Ghosts of the 1890s silver boom

We don't have cell phone service out here, but Rick ingeniously installed a series of repeaters and got wireless access.

The forest fires are small but frequent, with helicopters flying big bucket of water to douse them. The haze ruins pictures, but we persevere. Today, we drove  up Idaho Peak on the silver ridge, from which the great silver boom extracted thirty-three billion dollars (when that was real money) from the single formation on which we walked.

It would be a fabulous view but for the smoke:

So, since we were in silver country, Rick and Barbara took me to the ghost town which was the center of the boom, Sandon.

In the hills and valley around Sandon, miners dug 1,000 miles of shafts at the rate of three feet per day. These hills were literally honeycombed with shafts:

Here's Sandon's City Hall, from 1900.

This is one of the ore-carrying steam locomotives:

 

 

These are the tailings that mark the entrances of each of the hundreds of shafts:

 

Here's what a tailings pile looks like when you are standing on it.

Off to Banff in a couple of hours, hoping to outrun the smoke and clouds.

More from Alberta whenever I get back online!