HIGH ALTITUDE SUBMARINE by Pam North There was never a more unlikely location, but at an altitude of 8500 feet above sea level, far away from any significant bodies of water, a submarine was launched in Gilpin County on an autumn afternoon in 1898. The concept of such a vessel was not new, having been envisioned during the Civil War, and designs for submarines had been proposed by various inventors during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The United States, at war with Spain over the sovereignty of Cuba, was viewing the development of submarines to defend its coastline from possible Spanish invasion. An engineer named Rufus T. Owens, known for designing the water distribution systems in Central City and Black Hawk, became intrigued with building a seafaring craft, and he hired a pair of local contracters to construct his design secretly in a shed in Central City. The result was a vessel nineteen feet in length, with a center height of five feet. It was constructed of hand-hewn, whipsawed lumber in a framework held together by square, handmade nails. Irregularly-sized sheets of iron, soldered together where they joined, covered the exterior. Owens named it the Nautilus, after Jules Vern's fictional submarine. A flatbed wagon was hired to transport the finished craft to Missouri Lake, the nearest body of water three miles north of Black Hawk. Owens' intention was to be aboard his creation for its maiden voyage, but concerned friends, pointing out the danger of an untested underwater descent, convinced Owens that the Nautilus might better be tested by using rocks rather than himself for ballast. His friends' intervention proved to be fortunate, as upon entering the small lake, the Nautilus sank immediately to the bottom, and permanently brought to an end any submarine-invention aspirations Owens might have entertained. Two years later the first successful submarine, called the Holland, was launched by the United States Navy. There is some question as to the seriousness of Owens' endeavor. If he was intending to submit his design to the Navy, his rather primitive creation appeared to lack any steering or propulsion mechanisms. The ballast used, approximately 1500 pounds of rocks, was a somewhat excessive weight for the trial experiment. Owens made no effort to retrieve his brain-child from the depths of Missouri Lake, and he left Central City permanently a few months later. The clandestine construction and launching of the submarine resulted in little public knowledge of the craft's existence, and the passage of time obscured it even further. The partial drainage of Missouri Lake by the Chain O' Mines Company in the 1930s temporarily exposed the submarine (its hatch was stolen by a souvenir hunter), but when the lake was refilled, the vessel was again covered by water and forgotten. Attention to submarine warfare in World War II prompted Fred DeMandel, one of the few witnesses to the construction of the Nautilus, to attempt to retrieve Owens' ship. In January of 1944, he found its exact location by drilling holes in the icy surface of Missouri Lake and peering into the water through a glass-bottomed bucket. DeMandel then enlisted the aid of an area trucking company to raise the vessel with a winch. The event, on the 25th of that month, was met with much local fanfare; Central City's school, courthouse and many of its businesses were closed, the high school band played, and approximately 600 spectators were in attendance. DeMandel placed the recovered submarine on display in his Central City museum for a time; then it was sold to the publisher of the Central City Register-Call, who put it into storage in his warehouse. There it remains today -- the submarine with a 45-year watery submergence that was jokingly referred to in the Rocky Mountain News as the "longest dive in history."