Drive east from Questa toward Red River and you pass a side canyon most visitors never name: Sulphur Gulch, a tributary of the Red River. For years, prospectors who noticed the soft black mineral and the earthy yellow material along the gulch assumed they were looking at graphite and sulfur, and walked on. In 1916 they learned better. The black mineral was molybdenite and the yellow coating was ferrimolybdite, and Sulphur Gulch held molybdenum, a metal valued for hardening steel.
Development followed quickly. The R and S Molybdenum Company, for Rapp and Savery, was formed in 1918, and production began in 1919. The Molybdenum Corporation of America soon acquired the property and kept developing it. In 1923 a mill and a camp were built along the Red River, and production soared. Miners followed the thin veinlets of ore down and sideways, stoping out any richer pockets they found. The ore was hand-sorted, and the molybdenite was concentrated by flotation at the mill.
The workings went deep. By 1941 the mine had reached about 850 feet down, and a mile-long tunnel was driven in from Red River Canyon to connect with the deepest workings, cutting the costs of haulage, drainage and ventilation. Crews kept following the ore another 250 feet down before the high-grade material ran out. Underground mining finally ceased in 1958, though exploration drilling and drifting that had begun in 1956 continued, and by 1964 geologists had outlined a large body of lower-grade ore just west of the old underground mine that could be worked from the surface.
That discovery remade the place. The old camp was torn down, a large modern mill was built on the camp site, and stripping for an open pit began. Open-pit mining ran from 1965 to 1981. Then the cycle turned again: drilling in 1975 found another large orebody beneath the pit, extending west-southwest from it. New shafts and a long decline, about 7,000 feet at a gentle grade, were built to reach it, the mill was renovated and enlarged again, and underground block-cave mining began in 1983. By 1989, geologist John Schilling tallied more than 190 million pounds of molybdenum disulfide produced over the life of the mine to that point.
The market decided the rest. A soft molybdenum market shut the mine in 1986, it reopened in 1989, and Molycorp was taken over by Chevron Mining Inc. in 2005. In 2011 the Environmental Protection Agency declared the mine a Superfund site. On June 2, 2014, Chevron Mining president and chief executive David Partridge told employees gathered in Questa that the mine was permanently closed, ending almost a century of on-and-off production. Demolition of the mine structures was expected to take one to two years, while full reclamation was expected to take decades.
For Red River visitors, the moly mine is the quiet counterpart to the gold camps in the other direction. The gold rush was loud, brief and romantic; the mine at Sulphur Gulch was industrial, long-lived and worked by generations of local families along the same river road. It began with a misidentified rock that prospectors had dismissed as graphite, and it became one of the defining workplaces of the Questa and Red River country for nearly a hundred years.
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