Pandora and the Mill
Near Telluride, Colorado
About a mile and a half east of town, where the valley narrows toward the falls, sat a place with an ominous name. Pandora. It was founded in the eighteen eighties as a mill town, the industrial heart of the district.
Here the ore hauled down from the Smuggler Union, the Tomboy, and the Sheridan mines was crushed and processed to free the precious metal locked inside the rock. The Pandora mill you can trace in the landscape was built in nineteen twenty, replacing an earlier Smuggler mill that had burned. In the twentieth century the operation was folded into the Idarado mine, whose tunnels bored roughly five miles straight through the mountains to connect Telluride's side with the town of Ouray on the other.
Milling left its mark. The process created huge piles of leftover crushed rock called tailings, spread across the east end of the valley. After the Idarado closed in the nineteen seventies, those tailings, and the pollution they carried, made this a major cleanup site.
For years now the company and the state of Colorado have been reclaiming the ground, healing a valley that once fed the mills.
