One of Colorado’s most demanding athletic competitions is hand-mucking — a timed contest to fill an ore cart with 1 ton of three-quarter-inch gravel.
“Someone who does shoveling in their backyard might think it doesn’t look too bad, but when I competed, I know I felt like I was going to cough up a lung — especially at this altitude,” said Dominick Patti, a former miner who is now general manager for Leadville’s K.W. Construction & Restoration.
You don’t have to be a miner (though it helps) to compete in the Colorado circuit of hand-mucking and drilling contests, including Idaho Springs’ Tommyknocker Days, Ouray’s Highgrader Holiday Mining Contest, Creede’s Days of ’92, Nederland’s Miners’ Days and Leadville’s Boom Days.
In fact, unlike other athletic competitions, including the Leadville Trail 100 run, you don’t necessarily have to train for mining competitions.
“I don’t train,” says Jenna Hinds Dokken, a Leadville athlete who won the Creede hand-mucking competition last month.
“Once, I took some girls who wanted to try hand-mucking, and we actually mucked real mining piles. It was so dusty and gross that I’ll never do that again. I do train for hand-steeling — using a stake to pound a hole into hard rock. I have a rock in the backyard, and I practice on that.”
For the past seven years, Dokken, a Colorado Mountain College librarian who is among the state’s top-rated hand-muckers, has been a popular contender on the local mining competition circuit. She’s known for competing in a skirt.
Hand-mucking, jack drilling and other competitions date back to the period when dozens of Colorado mountain- town economies relied on hard-rock mining. “Mucking” was their term for shoveling the shards of ore produced when sticks of dynamite exploded in holes the miners hand-drilled in underground rock.
“Your quota for a day shift in many mines was 16 tons, just like the Merle Travis song,” said Dave Futey, director of education at the Western Museum of Mining and Industry in Colorado Springs.
“That means filling 16 ore carts that each hold one to 1 1/2 tons of material. And typically miners got only two days off a year — Christmas and July Fourth. And on July Fourth, they’d have drilling and mucking contests.”
Most of the jobs that miners once did by hand became mechanized by the 1940s, though hand-mucking still exists.
“Where I got my practice for hand-mucking was working underground at the Black Cloud Mine, 20 and 15 years ago,” Patti says.
“You had to work muck and dig ditch and all that stuff in a real working environment. Sometimes there were time constraints. We’d hand-muck when a slurry line broke, and you’d have to muck up the slurry to keep things moving.”
At the time, he didn’t think of hand-mucking as an athletic contest, but that changed when Patti started competing on the mining circuit.
“If you haven’t done it before, you think it’s all in the arms, but frankly, legs are the key,” he says.
“You have to learn to lift with your legs when you’re shoveling muck, and it’s important to keep the fresh muck right in front of you so it’s easier to fill the bucket. It’s not for the physically weak, that’s for sure. It’s definitely difficult.”
The incentive for competing in the grueling contests? Money and bragging rights — pretty much the same rewards that motivated miners, back in the day, to compete in similar contests on one of their two annual holidays.
The men’s mining competitions typically offer purses up to twice the size of the women’s. At the 2011 Boom Days in Leadville, the men’s first prize was $300, the women’s, $250. This is a sore point among Dokken and other women who compete in mining events, although the male competitors point out that some competitions require more from the men. In some hand-mucking contests, the men aren’t finished until they’ve pushed their loaded ore cart down a rail line.
“So it’s a little bit more difficult for the men because as you’re shoveling, the muck tends to get on the rail and block the cart’s wheels,” Patti said.
“So in that respect, it’s a little easier for the women — but they still have to get after the muck, and that’s not an easy task.”
He competed in Boom Days this past weekend, but not in the hand-mucking competition.
“Miss it?” he asks, rhetorically.
“No. I like my lungs and my chest.”
Claire Martin: 303-954-1477, cmartin@denverpost.com
