Only a handful of souvenir hunters, mineral collectors, and history buffs even set foot on the mine property. One of those was Jack Morris, a Missouri truck driver who spent his summer vacations in Creede, pursuing an interest in minerals and mining history. Morris's visits to the Last Chance changed both his life and the fading fortunes of the old silver mine.

"There was something about the Last Chance that just hooked me," Morris recalls. "It was more than old timbers, rusted metal, and broken rock. What I saw was a dramatic location, a great view, heaps of beautiful ore minerals, and a rich history that was just fading away with each passing year."

Today, Morris owns the Last Chance. And each summer he welcomes some 600 visitors who enjoy the mountain scenery, photograph the ruins, collect specimens of amethyst-silver ore, and listen to tales of the mine's history. Some also stay in mine cabins that Morris has restored.

The Last Chance was the site of the last major silver strike in what would turn out to be Colorado's last big silver-mining district. Colorado's other silver camps, including Georgetown, Leadville, Aspen, Ouray, and Silverton, were already declining when prospector Nicholas Creede discovered silver in 1889 in an out-of-the-way location in the eastern San Juan Mountains. Creede named his find -- an outcropped quartz vein with rich lead-silver mineralization -- the Holy Moses Lode. The boomtown of Creede that sprang up nearby was named in his honor.

The following year prospectors made a succession of similar strikes along linear trends that followed long, continuous vein-type deposits. Miners named three of these veins the Solomon-Moses, Mammoth, and Alpha-Corsair. The largest and richest of all was named for its unusual abundance of distinctive purple quartz -- the Amethyst Vein.

At the time of the Creede discoveries, mineral exploration was still largely a matter of luck. And that had eluded prospector Theodore Renninger. After fruitlessly searching the rhyolite canyons north of Creede during 1890, Renninger was broke and about to give up. But when Del Norte butchers Ralph Granger and Erick von Buddenbrock offered to grubstake him with $25 and three burros, Renninger decided to give it one more try.

KNOWING THIS would be his last chance to strike it rich, Renninger set out again in August 1891. But things went wrong from the start. First, his burros wandered off, and when he finally caught up with them high on the side of Bachelor Ridge, the stubborn animals refused to move. Frustrated and weary, Renninger decided to prospect right where he was.

This time, luck was with him. Renninger discovered a weathered outcrop of mineralized, amethyst quartz containing a whopping 1,500 troy ounces of silver per ton. He aptly named his strike, which marked the northern end of the Amethyst Vein, the Last Chance.

Renninger then sought the confidential advice of Nicholas Creede, the dean of Creede prospectors. When Creede inspected Renninger's find, he was stunned by its richness and advised him to register his claims as quietly and as quickly as possible. Creede's advice proved somewhat self-serving. As soon as Renninger had registered his claims, Creede, wasting no time in actual prospecting, simply staked the adjacent lower ground between Renninger's strike and the southern part of the Amethyst Vein. Creede's claims were immediately developed as the Amethyst Mine.

The Creede district shipped its first silver -- a modest 380,000 troy ounces -- in 1891. But when the Last Chance and Amethyst mines opened the following year, the district's silver output jumped to 2.4 million troy ounces. By 1893, district production had soared again, this time to 4.8 million troy ounces (about 150 metric tons) worth $6 million.

"By then," Morris explains, "Ralph Granger, one of the Del Norte butchers who had grubstaked Renninger, had become the sole owner of the Last Chance. In just 18 months, his share of the Last Chance profits had enabled him to buy out the interests of both Renninger and von Buddenbrock for $150,000 in cash. The mine would stay in the Granger family until I bought it more than a century later."

Ironically, Creede's emergence as a major silver producer coincided with the silver crash of 1893. With hundreds of western mines flooding the silver market, prices remained strong only because the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890 required the U.S. Treasury to purchase silver far in excess of its actual coinage needs. But when Congress bowed to eastern political pressure in 1893 and repealed the act, plummeting silver prices closed western silver mines by the hundreds. The camps most vulnerable to the price collapse were those working lower-grade ores. Leadville was particularly hard-hit because its average ore grade had already dropped below 40 troy ounces of silver per ton.

Although Creede did not entirely escape the effects of the silver-market crash, the extraordinarily high-grade ores in many of its mines more than compensated for the depressed silver prices. Mines like the Last Chance and the Amethyst continued to rack up huge profits on Amethyst Vein ore that averaged several hundred troy ounces of silver per ton.

THE AMETHYST VEIN was a mineralogical wonder, stretching nearly three miles in length, with lower-grade, lead-silver mineralization extending outward 50 feet from its center. The vein's core was as thick as 15 feet and had a geode-like, concentric structure. Its outermost section consisted of dark quartz rich in lead-silver sulfides, followed by a delicately banded layer of white or bluish agate, another layer of dark, mineralized quartz, and then a layer of amethystine quartz. The latter made up half the total weight of the vein and contained crystals of silver-lead sulfides and green fluorite, along with bits of native silver.

The center of the vein was either hollow or filled with heavy masses of silver-lead sulfides and native silver that graded to 2,000 troy ounces of silver per ton. Many vein sections consisted of composite geodes with multiple cores surrounded by pale-blue, banded, "sowbelly" agate.

At its peak, the Last Chance Mine had 75 employees and a 1,400-foot-long inclined shaft that served 13 underground levels. The mine operated almost continuously under unified management from 1891 until 1947. The Granger family then leased different underground sections to individual teams of miners.

After lease-mining finally ended in the early 1960s, the Last Chance remained idle for ten years. But when silver prices soared during the 1970s, the Granger family hired contractors to "mine" the surface dumps. Some of this dump rock, considered waste by Creede standards of the 1890s, contained as many as 38 troy ounces of silver per ton.