I went as part of a group of 10 adults. We stayed for 3 hours & all enjoyed the museum. While we were there, a school group was also there, which made the 3rd floor a noisy place for awhile.

The first entrance we tried was locked & it confused us because it was 45 minutes after the museum should have opened for the day. Turns out that's the summer entrance. The non-summer entrance is on one end of the building. While inside the museum, I witnessed several other visitors trying to access the building using the "summer entrance", I'm not sure why they can't use the same entrance year-round? I guess it's probably because the gift shop is located next to the non-summer entrance ticket desk?

Exhibits included information about the Ice Palace (only lasted a few months before melting, you can visit the park where it was located- it is behind the museum), Climax Mine (about 15 minutes away), mining safety gear, and the Tabors. The 3rd floor had an interesting assortment of exhibits: a model railroad (it was out of order, but I'm guessing when it works the train runs around the tracks), a model of the Ice Palace, approximately 20 dioramas, a mock mine tunnel, a coin with a panda on it, pictures of some kind of currency (we think it was a company town thing), and information about minerals that are in common household products. The flourescent minerals on the 1st floor were really neat! There were also some exhibits that played short films & there was an exhibit that talked about mining in space.

We did find the Hall of Fame to not be of much interest, and the members of the Hall of Fame were almost all Caucasian men from what we could tell.

There is a library on the 5th floor, which is locked unless you have an appointment, which is unfortunate because there were some absolutely beautiful stained glass windows that I would have loved to have gotten a better view of. There's also beautiful stained glass windows on the 4th floor landing where the patio door is. The patio door apparently gets stuck sometimes because there was a sign up with a number to call if you couldn't get the door to open up to get back inside.

A week before our visit I called to find out if we needed to do anything special because we were coming as a group, I was told no & that I could go ahead and buy tickets online- there was no mention that I could do it in person on the day of my visit. I then proceeded to buy the tickets online- I recommend that you do not because the woman at the ticket desk was very confused by my having already purchased tickets. When you buy online you also have to pay additional fees & my group that I was booking for has tax-exempt status but there was no indication online of how this could be accomodated so we ended up paying the tax. Also, we'd bought tickets for 4 other group members who ended up not being able to go because they didn't feel well, I emailed (on Monday) to find out if we could get a refund (our visit was Tuesday), but never received a response (it's now Friday). It was within 24 hours of our visit, but a previous email mentioned that refunds are possible due to "unforseen circumstances," so I thought I'd give it a chance.

The elevator was broken when we were there, so the museum was not handicap accessible. I don't know if the elevator is usually out of order or if this was just a rare event.

There is a gift shop next to the ticket desk on the 1st floor.

Apparently the building used to be a school.

There are a couple of picnic tables out front that you can eat at. There's no food or drinks allowed inside the museum. You also cannot bring backpacks in.