I remember on our first trip out to Colorado before we had a 4x4 vehicle of our own, we took one of the trail tours with (Colorado West), starting out of Ouray (went up Engineers Pass onto to Imogene and many of the spur trails up there and worked our way over to Silverton in one of these 4x4 rigs....

<img src="/forums/images/graemlins/shiner.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/shiner.gif" alt="" /> (built on a Jeep truck aka from the Wagoneer chassis era)...

A pretty cool ride actually..

Anyway, the driver (who drove the tours in the summer time and was a high school teacher in the area) warned us to never get on a trail in the area that had any active mining going on (which apparently there was still some active mining in the area in the '80s).

Said it would be very dangerous with the mining vehicles and the fact they didn't like "visitors".



Never really knew what the dangers might be until I saw this. I found this document on the Mining Safety and Health Administration web site about the dangers on mine "haulage" roads... interesting to look at.. but be forewarned it's a 25MB download pdf file... 70 pages loaded with lots of pics of accidents that have happened..

Although the pics, haul roads and equipment shown in the above doc are mostly surface/hard rock mining, versus the underground mining that was typical in the Ouray/Silverton area, kind of curious if anyone had ever been around any active mining roads.... and your experience?