The Tiff Ponds of the Garottee Mines

While two 12-acre lakes now support largemouth bass and pan fish, both lakes are manmade and their dams came from rock hauled in from mine sites after the era when trucks and internal combustion engines began. While miners of all eras found our metallic ores often attached to cave walls or to quartz geodes which usually range in size from bowling balls to beach balls in size, modern concentrators and refinement came with automating the ore-cleaning process, which came with electricity and trucking.

TIFF A unique mineral asset of the area is “tiff” (or barite), named by the French from their word, “Tuff”, meaning “scrap”, which they first threw aside in lead mining.

Crushing & Washing: Our ore-dressing operations at the upper lake first separated lead and barite ("tiff") by down-sizing the raw material which could arrive as pieces as big as 24" x 36" in size or whatever miners could get up a mineshaft, but usually wrapped in thick, red, 'greasy', as they called it, clay. In the first step, crushing reduces everything down to a hand-held size.

What came out the conveyor belt would be hand sorted and the galena nuggets, the "low hanging fruit", pulled out first. At 80 lbs per cubic foot, it was heavy work. Then that feed would go to a log washer, like spinning telephone poles, that got flooded with water and washed the red clay off. That water may have taken away the clay but it also contained tiny pieces of ore too small to pick out and they went into the lake and sank to the bottom of the lake's floor. Waste was estimated at 25%.

The common sense approach in this era used a lot of water but all the fines, considered pollutants today, were contained by the process in the upper lake. It was not until WW II that the huge crushing operation of the War Department on the Chat Pile re-mined our mine dumps. The entire flow of Valles Mines Creek was used to wash out clay and tiny ore particles directly into the creek. Too small to concentrate, this ore washed downstream for miles. The environmental consequences are measurable to this day but it was a world at war and winning the war over the Axis powers was the priority.

(NOTE: You can find zinc at Valles Mines not only in rock and soil but also in the biosphere as ridiculously robust plants near the many zinc mines because Nature transports zinc in a process called natural cycling. "Rain, snow, ice, sun and wind erode zinc-containing rocks". But for the Mining Company, zinc ore began its conversion from an ore mixed in with rock into a usable metal by heating it above its melting point in the Calcine Furnace on the Rock Road above Tunnel Station on the MR&BT Railway. Because of the scale of the deposits it was transported to the Edgar Zinc smelter in Carondolet but when it closed, so did our zinc mines.

A serious effort to revive some mining was begun in 1977 by hiring William Weigel, retired Doe Run Mining Engineer, who came up with a plan but it never got started [See The Valles Mines Ore Washer].

The Lower Lake [aka "Beaver Lake", shown on the left of the road] has a huge natural artesian spring flowing out of the bottom of the lake. If you check the spillways you can see how much water is coming out. Of course the lake has been adopted by local beaver colonies where they build shallow 'kiddie pools', only 6" deep, for their new arrivals to train in.

Because the Lower Lake enjoys both a spring-water supply at 39 degrees and a gravel bottom, it is capable of supporting trout. In the near future we hope those released grow into a native population.

The Upper Lake has been characterized by Conservation as "Marginal Wetland Habitat" and gets visited by Canada geese annually. Recently when the Upper Lake was drained and the dam maintained, an island was added in the middle of the lake for the visiting geese.