Mineral collectors and mining history buffs in search of mining lore, collecting opportunities, 19th-century ghost towns and very-much-alive mining towns replete with historic mining districts, museums and underground mine tours should head to Colorado. All these attractions can be found amid the scenic Rocky Mountains within a relatively small, mineral-rich, geological anomaly known as the Colorado Mineral Belt. This 150-mile-long, 10-to-40-mile-wide, northeast-southwest-trending mineralized zone extends from just west of Denver to Colorado’s southwestern corner. Since 1858, Colorado Mineral Belt mines have yielded $8 billion (year-mined value) in gold, silver, lead, zinc, copper, tungsten and molybdenum, along with a plethora of fine mineral specimens.
THE COLORADO LINEAMENT
The Colorado Mineral Belt is geologically unique. In other mountainous mining areas, mineral deposits are aligned with fault systems that parallel the mountain ranges. But Colorado’s mineralization trends across mountain ranges—an anomaly that is explained by tectonic-plate theory and proven by geophysical remote-sensing techniques.
