Mine tour guide Patrick Weier, a 46-year-old father from Victor, was the sole fatality in a deadly elevator accident that also stranded a dozen people deep inside Cripple Creek’s Mollie Kathleen Mine for several hours Thursday afternoon.

Weier was among about a dozen people inside the tourist mine’s rapidly-moving “cage” style elevator car when the machinery malfunctioned about halfway through a two-minute, 1,000-foot trip.

When the elevator reached the main level, it was discovered that Weier had died and four other adults in the car had suffered minor injuries.

While it’s been more than a generation, and historical incidents did not involve injuries, the recent tragedy is not the first time the elevator at Mollie Kathleen has made headlines.

According to a 1994 Gazette-Telegraph story, the mine shaft elevator system failed twice within a five-week span during the late spring and summer of that year, trapping visitors underground, in one case for more than 12 hours.

A Kansas mom rescued from the latter, and lesser, of the two incidents told the newspaper she and her young son were among about 50 tourists who became stranded in the tunnels deep below Cripple Creek after a metal pulley on the elevator cracked, “causing a cable to slip off the wheel,” according to the story.

The same malfunction was found to have caused the earlier incident that year, when mine employees were able to use an emergency ladder to get provisions to 13 tourists while they waited more than half a day for repairs and a ride back to the top.

Dennis Lanning, whose family owned the tourist mine at the time, told the Gazette-Telegraph that, in the decades since tours began in the 1930s, there had never before been a problem, or accident, with the elevators.

“It’s an extreme fluke,” said Lanning in that archive story, addressing how replacement and inspection of the broken equipment after the first incident failed to prevent the second, mere weeks later.

Founded in 1891 in an area of Cripple Creek reputedly misnamed “Poverty Gulch” by prospectors who’d overlooked its hidden riches, the Mollie Kathleen Mine was the first Gold Camp claim staked — and subsequently reaped — by a woman, “in her own name,” according to a narrative history included on the mine’s website.

Mining operations ceased in 1961 and the site pivoted fully to the tourist attraction it is today, with visitors descending deep below ground for the nation’s “only vertical shaft gold mine tour.”

A video posted to the Colorado Fan Club Facebook page provides an insider’s perspective on the opening rush of that guided subterranean excursion just west of Colorado Springs.

“It’s like a not-as-fast Tower of Doom,” opines one rider as the “cage” style elevator car plunges and the shaft beyond blurs, referencing the infamous freefall thrill ride at Denver’s Elitch Gardens.