373 people underground, and a mill on the other side of the divide
Empire sits in Clear Creek County and carries one mine on the MSHA register, and it is a large one. Henderson Operations is an underground molybdenum mine run by Climax Molybdenum Company, working 373 employees and continuously active since February 1973.
The unusual part is where the ore goes. The mine is on the east slope and its mill is on the west slope, and the two are joined by a tunnel driven beneath the Continental Divide rather than by a road over the top of it.
Together with a surface operation at Leadville working 315 employees, both under the same company, this is most of the primary molybdenum capacity in the United States. That is a large industrial employer for a very small town, and it sets what drives here.
The tunnel
The ore stopped going over the pass in 1976
That tunnel is the reason this is not a haulage town, and the history is worth having. It opened in 1976 to carry ore under the divide by rail, sparing the long surface haul over Berthoud Pass, which closes in winter snow. By 1999 a conveyor had replaced the train and been extended to about 15 miles, and the trains stopped running.
So the single heaviest flow of material out of this place has not touched a road in nearly fifty years. Anyone expecting a mine of this size to generate a matching fleet of haul trucks on the pass road would be expecting something the tunnel was built to prevent.
What is left on the road is everything else a 373 employees operation needs: service trucks, crew vehicles, contractors, deliveries and the plant that moves between jobs. Real traffic, but not ore traffic.
Altitude and weather
A pass that closes, and what that does to a machine
Beyond the tunnel, the thing that shapes a vehicle here is the road itself. Berthoud Pass closes in winter snow, and a truck working out of Clear Creek County spends its life climbing, descending and waiting.
That is hard on specific things rather than on everything. Brakes and cooling take the descents, the driveline takes the climbs, and the body takes whatever is used on the road surface in a mountain winter. A mile up here uses a machine harder than a mile on the plains does, so the odometer understates the work.
In a town this size, next to an operation working 373 employees, most of the vehicles belong to people rather than to fleets, and they stop when their owner does. Yards across Clear Creek County usually have one standing that never got its next job.