Copyright 2006 Lydia Hinshaw
CARCROSS, YT -- For 10 weeks we've been intrigued by Montana Mountain, a large massif we drive past several times per week. There are old mine workings visible on the slopes above, and and old mill below the road near the water of what is known as the Windy Arm of Lake Tagish.
Montana Mountain has been the site of numerous silver-mining (some other ores as well) ventures over the past 100 years. None of them lasted, either because the price of silver fell, because the quality and quantity of the ore weren't good enough, or because the cost of transportation ate up profits.
There are only the ghosts of miners on Montana Mountain now, and last Sunday Prince Charming and I set out to chase them. We hiked up an old roadbed and spent a couple of hours roaming from one site to another. We found buildings, rail tracks, tunnels, pipes, oil drums, all sorts of junk, much of which we didn't have the expertise to identify. It seems that whenever a mining enterprise went bust here, the miners just walked away and left anything that couldn't be carried off easily. Fortunately, most of the trash-heap caliber stuff is not visible from the road.
I took lots of pictures, which I duly burned onto a disk and sent along to my brother, who is a bit of a mining-history buff and will be able to make more sense of what we saw than we could.
Aside from imagining what this mountain would have been like with miners and machinery working away at it, we were looking mostly for scenery, and we certainly weren't disappointed.
Montana Mountain has been the site of numerous silver-mining (some other ores as well) ventures over the past 100 years. None of them lasted, either because the price of silver fell, because the quality and quantity of the ore weren't good enough, or because the cost of transportation ate up profits.
There are only the ghosts of miners on Montana Mountain now, and last Sunday Prince Charming and I set out to chase them. We hiked up an old roadbed and spent a couple of hours roaming from one site to another. We found buildings, rail tracks, tunnels, pipes, oil drums, all sorts of junk, much of which we didn't have the expertise to identify. It seems that whenever a mining enterprise went bust here, the miners just walked away and left anything that couldn't be carried off easily. Fortunately, most of the trash-heap caliber stuff is not visible from the road.
I took lots of pictures, which I duly burned onto a disk and sent along to my brother, who is a bit of a mining-history buff and will be able to make more sense of what we saw than we could.
Aside from imagining what this mountain would have been like with miners and machinery working away at it, we were looking mostly for scenery, and we certainly weren't disappointed.
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