Imagine your commute to work takes you deep into a subterranean realm buried beneath billions of tons of volcanic rock.
That’s what Janice Sanders got to do more than 40 years ago, in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado.
"You go two miles in and a couple thousand feet up," Sanders said. "You’re in the belly of the mountain."
In the 1980s, at the Sunnyside Mine northeast of Silverton, miners followed a vein of rock rich with gold, blasting it apart, funneling chunks of ore down chutes, and hauling them out of the mountain on railcars.
As a geologist, Sanders roamed around the matrix of tunnels, often alone.
"It’s not all lighted, you depend on your headlamp," she said. "So if you went anywhere and turned off your light, you’re in absolute darkness."
These were some of the last years of hard rock mining in Colorado. But at the time, gold prices were high, and the Sunnyside Mine was still going.
In Colorado’s history of hard rock mining, underground work was almost entirely done by men. But by the 1970s and 1980s, companies started hiring a few women.
Janice Sanders was one of them.
She loved geology and working underground. But she had to endure a work culture that was sometimes sexist and occasionally even hateful.
Like a football team in a small school
Working in a mine was a dream job for Janice Sanders. She fell in love with geology in junior college.
"It just intrigued me," she said. "This variance of rocks and rock styles….and how volatile it is! The ground turned upside down and flipped over. I was so excited by it."
She was fresh out of college when she landed a job at the Sunnyside Mine northeast of Silverton in the early 1980s.
Today, Sanders misses the tight-knit community and the adventure of working underground.
Gold mines were still producing at the time.
"I'm going to equate it to a football team in a small school," she recalled. "We're all on the same team. We all have the same goals. We all come home really grubby, and we're working together to make this thing happen."
But as a woman, she always felt like an outsider.
"You put up with a lot because you’ve got this job, and other people would have liked it too," she said. "But being in the boys club and not being a part of it was a little tough....Actually, I wouldn't have wanted to be a part of it. But I didn’t like the discrimination."
From sexualized nicknames to obscene drawings posted in the mine, the few women who worked at the Sunnyside Mine were subjected to harassment and abuse by male co-workers.
Sanders said it was sometimes difficult to decode the behavior of the men she worked with underground. Some were friendly and professional. But there was hazing, from light, friendly jokes to commentary that had more of an edge.
"One team called me 'pechos'," Sanders said, of a nickname Spanish-speaking coworkers gave her. "I thought it meant 'peaches'. I found it was 'boobs'. But I didn't understand it, so I wasn't offended."
Sanders said there were probably men who disliked working with women, but didn’t openly admit it. Some men made clumsy but earnest efforts to build rapport with her.
But in a few of her interactions with male mine workers, an unmistakable meanness came to the surface. Sometimes, even naked hostility.
At one point, Sanders arrived in a break room inside the mine to find that one of her co-workers, a fellow geologist, had put up nude images of women ripped out of a magazine.
A man's job
There are thousands of historic black-and-white photos in online historic archives, documenting Colorado's late 19th-century hard rock mining boom.
Of all the images of mine workers holding or posing in tunnels, it's hard to find an image of a woman. The women who do appear in these images are either female operator/owners or service workers who attended to cooking and cleaning.
"It was the times. Especially in the early days, that was a man’s job," said Scott Fetchenhier, who is Janice Sanders' ex-husband.
In the 1980s, when he and Sanders were still married, Fetchenhier also worked at the Sunnyside Mine.
"She was getting harassed all the time," he said. "A couple of nights, after getting harassed by some of the staff she worked with, she came home in tears, and this is a pretty tough woman."
Fetchenhier says there were many men at the Sunnyside Mine who believed that women weren't suited to working underground.
"I think some of the men just felt that a woman couldn't do their job, because they're lifting 120-pound drills, and running this heavy machinery," Fetchenhier said. "But it turns out a woman can do it just as well. I mean, I had trouble lifting those 120-pound drills."
Beyond the belief among men that women could not handle the physical demands of mining, other things made men uncomfortable.
"There was this age-old superstition that women in a mine were bad luck," Fetchenhier said.
Breaking into the boys' club
In the 1970s, equal employment laws and legal action pushed mining companies to start hiring women.
According to the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, less than 1% of US mine workers were female in the early 1970s. Within a decade, women accounted for almost 7% of the mining workforce.
But even then, it was still very unusual for a woman to do the actual mining work.
One early trailblazer was Marilyn McCusker, who successfully sued the Rushton Mining Company for the right to work at the company's Osceola Mills coal mine in Pennsylvania.
In 1979, McCusker had been working at the Rushton mine for 2 years when a massive piece of shale fell, killing her. McCusker was the first woman killed in an underground mine accident in the United States.
A company safety director told the New York Times that McCusker died in the accident because she was a woman
"If Marilyn McCusker had been a man, 'she would have been 10 steps away,' when the shale fell," said Clarence Burke, Rushton Company Safety Director.
McCusker was the first woman killed in an underground mine accident in the United States, and her story inspired other female miners.
In 1981, a survey of female coal miners, conducted by the Coal Employment Project, found widespread harassment and discrimination. 17 percent of those surveyed said they had been physically attacked on the job; 36 percent felt they were given more difficult, dangerous, or "less rewarding" jobs than male co-workers; 66 percent of women surveyed said they had been sexually propositioned by a co-worker.
In spite of these headwinds, a growing number of women pursued mining careers.
"There were a lot of women in my class," said Sanders, who graduated in 1980. "There were definitely still more men. But we’re Boomers, so women in the workforce was sort of still new, even in the 1980s. Especially in what was traditionally a man’s job."
It was a precarious environment that women mine workers faced in the 1980s.
On paper, they were fully vested employees, with skills and capabilities, and equal protection under federal law.
In reality, women were embedded in a work culture where camaraderie and humor blurred with sexism and misogyny.
Working underground, in a dangerous profession, women needed to rely on male co-workers, and some of those men did not view them as equals.
"It felt like a trial by fire every day," Sanders said. "It really felt as if you can’t tough it out, you shouldn’t be there. I felt like I had to act like one of the guys, to not get more harassment."
"For those women to break into that at that time was really quite something," said Scott Fetchenhier. "For them to stay with their job, even with the abuse...was pretty brave."
Sanders had several close calls with accidents that nearly killed her. But she was reluctant to report these events.
"I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, as a female," Sanders said. "I didn't want to draw attention to the fact that I‘d made a mistake too."
But her silence contained its own risks.
She recounted a situation where two miners had unearthed a deposit of gold, and instead of reporting their findings, they had concealed it. They planned to return later and smuggle it out of the mine.
But someone else had discovered their stash and had taken it.
Janice Sanders had been taking samples in the tunnels where these miners had been working. She was on her way out when they confronted her in a dark tunnel with no one else around.
"They came at me and threatened me," Sanders remembers. "I told them, 'I didn't take your gold!'"
As the men continued to walk toward her, Sanders kept backing up, terrified.
"They can push you down a hole and make it look like an accident," Sanders said.
It was one of the instances when she felt extremely unsafe around co-workers. But she never told anyone about it.
"I was just trying to preserve myself," she said. "Be safe underground."
Silver (and gold) linings
Janice Sanders worked for a decade as a mining geologist, and there were many men she worked with, who she said treated her with dignity and respect.
"There were more good people down there than those few bad eggs," she said.
She fondly remembered walking alone through the mine in complete darkness and some of her discoveries of beautiful, rare mineral deposits.
Here's one of her favorite memories:
In 1978, before workers at the Sunnyside Mine had drilled too close to the surface above the mine, below a body of water called Lake Emma.
The lake drained into and flooded the entire mine, and for a time, Sunnyside shut down.
"A whole lake just went through the mine like a bathtub in an ant hill," Sanders said. "If anyone had been there at the time, they would have been killed.
When Sanders started working in the mine, she had a chance to explore the upper levels, where the flooding had occurred. These were areas of the mine that hadn't been visited in 50 years.
It was like walking through a museum.
"I could find old dynamite boxes and stuff like that. So it was like, really going back in time," Sanders said.
Sanders was there with a co-worker from the geology team to take rock samples. They'd brought a hydraulic air drill, and her co-worker was using it.
"Those things can be dangerous," Sanders said. "They can pin you (against the wall of a tunnel)...You can be trapped."
The drill got away from her co-worker, and it started to push him backwards. Sanders was new to the job, and she froze for a moment before coming to her senses.
"I reached down and turned the air off," she recalled.
Faced with a potentially life-threatening situation, Sanders acted decisively. Her male co-worker expressed relief and gratitude.
"It made me feel like I'm in the right place at the right time," Sanders said. "I'm okay to be here in this job."