A Grand View

Hidden amongst the cottonwoods and aspens, the sleepy little village of Encampment hides a secret.

Just a little more than a hundred years ago, this little village was a mecca of industry.

In the late 1840s trappers and traders rendezvoused at the base of the Sierra Madre Mountains. The Ute and other tribes also lived, hunted, and fought in the area. At that time the area was known as Camp le Grand.

The Cherokee Trail was blazed through the region in 1849 when wagon trains headed for the gold fields in California. In the 1860's and 70's white settlers arrived and began cutting timber for railroad ties used by the Union Pacific Railroad. Ranchers brought as many as 10,000 head of cattle to the area by the mid-1880s.

When copper was discovered in the Sierra Madres, near Battle Lake, in the late 1880's many things changed. The Doan-Rambler Mine followed by Ed Haggarty, who discovered a copper vein in 1897, marked the beginning of a decade when the little town of Grand Encampment was predicted to become another Denver.

The Boston & Wyoming Smelter, Power and Light Company began operations in Encampment in 1902.

A 16-mile-long aerial tramway was built to transport ore from the mountains to the smelter. The tramway was considered an engineering marvel and carried 840 buckets that could hold as much as 700 pounds of ore each.

It was a sunny day in Encampment when Andy Peryam and Dr. Ron Schmiermund took a group of people down to the old smelter site in Encampment. Schmiermund is a geochemist from Denver that is helping map the site. Andy has been a long-time resident and valued historian of the Encampment area for many years.

The first thing he taught was, it is not just a smelter. The maps and pictures portray an immense operation. However, Schmiermund said it was state of the art. Much of the technology and practices are still used today. Some of the structures were over 10 stories high and could be seen from every direction.

To begin with, the smelting process was a small operation. Initially, the copper product had to be shipped to Denver for refinement. Waste products were dumped into the river. It wasn't long before locals began to complain about the toxic waste being put in the water.

Peryam said, as kids they would stick their pocket knives in the ground where the waste was and their blades would come out covered with copper. As children, they played all over the ruins and in the pipes. In the 1980's there was a huge cleanup paid for by the SuperFund EPA project. The slag pile was taken near Blackhall and buried. Dr. Schmiermund said it was a good disposal site and can be seen on Google Maps aerial view.

There was a hydroelectric power plant that sat down the hill near the river. It produced electricity for the Town of Encampment as well as the copper production plant.

Power is generated entirely by utilizing water and Pelton Wheels which are water wheels redesigned to produce massive amounts of power with small amounts of water. The wheels were designed with split buckets side by side and harness kinetic energy of a small volume of water flowing at high speeds. The Pelton wheel, invented by Lester Allan Pelton in the 1870s, revolutionized the use of water turbines and transformed the American West with low-cost hydroelectric power.

Five Pelton wheels measuring six feet in diameter were powered by water flowing from a dam 4 miles up the Encampment river through a four-foot diameter water pipe. The 174-foot drop in water created the pressure needed to power these dynamos. The water then traveled through several buildings including the concentrator. Schmiermund said it was a complicated facility. The blast furnaces required a blast of air, much like bellows, to produce the heat needed for the operation. The air, produced by the Pelton wheel, was delivered from the power plant up the pipe to the blast furnace. Converters were also installed and that is where the "blister" copper, a more refined product, was created. There was a separate facility built on the side of the hill that provided air for the converters.

Peryam painted quite a picture of how large the operation was. The buildings and stacks were at least 10 stories high. Looking towards the top of the hill, which is owned by the Grand Encampment Museum (GEM), the foundations still exist.

Standing amongst the old foundations where the Pelton wheels were located, one can imagine the noise, heat and humidity produced by all of the machinery and water involved in this incredibly sophisticated mill.

The structures that were quickly built, were massive and well-made. Schmiermund reiterated that this was not a primitive shelter or operation. Halfway through its life, the operation changed completely from one type of smelting to another. This was a very sophisticated operation and the mining company kept pace with the development of modern equipment, methods, upgrading and improving.

Iron and sulfur must be removed from the copper concentrate after the waste is separated. This is smelting. Smelting starts by feeding the copper concentrate into a furnace along with a silica material called flux. This is the function of the blast furnace. The molten mixture collects at the bottom of the furnace. Most of the iron combines with the flux to form "slag" which floats on the surface like scum. The slag is skimmed from the surface. The molten material that remains at the bottom of the furnace is called matte and is a mixture of copper and iron sulfides that contains about 60 percent copper by weight.

The matte is transferred to the converter where additional silica flux is added to the mix. Oxygen is again injected through the furnace, causing the flux to react and form a slag. The process continues. The resulting material is called "blister" and is comprised of about 99 percent copper. The copper blister needs further refining to remove the levels of impurities. The slime that collects at the bottom of the tanks once the final process is completed, contains gold, silver, selenium, and tellurium which are collected and recycled.

In 1906 the smelter burned to the ground. Legend has it, the fire it was caused by a caretaker's wood stove. At the time, everything was made of wood, so the fire spread with abandon.

The facility was rebuilt in about nine months and burned down again soon after. It was rebuilt a third time in 1912. With the closing of the large mines and the copper boom coming to an end due to dropping prices, the site only stayed active until 1917 providing electricity to the community.

Andy Peryam has been an active volunteer at the Grand Encampment Museum for many years. Peryam's first diorama creation was a model of the tramway that transported copper ore from mines like Ferris-Haggarty down to the Smelter that sat along the Encampment River. 

With the help of volunteers, Jerry Anderson, Anita Morris and Vicki Ward, Peryam was able to produce a smelter site diorama with amazing detail and accuracy. The model is 1:148 scale that took 7 months to build. 

It's easy to lose one's self in the detail right down to flickering red lights in the buildings to depict the flames and imagine the heat emanating from these structures. This diorama is a representation of what the buildings looked like and where they stood in 1903.  The diorama was dedicated in Peryam's name as a tribute to his tireless commitment to preserve history by creating three-dimensional models that bring the past to life and captivate the viewer. Peryam's dioramas inspire us to look deeper into our history here in the valley and be amazed.