Review by Ed Quillen
Local Lore – November 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
Beyond the Glory Hole – A Memoir of a Climax Miner
by Jim Ludwig
Published in 2005 by Pleasant Avenue Nursery
ISBN 0-9679419-1-1
JIM LUDWIG, who is somewhat retired in Buena Vista after a career with Climax Molybdenum, is an engaging story-teller when you’re sitting around a small fire consuming beer on a summer evening. That comes through so clearly here that you can almost hear his gruff voice and see his hands move as he describes the pleasures and pains of old age:
“There was a time when I was strong; I mean really strong!
“I’d pack a rock drill through the stopes on slopes of forty-five degrees. The damn thing weighed a hundred pounds or more. I could throw a ten-pound bag of powder fifty feet or so, set timber eight by eights over my head.
“Now the words that I most often say, `Will you give me a hand?'”
“The words I often hear, ‘Don’t hurt yourself. I’ll help you, Dad.'”
Ludwig told many of his mining tales in an earlier book (The Climax Mine: An Old Man Remembers the Way it Was, published in 2000), and some of them have been published in this magazine.
This book starts with some musings about the Glory Hole – the big excavation at the top of Frémont Pass that initially resulted from so much underground mining that the surface collapsed. While in Leadville one day, I heard a tourist complaining about this desecration of pristine scenery, and heard a local reply that “We’ve got a lot of mountains around here. So what if we take the top off one every 150 years?”
Ludwig worked at Climax in 1948, returned to his native Wisconsin to finish engineering school, then came back to the mine as a manager in 1951. He rose to become general superintendent there, then got a promotion in 1971 to the Amax (Climax’s parent company at the time) Western Operations Center in Golden.
“Western Operations was Amax’s shining glory and cash cow. Our CEO, Ian MacGregor, was on his way to make Amax ‘America’s greatest natural resources company.’ Deeply in debt, but beginning to believe their own BS, they embarked on a campaign to let the world know how great they were. I began to pull into a shell, for I could do little to change the business philosophy with which I could not agree.”
That business philosophy took Climax from full production with 3,000 employees in the late 1970s to a total shutdown in 1982, and the mine has operated only sporadically ever since.
Ludwig retired from Climax. One of his responsibilities there had been to get plants to grow on the tailings. That led to his second career, specializing in native plants that can thrive without much human attention.
Despite this book’s title, most of its chapters do not take place at Climax. There are recollections about farm life in Wisconsin, tales of fishing on Twin Lakes, adventures with home-made wine while visiting Glenwood Springs and confrontations with bears in Buena Vista, along with some curmudgeonly essays about modern life and media.
For those readers who might not know muck from peanuts, Ludwig also offers a helpful glossary.
My favorite piece was one of the longest, “An Old Man Learns to Weave”:
“It takes a good eight hours just to dress the loom and twin and bind the ends onto the beams so I can tension up the warp. At last I’m set to weave, I’m using all commercial yarn, single ply and all the same in size; the colors are consistent, and there is no pattern at the start.
“This should be easy. Guess again.”
In general, Ludwig has some fine stories for us, along with a few pictures, and he tells them well. Like many locally-produced books, this one would have benefitted from a little more editing and closer attention to typography.
But it’s an informative and entertaining addition to our lore, and along the way you get acquainted with one of this area’s most interesting characters.