Western Museum of Mining and Industry

On Saturday we went to the Western Museum of Mining and Industry in Colorado Springs.  I'd never been there before, but a friend of mine told me it was fun for kids, so I thought we would give it a try.  It was "keep what you find" gold panning day at the museum, so we tried our hand at gold panning.

We didn't find too much gold, but we found pyrite and some other minerals.  Here is Kelsie with one of her treasures.

Anna mostly dumped her sand and gravel (and any treasures) into the water.  She was probably the one with the gold.  Oh well.  :)

 Here is Jaron giving it a try.  We had fun!

Jaron measured all the different mineral specimens.

 And Matthew examined them up close!

We also got to see a lot of the machines in action!  Our tour guide did a good job explaining how the equipment worked.

 You can't tell but here is one of the machines in motion!  I think this one was a very big steam run (coal run) power plant for a big mining operation.  They only turned it on to 1/10 speed, 'cause full speed would have shaken the whole building.  We got to see some other machines in action too, but this one was the biggest!

My favorite part was this steam shovel!  It looked just like MaryAnn from Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel.

 We even got to see her in action!

And we saw this little train too.  It made a lot of noise and scared all the babies.  They also had a 10 stamp ore mill up on the hill, but I didn't get any pictures of it.  It was an interesting trip.  We definitely learned a lot about mining...even if we didn't get any gold.