The building in front of you was the center of the Silver King Coalition Mine, Park City’s biggest producer of silver and lead. Look through the windows in the tall section to see the headframe — a steel structure built over a shaft more than 1,300 feet deep. It guided a steam hoist’s cables to raise and lower loads through that shaft. A compressor delivered pressurized air underground to run the miners’ tools, until the mine switched to electrical power in the 1930s.
The mine created great wealth for its owners and jobs for thousands in Park City. The community built around it still shapes the town today through the ski resorts that followed.
Brian Buck is the project manager responsible for the preservation of this building as well as several others on The Park City Mountain Resort.
On behalf of The Friends of Ski Mountain Mining History, I’d like to welcome you to the historic Silver King Coalition Mine building.
The Friends of Ski Mountain Mining History have raised more than $1.6 million dollars to return the building to how it looked in 1953, when mining ceased at this location.
One important challenge was to cap the top of the shaft to stop it from caving. That happened in 2015 at The Daly West Mine near the Montage Hotel on the Deer Valley resort. There, the upper part of the shaft collapsed, making a crater that caused the headframe standing over the shaft to fall into the crater. If that were to happen here at the Silver King, the collapsing headframe would seriously damage the surrounding building. So, we teamed with the abandoned mine closure experts at the State of Utah to install a permanent cap on the Silver King shaft before we started preserving the building.
Our next big challenge was to reinforce the roof to stand up to the heavy snow loads of the Park City winters. The roof never had to face these stresses when this was an active mine, because the heat in the building melted the snow off the uninsulated roof. We ended up rebuilding much of the roof structure with new steel and then covering it with the rusty old roof material so you would never know we did all that work.
Our ongoing challenge is vandalism. The windows were broken out years ago. We removed the glass shards in over 1,600 window panes and secured the building with steel grids behind the windows. We also installed security cameras monitored by the resort to discourage any future vandalism.
The Friends of Ski Mountain Mining History are proud of our preservation work here to save this building for future visitors. We recently won awards for our work from Preservation Utah and the Park City Historic Preservation BoardIn 2024, the 31-acre Silver King Coalition Mine District was named to the National Historic Places list, a tribute to the community’s deep admiration for this extraordinary landmark.
Brian Buck Lectures:
Deaths in the Park City Shafts
Closing the Silver King Coalition Mine Shaft
When the Daly West Shaft Collapsed