 12degree E., dips at from 85-degree to 90-degree to the westward, and varies from 6 inches to 3 feet in thickness. At the most southerly point at which it is exposed in Squaw Gulch it is in solid granite more or less fractured by numerous cracks; but to the north the inclosing rock becomes more and more broken until it passes into a breccia of granitic and volcanic fragments.
The ore, especially near the surface is largely a rusty or gray quartz, but at a slight depth this passes into a mixture of purple fluorite and quartz with iron pyrites, manganese oxides, and occasionally some galena and sphalerite, which contain both gold and silver, as is shown by the accompanying assays, kindly furnished by the manager, Mr. J. S. Lentz.

The vein contains many fragments of granite and breccia broken from the walls and partially replaced by quartz. A remarkable feature of the mine is the large quantity of water encountered in it.
Most of the mines of the district are comparatively dry and rarely require pumps, but a stream of water comes from the Blue Bell tunnel which has been used in running the Sylvanite Mill (ten stamps) and once supplied a part of the requirements of the Rose Bud Mill (fifty stamps).

Although not driven for drainage purposes, the Blue Bell tunnel, near Anaconda, is of interest as being the first of the Cripple Creek workings to encounter water. This tunnel, which enters in granite at an elevation of 9,335 feet, or about 15 feet below what seems to have been the average elevation of the original water surface in this part of the district, had a maximum flow of 200 gallons a minute.
Water was issuing from this tunnel in 1894, when Penrose visited it, and the flow persisted for several years. The extent to which the Blue Bell tunnel lowered the original ground-water surface in the western part of the district, before water was reached a year or two later in shafts, can not be determined.
Its effect, however, was probably slight.