Public Health References
CDC * Colorado * Jefferson County * City of Golden
Coronavirus report from Jeffco Public Health’s Case Summary Page, as of 3PM Thursday:
Cases in Jeffco
Wednesday: 2750 | Thursday: 2766
Deaths in Jeffco
Wednesday: 211 | Thursday: 212
Ever Hospitalized in Jeffco
Wednesday: 425 | Thursday: 425 (currently 17)
Recovered
Wednesday: 2352 | Thursday: 2367
Known Cases in Golden
Wednesday: 114 | Thursday: 114
The Safer at Home and in the Vast, Great Outdoors protocol is in effect. City and County fire restrictions are in place. The City is requiring masks on public property unless you’re six feet apart and the Creek is fenced off. See the City’s website for more details….
Virtual Golden
6:30-7:25AM Virtual HIIT
9-10AM Virtual Power Training
Real Life Golden
10AM-3PM Train Rides at the Railroad Museum
1PM Friday Tour at the Railroad Museum: Museum Highlights
4PM – Wild West Walking History Tour
6PM Live Music at Wrigley: Look Both Ways
The Golden History Museum has re-opened! The museum is open from 11AM-2PM Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. You can call 303-278-3557 to reserve a time for a visit or take your chances with walk-up availability.
If you’re a museum member, you can reserve a time during the members-only hour: 10-11AM. The entrance is now on the Clear Creek side of the building.
July 4th Preview
8AM-1PM Farmers Market will be open
9AM Yoga in Parfet Park with PranaTonic
Parks and Trails are open, though you must wear a mask (unless you can guarantee 6′ distance from other people at all times).
The Creek will be closed all weekend.
There will be no celebration in Lions Park this year. The Lions Club will be broadcasting 4th of July content all day on their Facebook page, so visit them there.
No fireworks tomorrow night…but there will be a full moon!
Golden History Moment
Glacial Floods and the Armory Building
By Guest Historian Donna Anderson
Completed in 1913, the Armory Building (1301 Arapahoe St. – map) was designed by James Gow for the Colorado National Guard. Gow originally planned to use brick to construct the building. Seeking to cut costs, he instead used 3300 wagonloads of cobbles. Sounds simple enough, but Golden was famous for its brick manufacturing, and a brickyard was literally blocks away. Gow was looking for something that was free with minimal labor cost to transport it. He ended up using cobbles and boulders from Clear Creek. But, exactly where in Clear Creek did he get the nice rounded rocks? There’s a hidden backstory here.
From 1904 to 1908, two gold dredges operated along Clear Creek from near the MacIntyre Street bridge to what is now the interchange of Hwy 58 and I-70. Although an unsightly mess, dredging produced neatly sorted cobble and boulder piles, left behind as placer gold was recovered. Gow used this essentially free resource, in a way performing a public service to deplete the unsightly piles. Given his thrifty nature, one wonders if Gow also used some free manpower assistance from Colorado National Guard engineering unit, Company A, made up of Mines engineering students, who were required to be in ROTC and who occupied the Armory building for decades after it was built.
But where did the cobbles ultimately come from? The more than 12,000-year-old Broadway and Louviers alluvium units, deposited along the bed of Clear Creek, consist of glacial outwash (cobbles and boulders). During the last Ice Ages, glacial meltwater floods originating in the Clear Creek drainage west of Idaho Springs brought down all this sediment to and through Golden. The magnitude of flood that would pick up and carry such large cobbles and boulders for miles out of the mountains is gigantic. A well-known Quaternary geologist, Dr. Vic Baker, estimated that the discharge of a glacial flood needed to pick up and deposit the boulders in the Louviers Alluvium would be about 50,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). Given that the biggest recorded flood on Clear Creek in the 20th century peaked at nearly 6000 cfs and the huge 1896 flood was an estimated 8600 cfs, that is an almost unimaginable amount of water coming down Clear Creek.
Next time you are enjoying a coffee outside at Café 13, remember that the walls of the Armory Building stand as testimony to glacial floods. Oh yes, Golden rocked during those gigantic glacial paleofloods, thousands of years ago.
Sources:
Baker, V., 1974, cited in Lindsey, USGS Professional Paper 1705
pubs.usgs.gov/pp/2005/1705/
National Register of Historic Places
catalog.archives.gov/id/84130843
Clear Creek stream gage data: waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/inventory/?site_no=06719500 and waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/inventory/?site_no=06719505
Guest Columnist Donna Anderson is retired from the oil and gas industry and is an Affiliate Faculty in Geology at Mines. She and Paul Haseman are writing a book called “Golden Rocks!” about the geology and mining history of Golden, to be completed by year end.
