A Corporate Mystery — Part I
This is for all of you Forensic Files and mystery buffs out there. The story itself is true and was relayed to me personally by one of the actual participants. It’s up to you to solve the mystery. All the clues are here for those of you who can find them. In a few days I will give you the real solution.
I’ll give everyone fair warning… this story may be a little long so I’m going to break it up into two separate posts. The first may or may not actually be legend, but will give you a little background.
Back in the mid 70’s when I first moved to Denver, Colorado, I stayed with a friend who sold real estate. Over the course of a couple of months Elizabeth showed me the Denver sights and some really beautiful scenery in the mountains surrounding Denver. This story is about one of those scenes.
On one of our excursions into the mountains we climbed up into the clouds on a long and winding hiway towards what Elizabeth said was once one of the largest gold mines in the world. Never having seen a gold mine before I was a little excited, however I was totally unprepared for the reality. I was prepared to see huge endless tunnels winding into the mountain, with railcars full of ore to be processed.
The name of the mine is the Glory Hole, near Central City, and it indeed was once one of the largest producing gold mines in the world—known as the "Richest Square Mile on Earth". At one time it was speculated that the Glory Hole was an entire mountain of gold because there were veins of gold running throughout the mountain itself.
What you see now is all that remains of that mine… a huge crater several hundred feet across and several hundred feet deep. 
To say that I was puzzled would have been an understatement.
Elizabeth explained that in their greed to get at the gold the corporation had decided to set explosive charges all around the mountain to break it up all at once, rather than waiting for crews to find and mine the individual veins of gold. Of course, if a little is good… alot has to be better. When the charges were set off and the dust cleared, the entire mountain had been turned to dust leaving the collapsed crater itself. In their rush they hadn’t taken into account the many shafts honeycombing the mountain. Since mining is much more efficient at refining large chunks of minerals… the Glory Hole was closed down. It simply wasn’t worth the effort to sift through the dust to find whatever gold was left. A grim reminder that a mountain that had stood for thousands of years was no more… because of a corporations greed for a shiny rock.
Keep this information in mind for Part II of a Corporate Mystery which will follow in a few days.