The Mary Murphy Mine is a well-known old gold mine located in Chaffee County, Colorado, United States, near St. Elmo, Colorado. The Mary Murphy Mine, discovered ca. 1875, was the principal producer in the district, with production exceeding $60,000,000 in gold by the mid 1920s, when the mine closed [1].
Drainage from the old mine into Chalk Creek, a tributary of the Upper Arkansas River, would sometimes cause fish kills at the state-run fish hatchery downstream, such as the kill of 800,000 fingerling trout in 1986 [2]. The Colorado Division of Minerals and Geology consolidated all of the surface wastes and capped them in a “high-and-dry” spot on the mill site. This reduced the dissolved metals levels enough to keep the fish kills from recurring. Since then, the site has been used as test-bed for new ways to treat harmful drainage from abandoned mines in the Colorado Rockies [3].
The Mary Murphy Mine is a popular destination for four-wheelers and ghost-town enthusiasts.