Mine Plans May Affect Grave Of Fallen Colorado Man

VICTOR, Colo. (AP) - In a scrubby gulch populated by the crumbling remains of mine works that created fortunes a century ago is the closest thing Wayne Tease will ever have to a grave.

Tease died 25 years ago when he fell down the old mine shaft where he remains entombed.

Now, his family says modern mining is taking away the place they go to remember him.

Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mining Co. says it needs to expand, and it wants to build a leach facility on land it owns in Squaw Gulch over the old Mary McKinney mine and Tease's remains.

The company has offered to build a memorial to Tease nearby along Colorado Highway 67, but that's not where he died and not where he is buried, his family says.

"We understand there's progress and everything, but boy, oh boy, I tell you, if that was an Indian burial site, there wouldn't be anybody digging or burying there," said his brother, Donald Tease, who lives in Utah. "This is an actual grave, in my estimation, and they're just going to bulldoze over it and do what they can, because they own the top of the surface and the mineral rights."

"They're going to totally destroy what we remember and have remembered for 25 years of going to visit his grave."

Tease, 23, had recently moved to Colorado Springs in 1986 with his fiancee. He took a trip to explore the old mines, and -- trespassing on CC&V property -- got too close to the edge of an open shaft and fell 1,000 feet.

Rescue workers and mine experts deemed it too dangerous to retrieve his body, so the shaft was filled and capped with concrete, and the company allowed the family to place a memorial and plant trees nearby. The plaque says "Remember me," Tease's last words to his family before he moved to Colorado Springs.

Donald Tease said the family tries to visit once a year, to remember Wayne. He never had a proper funeral, so the family had a memorial service for him when they visited in April, to mark the 25th anniversary of his death.

It was then they noticed evidence of new digging in the gulch, and asked the mining company about it. The family was shocked to learn the company had big expansion plans, which go right through Squaw Gulch.

"We didn't know and no one had informed us of anything up until that point, when we went to the site," said Donald Tease.

Company community affairs manager Jane Mannon said she tried to reach the family several years ago but was unable to locate them. She said the company had not heard from the Teases in a decade, and if they were visiting the memorial site, they weren't notifying the company.

Had she reached them, Mannon said she would have told them about the expansion. The mine uses a leach facility, a massive valley where ore is crushed, spread on a hillside and exposed to a cyanide chemical solution to separate the gold. Gold is then recovered from the fluid that leaches out.

The mine's leach facility can only run through 2016, when it will be full. But the company believes there is still gold to be found, so it has drawn up plans to build another leaching area in Squaw Gulch.

The mine is hemmed in by buffers around the towns of Cripple Creek and Victor, and this gulch has the only suitable topography, Mannon said. The company has even found some promising gold on its property north of its current diggings.

"We're finding some higher grades up to the north that the old timers didn't get," she said.

CC&V will apply for county and state permits early next year. The company has offered to pay to have Highway 67 re-routed and a bridge built, and has offered to move the Tease memorial to a roadside lookout it will create.

Said Donald Tease, "They did offer to move that. We just don't know we feel comfortable with that."

There's not much room for a middle ground. With permits in hand, in 2013 or 2014, the company will build its leach field. Mannon said the project is essential for continued employment and will allow the work force to grow by 10 percent.

If approved, the new site would allow the mine to operate through at least 2025.

"Yes it's very tragic. I've never lost a child," Mannon said. "But we have a responsibility to the 450 families, and every mining job generates four-and-a-half jobs in the community."

Donald Tease knows that after a quarter-century buried in dirt, there's probably not much left of his brother. He knows the company has a lot of people who depend on it for their livelihood. And he knows it's the company's land so they can do as they please.

He just doesn't like the idea of this memorial site, the last place Wayne ever was, being lost. The family recently spread some of his father's ashes at the site and hoped to spread his mother's ashes there when she dies.

"What I expect from them, I'm not sure. I think I just want to voice my feelings," he said.

"We know his body's there, but his soul is not there. He's moved on. But ... it's been our place to go feel that we're close to Wayne once a year and remember him."

- By R. Scott Rappold, The Gazette

(Copyright 2011 by The Associated Press.  All Rights Reserved.)