Peru

Hi Cindy,

The Mirasol project sounds pretty interesting. I'll have to see if any of the yarn stores around here carries the line. Peru sounds like a pretty and interesting visit. DH and I have talked about some day going there. A guy we've worked with from National Park Service has climbed to Machu Picchu from the village below.

A supervisor that we used to have did a five year stint at one of the mining companies in Southern Peru. He was in the area where the big earthquake hit last month. He was my supervisor when I started at MI but after two years as a bureaucrat he had to get back to real mining. After 5 years in South America his wife was tired and ready to come back to the states. He stayed another 4 years at MI but got left when the big boss got even more crooked than he'd ever been before. This little hat wall hanging was one of the things he gave us for our wedding. Notice the spindle and the mining pick on the bottom.

He is now a mining supervisor at the MolyCorp mine in Questa, New Mexico. He and his wife live just north of Taos. There is a wool festival there the first weekend in October that I'd love to go to. I'm sure they'd welcome us and he's already offered sightseeing any time we get over that way. He's also always good for a job reference. In fact he's the one that sealed the deal last year for DH at his current job and I'm sure he's given him another good reference (or a couple) this year too.

Isn't this llama just too cute? He brought this back from his last trip to Peru in 2002. He got to visit Machu Picchu and did a lot of sightseeing on that trip.

A little more information has come out about the mine where the girl died. The survivor is doing better. The mine is called Brighter Days Mine. DH was there in May 1997 although his field partner wrote the report. He and I inventoried two mines nearby in February that year, the Lucky Boy and the Samoa mines. The whole area was scary just being on the roads and to venture off them is incredibly dangerous. It looks like the mine is probably on a mining patent in an area of federal land managed by the Bureau of Land Management.

The new mine inspector is talking like he wants to fill in all the abandoned mines in the state. We used to estimate 100,000 of them. At 20K-50K per mine that comes out incredibly expensive. In all the time I worked there we probably spent 250K on safeguarding mines. The bulk of that went for a couple of big projects and the rest went for smaller fencing jobs. Education is the best bet. These girls lived in a small town 20 miles north of Chloride. Most of the people in Chloride and other mining towns know the dangers but those who don't live near them don't realize what can happen. At least the new mine inspector isn't grandstanding on these poor girls' misfortunes. The old one would have; he used to love the publicity.

How was DS's first day?

More later, A