Kemmerer, Continued

Here I am in 1978, somewhere near the Grand Tetons:

From Wyoming Images from Slides

The apartment I rented in Kemmerer looked like this is 1978:

From Wyoming Images from Slides

and last week from Google Street View:


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I guess you could say that not too much has changed in Kemmerer in the past 33 years.

The Kemmerer Coal mine was unusual in a couple of aspects. First, it was still an independent mine. (It was later purchased by Pittsburgh and Midway)Second, and more interestingly, the coal was dipping to the west at about 17 degrees:

From Wyoming Images from Slides

and:

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That meant that we ran the mine closer to a classic "Open Pit" mine - with a high wall and a foot wall than a "Strip Mine" which moved "strips" of overburden to the side to get at the coal underneath.

Here is a good view of the "Big Pit" that you can still see in the satellite images from the previous post:

From Wyoming Images from Slides

Our main coal seam was 100' thick, high BTU and low sulfur. Good coal, in other words. Because it was good coal, it had been mined for years. Mostly, it was mined underground.

Because old maps were not reliable, we had to try and find these old mines with a drilling rig. One of my jobs in Kemmerer was to be the engineer on the void detection rig. It was a reverse circulation rig, which meant that the drilling fluid (mostly water, in our case) when down the annulus, and the cuttings came up the center of the drill pipe:

From Wyoming Images from Slides

It was an interesting job - my crew was two guys, Manny and Leonard. They knew much more about it than I did, and they certainly made me know it. It was fun, to tell you the truth.

The terrain around Kemmerer was not the most exciting in Wyoming. Here is a typical Lincoln County Vista:

From Wyoming Images from Slides

But you get a little farther away, say to Pinedale, and you see things like this:

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We were also near a ghost town named Sublette. It had been a trona mining town, but the trona played out:

From Wyoming Images from Slides

get a little father away, and you see some really spectacular things:

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The Grand Tetons, my favorite National Park.

also, Yellowstone:

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and some other relief nearby:

From Wyoming Images from Slides

Finally, here is a photo of my car at the time. One would imagine that a 1965 Mercedes 220S purchased for $450 would not be the best ride for someone working in a coal mine in Kemmerer, WY - a town of no more than 3,000 souls. In that, one would be correct. But the car made it there, and back to Madison with limited downtime.

From Wyoming Images from Slides