Closing the Silver King Coalition Mine Shaft lecture given by Brian Buck and Davey Jones

Park City Museum and Friends of Ski Mountain Mining History will host a lecture called Closing the Silver King Coalition Mine Shaft given by Brian Buck and Davey Jones on Wednesday, June 12 from 5-6 p.m. held at the Park City Museum Education and Collections Center located at 2079 Sidewinder Drive. More information can be found at www.parkcityhistory.org

The historic Silver King Coalition Mine building is located in Woodside Gulch across from the Bonanza lift. The shaft within the building was begun in 1889 and eventually completed to its total depth of 1,300 feet. It was the only point of access for ore removal from the mine during all of its ore production, closing down in 1952. In the 1990s, the shaft was backfilled with earth but since then the backfill had settled leaving a large hole at the surface that was unsafe and threatening to collapse the steel headframe standing over the shaft. The Friends of Ski Mountain Mining History retained an engineering firm with experience in closing shafts to design a surface plug that would fill the hole and stabilize the headframe. The State of Utah, Division of Oil, Gas and Mining then hired a contractor to build the plug. The majority of the construction was done in October 2023 and will be completed in 2024. This was an important step in the long-term preservation plans for the mine building, which will still take a number of years. The presentation by Brian Buck, FOSMMH, and Davey Jones, UDOGM, will discuss the work that was accomplished to close this shaft.

Brian W. Buck has resided in Utah since 1973. He obtained a B.S. in Geology from the University of Wisconsin in 1973 and an M.S. in Geological Engineering from the University of Utah in 1976. He began a career working with the mining industry in 1976 and has experience in various positions including government, a mining company, and consulting. He has experience in all facets of mining including exploration, mine design/operations, permitting/government relations, and final mine closure/reclamation. He has presented lectures and short courses on mining topics, served as an expert witness related to mining practices, and since 2015 has been a researcher of Park City mining history. He has given lectures on mining for the Park City Museum and written articles on mining for the Park Record newspaper. He is the Project Manager for the Friends of Ski Mountain Mining History, a committee of the Park City Museum, and did their planning for closing the Silver King Coalition Mine shaft. Brian and his wife have lived in Park City since 2009.

Davey Jones grew up in England and moved from England to Utah in 2014. He obtained a B.S. in Geography from Durham University in 2008. He began his career working in flood modeling, producing flood models, and running risk matrices on UK postcodes to aid the insurance and re-insurance industry in assessing property flood risk. In 2015, with his move to Utah, he moved into consulting where his primary focus was the production of FEMA flood maps. In this role, he also carried out a number of field inventories of mining districts for Utah’s Division of Oil, Gas and Mining’s (UDOGM) Abandoned Mine Reclamation Program (AMRP). Davey moved over to work for the AMRP in 2018 as a Project Manager where he has worked on several reclamation projects, including the Defense Related Uranium Mines project, which is a multi-agency project spearheaded by the Department of Energy. He has worked on reclamation projects all over Utah including the Wasatch Front, Oquirrh Mountains, and in the Moab locality. He is the UDOGM Project Manager for closing the Silver King Coalition Mine Shaft.