315 people on a surface mine, above eleven thousand feet
Leadville sits in Lake County. The Climax Mine is a surface molybdenum operation run by Climax Molybdenum Company, working 315 employees and continuously active since November 2012. It processes on site.
The altitude is not decoration. This ground sits above 11,000 feet, and everything about running machinery here follows from that.
Together with an underground operation at Empire working 373 employees, both under the same company, this is most of the primary molybdenum capacity in the United States. Two towns, one commodity, and a great deal of it.
The pair
Two mines, two methods, and only one of them uses a road
Those two operations are worth reading against each other, because they solved the same problem differently. This one is surface and processes on site, so material moves within the property and the trucking that leaves is product and supply.
The other is underground on the far side of the divide, and its ore goes to a mill on the opposite slope through a tunnel driven beneath the Continental Divide rather than over a pass. By 1999 a conveyor about 15 miles long had replaced the train that used to do it.
So neither operation generates the fleet of highway haul trucks their combined size might suggest. What is on the road around a 315 employees surface mine is service trucks, crew vehicles, contractors, deliveries and the plant that moves between jobs.
Altitude
What eleven thousand feet does to an engine
That altitude is the thing that most distinguishes a machine from here. Thinner air means less oxygen per stroke, so a naturally aspirated engine loses power outright and a turbo works harder for the same output, all day, for its whole life.
Add the terrain and it compounds. Everything is a climb or a descent, so brakes and cooling take punishment on the way down and the driveline takes it on the way up, and a Lake County winter puts whatever is used on the road onto the underside.
- Above 11,000 feet it would not. Thin air costs a diesel output, and a truck that has spent its life in Lake County is not faulty for it. Tell us where it worked.
- The brakes and cooling have had a hard time.Expected around a 315 employees mine at this altitude, where everything is a climb or a descent.
In a town at this altitude, next to an operation working 315 employees, most vehicles belong to people rather than fleets, and yards across Lake County usually have one standing that never got its next job.