Colorado man finds Chamber of Secrets in his home

You live in a house for 37 years, and you think you know its secrets. But one day, Don Smith is installing new shelves in his basement on North Willow Street, when - krrrack! - he punches an apple-sized hole into the dirt floor.

Well, if this doesn't beat all. Smith threads a tape measure into the gloomy aperture - 3 feet, 4 feet, 5 feet down - until he strikes the bottom of this hidden chamber, 7 feet below his basement floor.

"That's our secret room," Smith says. "We didn't even know it was there."

Smith believes that decades ago, miners who lived in his century-old frame house used this room to extract gold from ore they'd stolen from the mines above Telluride. The process was called high-grading, and it represents a lesser-known part of Telluride's mining history.

"A lot of people did it, but they rarely talked about it," said Sonchia Jilek of the Telluride Historical Museum.