It started with a question from a longtime Red River visitor. Riding a jeep tour up Bitter Creek in 1970, she crossed private land gate by gate with an infant in tow and never forgot the old mine camp at the top. Half a century later, she asked us: are there any recent photos of the Big Five? The answer is yes — and the old mine still has plenty to show.
📷 Click to see the full photo set — recent photographs of the Big Five mine site, the cabin, the waterwheel power-plant ruins, and Bitter Creek today, in the Red River Mining District gallery at Places and Pics »
Bitter Creek is a narrow, heavily forested valley northeast of Red River, holding several of the major mines of the Red River mining district. The gold rush reached these Sangre de Cristo high valleys in 1866, and prospectors worked the creek's mines and placers for decades. The Big Five — also known as the Oro Fino — sits above 10,000 feet. It was thought to have yielded a rich bounty of gold as early as 1858, but when prospectors worked it in earnest in 1890, the results were poor, and the mountain kept its secret.
The Big Five's second act came in 1921, when it finally became a working gold mine. Its most ingenious feature was a waterwheel power plant driven by the creek itself, generating the power the operation needed in a canyon far from any town. The rusted wheels and iron machinery in these recent photographs are that plant's remains, still lying among the timbers where they fell. Recent reclamation work has taken away much of the mine's tailings piles, but the mine cabin stands relatively undisturbed on its hillside, and pieces of the old equipment survive around the pond below it.
The site drew scientists as well as miners. Taos archaeologist Michael S. Burney excavated and documented the Big Five, and his 2014 book, Historical Archaeology of the Big Five Gold Mine, rebuilds the miners' world from written records and the everyday domestic and industrial artifacts recovered above 10,000 feet. Fellow archaeologist Carrie Leven worked with Burney documenting the Oro Fino–Big Five site during a mine-waste reclamation project in the Bitter Creek watershed on the Carson National Forest — you can see Burney's 2012 photograph of that documentation work in her Remarkable Women of Taos profile.
Today the Big Five is protected as part of America's heritage: a Forest Service notice at the site reminds visitors that the ruins are covered by the Antiquities Act of 1906 and the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 — enjoy them, photograph them, but never dig, remove, or disturb anything. If you go, go gently, and leave the old camp exactly as you found it for the next visitor who falls in love with it, whether in 1970 or today.
Recent photographs of the Big Five site appear courtesy of the Red River Mining District gallery at Places and Pics, which documents the surviving remnants of the district in Pioneer Canyon, Bitter Creek, and the Keystone District — visit it for the full set of Big Five photos, including the cabin, the powerhouse ruins, and the Forest Service heritage notice.